Spoilers. "What a crock of smite", as Philip Glenister's trans-American might say. Demons appears to have settled on its identity, so we'll just have to put up with the frankly embarrassing dialogue and head-slapping clichés. The characters are still soulless bores (the "half-lives" have considerably more personality, so I'm on their side), and it still hasn't been explained why Luke (Christian Cooke) has blindly accepted his destiny as the last Van Helsing. Wouldn't it be more dramatic if he was less acquiescent about his calling? Or, even if he prefers killing monsters over doing school work, can we get a sense that he's an academic underachiever who's discovered something he's good at?In this week's outing, a rat-faced villain called Mr. Tibbs is on the scene; the rodent-man responsible for killing Galvin's (Glenister) wife Maggie years ago. Kevin McNally plays Mr. Tibbs (the second Pirates Of The Caribbean alumni to appear on Demons after Mackenzie Crook in episode 1), and has great fun with his Terry Thomas-meets-King Rat persona. Despite his character's non-threatening moniker and a disappointing lack of intelligence (we'll come to that later), McNally does well to make his character enjoyably slimy and creepy.
You'd think the storyline would give us fresh insight into Galvin, but the script squanders that opportunity. We've never met Galvin's wife, and have no sense of their relationship before her death, so it's difficult to really care about Galvin's grief. Glenister wrings what he can from a speech about his wife's murder while trapped in a slowly flooding sewer with Luke, but it's not enough to earn much sympathy. Would a few flashbacks have hurt? Or how about tying Mr. Tibbs' current actions into what happened years ago? We're told Mr. Tibbs is renowned for performing genetic experiments on humans, but that's strangely not a factor in this episode.
Instead, this episode is more focused on Ruby (Holliday Grainger) and her willingness to get embroiled in Luke's dangerous new life. After Mr. Tibbs lures Galvin and Luke into a trap (the aforementioned sewer), he also gains access to "The Stacks" via a human accomplice called Grace – who poses as a traumatized women Galvin rescues from Mr. Tibbs' clutches. Once she's safely in The Stacks, Grace brains Mina (Zoë Tapper) and leaves her unconscious on the floor, before being killed for her trouble by Tibbs. But why doesn't Tibbs shoot Mina? Or burn The Stacks down? Instead, he leaves a bomb behind to destroy the place. And, while that seems like a good idea, why did he ensure the bomb has a 50-minute countdown? That's bad-guy cliché #2, just behind reciting a monologue that explains your evil masterplan.
Inevitably, Ruby saves the day when she discovers the bomb – although, despite the fact she has 14-minutes to grab it and throw it into the Thames, she instead decides to become a bomb disposal expert by speed-reading a book about incendiary devices. Then, having snipped the appropriate wire (yes, that old chestnut) she takes the concussed Mina to the sewer to save Luke and Galvin from drowning. Here, the script once again leans heavily on the magical ability of Mina to discern information from touching things (in this case, sewerage control panels.)
On the bright side, every episode is a slight improvement on the one before – but maybe we're just acclimatizing and have our expectations low enough to be mildly surprised we didn't fall asleep? It's still a terrible waste of a good cast (particularly Zoë Tapper, who's good but wasted), and the tone is very uneven. Is it a children's television series (a la Sarah Jane Adventures) as evidence by the upbeat theme tune and Harry Potter-esque villains? Is it something a bit grittier (Galvin obliterates a sympathetic "mouseman" with his pulse gun, Mr. Tibbs shoots a brainwashed woman at point-blank range)? The producers are clearly not sure, either; in one scene, the script clearly has Galvin say "shit" when he's trapped in a sewer chamber, but the swear word is dubbed over as "shoot".
Overall, "Saving Grace" was another lightweight outing for a series failing to make any of its characters worth caring about. I have minor interest in Mina's back-story (which must, surely, be quite interesting), but its sub-Buffy action sequences (the badly-choreographed attack of the "Noisy Boys"), bland characterisations, and humdrum storylines, are very difficult to sit through.
17 January 2009
ITV1, 7.45pm
Writer: Lucy Watkins
Director: Matthew Evans
Cast: Philip Glenister (Galvin), Zoë Tapper (Mina), Christian Cooke (Luke), Holliday Grainger (Ruby), Kevin McNally (Mr. Tibbs), Laura Pyper (Grace), Saskia Wickham (Jenny) & Calvin Dean (Mouseman)
