Finishing Happy!

Done. Parts of this worked out well, as a violent fairy tale for Christmas.

The mob boss’s sister’s reality TV show, bruja grandmother(?), and the sort of return of her son was both annoying as hell (fake-ass social media & TV people, ugh), and sometimes the only good parts of an episode; but the actual supernatural shit going on around this later is jarring. Imaginary friends can be seen by someone else, great premise. They can touch things, uh, this is weird… But the demonic stuff I’m not so sanguine about (the sanguinary sauce scene is great, though!)

The bad guys’ constant running the kids around to different places, no clear explanation of who’s coming for them, the Big Bad’s weird-ass bug suit cult, Bad Santa’s, uh, friends… Not tied up neatly at all. Reminds me a bit of Shadowrun’s Universal Brotherhood which are really insect spirits. Grant Morrison’s had insectile villains, doing radical body and brain surgery with very similar results in The Invisibles, too.

The characters remain cartoonish and hard to take seriously. And there’s a homophobic vibe to some of it, two villains are gay and weird about it, there’s no positive portrayals (not that anyone’s positive in this show, but still). I dunno if this is intentional; Chris Meloni’s pro-gay rights, has done all but gay porn in Oz, so he’s probably not meaning it to be taken this way. Grant’s a cross-dresser, and is weird about it, but not like this. I still went “Oh, that’s not OK” a couple times.

As is often the case, even on a short series, there’s a lot that could’ve been cut. About 2-3 episodes worth are just “Nick goes to a new location, gets in a fight, gets a clue or has to flee to the next location”. The fights are good, often funny slapstick; there’s axes, and a chainsaw, and a kung fu gang in Chinatown. Blood but still not a lot of visceral damage.

There’s a parody of a Tarantino film scene that made me laugh out loud for over a minute, and freaked out my dog. The show keeps dragging down to boring, and then up pops a good gag and it carries me forward to the next.

If we were making a checklist:

  • Bad Santa
  • Smoothie
  • Blue
  • Nick being an asshole all the time.
  • Big Bad

So, still ★★★★☆, but I’m creeped out by some portrayals, and probably other people will be, too.