bbshockwave

I cannot believe that people hail this as some smart excellent sci-fi series, when this is basically a romantic comedy for middle aged unsatisfied housewives, with mild sci-fi elements thrown in. It's basically The Hive Mind of Bridget Jones.

Our main character is so unlikeable, I find it hard to sympathize with her. Yeah, sure, so few immune people remain... but if the hivemind is so accommodating, and helpful, even if I wasn't a scientist or smart, I'd definitely try to contact the remaining free people and try to find a solution. Instead, she spends her time romancing a woman she barely knows, and despite being warned about how too strong emotions can cause harm and death to the host bodies, multiple times taking reckless action that causes terrible devastation. It all could have been avoided if she dialed down her emotions a lot... (but then, she is an over-emotional woman... now you see why I hate rom-coms).

And what annoys me the most about this is how this exact store has been done before a decade ago, and far better, in the Futurama stand-alone episode/movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs. The same thing happen, a tentacled entity from another universe takes over the minds of every human on Earth, making them fall in love with her unconditionally. Leela is the only one unaffected, and unlike this main character, she leads an active resistance, analyzing the creature and trying to come up with a way to detach it from people, all the while fighting off a romantic interest from the hive-mind. A much better story, go and watch it.

I remember for the longest time thinking that the guy who was Doctor Who at the time played Jack the Ripper in this show... but no, wasn't Eccleston, they just look alike.

Anyhow, this for all intents and purposes could have been a BBC production like Primeval, because it is just as bad.

The weirdly named Magnus (as she is british) is this badass old boss lady who is centuries old and immortal, and runs a basically home zoo for "Abnormals" which is a go-to term for any and all monsters from any mythology or fantasy and sci-fi book they can think of. She recruits a protege scientist kid to work with her and her badass leather clad action hero daughter in capturing and "saving" these Abnormals. Turns out she has a whole network of these sanctuaries housing these super-powered things worldwide, and you'd think at least they would research them to benefit mankind by their byproducts, but nope. They just spend untold money to capture them to preserve them from extinction and inevitably lose 5-10 agents every episode because of course things go wrong. Who'd fund this? Apparently, the UN... Here is the kicker though - Abnormals are just plain BAD. Most are non sentient horrific monsters that prey on people and attack without provocation. The sentient ones are innately hostile to humans too and some of them want us all gone. All in all, keeping these dangerous things around is a bad idea. It's like if Jurassic Park tried to picture InGen as the good guys for bringing back Dinosaurs.

I am totally with the villains of the series, who want to either experiment on these literal monsters to make them have some use to humanity, or in the third season, want to exterminate them all because they pose a danger to us all. Seriously, there is a giant sea monster called Kali that serves no purpose but to periodically create devastating cataclysms that destroy half of India. I AGREE with the supposed villain that this thing needs to die, it is too dangerous to contain, especially when the other villain wants to control and use its powers to destroy all humans. Seriously, this is as dumb as the modern Godzilla movies where people argue that having a giant lizard destroy their cities is a good thing because it is the "balance of nature". It is a bunch of hippie dark-green philosophy.

Eventually, the annoying cliche action hero girl dies, and the kid protege character turns on Magnus too when he realizes that she carelessly endangers the world and does not care about all the deaths that her pet monsters cause. And I was totally agreeing with him. A happy ending for this show would have been to see her arrested for her crimes.