Moonlight, Ep. 1-01 “There’s No Such Thing As Vampires” (re-post)

(Note: this was originally published at FADPOV on 30-Sep-2007)

Interviewer: “So, what’s it like being a vampire?”
Mick St. John: “Being a vampire sucks. It’s a bad joke, I know, but it’s the truth.”

Well. I think my opinion of the Moonlight pilot is pretty much a “meh”. It’s not bad enough to make me throw things at the TV, but not good enough to keep me from huffing as it dangerously exceeds my suggested daily allowance of bad puns.

Things I liked? Well, I did like that although they went with the rather tired conceit of the eager, hot investigative reporter, Beth didn’t completely uncover Mick’s secret and join forces with him right away. There was also a nifty editing job where Chloe and Beth’s conversation was largely overlaid on a shot of Beth parking outside the diner where Chloe worked and entering to talk to her. That sort of thing is so much more interesting than just watching a character talk. Beth managed to fight her way out of the professor’s attack without help – yay! And I loved the credits, with the names fading up centered around one bright vowel. As for the rest of the show?

We start with our erstwhile vampire, Mick St. John, being interviewed. That’s right… an interview with the vampire! Ha! Get it? Ha! I slay me! (Hey, if the show can do puns, so can I.) I’m intrigued that they tossed aside a lot of the vampire mythology in this scene – garlic, crosses, stakes don’t work, and sunlight is a slow death rather than instantaneous. It opens up the possibility that they’ll try taking the show in an entirely different direction from previous vampire shows. Of course, it also opens up the possibility that the writers are too lazy to keep track of all that complicated stuff and just don’t want to have to be bothered with it.

Mick is a vampire with a soul – er, I mean, a conscience. Rather than treating humans as walking larders, he’s become a private investigator to help them by putting his “special abilities” to good use. And frankly, I had a three page rant prepared about Mick using the term “special abilities”, but now I don’t have the energy to deliver it. I’ll just content myself with saying that I’ve already got one show that I can watch if I want to see someone using his special abilities to save young girls, and new shows would fare a lot better with me if they wouldn’t take the lazy route of invoking the image of that show to try to make me like them.

OK. Digression over. Mick gets his fix from blood supplied to him by a fellow vampire who works at a morgue, and won’t kill women, children or innocents. In the pilot, he discovers a not-so-innocent when a college student’s body is found in a fountain plaza, wrapped oddly in pink cloth and with two enormous puncture wounds in her neck. He’s led to this by watching online newscasts by Beth Turner, who (we eventually learn) he saved 22 years ago when she was a kidnapped child, and who he’s quietly watched over ever since.

Beth immediately writes a tabloid-style news story about the “vampire murder”, which enrages Mick’s 400-year-old best friend, Josef. He’s survived torch-bearing mobs before and just wants to lead a quiet life out of the spotlight with only his fortune and his bevy of blood-offering beauties to console him. He charges Mick with shutting this story down fast, before anyone starts to wonder if there could possibly be truth in it and hauls out the pitchforks again.

In a development that will not surprise anyone who’s watched a TV show before, Beth badgers Mick into joining forces with her to try to solve the murder. They don’t have to look far to see that the dead girl was involved with a charismatic college professor who believes he’s a vampire – a sexual-energy-consuming vampire. I thought the mystery was relatively transparent: the professor was too obvious of a suspect, as was the victim’s jealous ex-friend. That left only the professor’s devoted, adoring teaching assistant as a suspect. Hmmm…

Mick has to save a drugged Beth from the murderer in the end. In a scene I actually did quite like, she makes the connection between her fuzzy childhood memories and her fuzzy recollection of how Mick saved her that evening. But Mick, without denying anything, tells her that she’s just confused due to all the excitement, and she hesitantly nods and accepts (for the time being) that he’s probably right. It was a simple scene, but his distraction technique made sense, and was much sweeter than a big confession and bonding scene would have been. Of course, the show ends with a shot of them hugging that suggests Mick’s feelings towards Beth may be less of a watchful and protective kind of father figure, and more of a George Michael “Father Figure”.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is Mick’s late ex-wife, Coraline. As we see in Mick’s flashbacks, she was a vampire also, and was little Beth’s kidnapper. Apparently Coraline was more than a little bit off her rocker and took the girl hoping Mick would follow her so that they could be a happy family together. Mick rescued little Beth and burned Coraline inside her house. Shannyn Sossamon is featured heavily in promo materials, so I’m guessing we’re going to be seeing a lot of angst-filled Coraline memories.

So… my jury is still out on this one. Overall, I was not really impressed. The mystery storyline just seemed too bare: my first reaction when I got to the credits was, “Wow, that was quick”. The show was hurriedly recast before filming and I’m still not sure they got it right. Sophia Myles felt not like a reporter, but like an actress pretending to be a reporter. Jason Dohring is as good as always and snarky without being just Logan 2.0, but I’m still not sure about him in this role – he comes across as charmingly cute, when I feel like the character needs some steely menace. The use of “sly” punny references to vampire conventions got really old really quickly, and despite the voiceover I mentioned under “things I like”, the show has a lot to learn about showing-not-telling the story. We saw Beth photograph the bat keychain in the dead girl’s car, and then we saw her find the bat necklace. We don’t need her to pull out the phone and show us the bat keychain again! Are they expecting this show’s audience to be blind drunk, or something?

There were also a lot of nitpicky things that jumped right out at me. For instance, Josef is allegedly terrified of their secret being discovered… yet he’s got a house full of flunkies and willing blood donors who he talks freely in front of? And Beth breaks into the dead girl’s apartment, finds a necklace with a vial of blood in it, and wants to take it to the police as evidence – um, you mean evidence of the fact that you were breaking and entering? Sheesh.

However, I’m going to give the show some chances. Pilots are always a little rocky because of the necessary evil of setting up storylines. Casts also often haven’t jelled yet, and the multitude of creative changes that went on behind the scenes here can’t be helping matters any. So I’ll try to reserve judgment and see if they manage to tighten things up in the coming episodes.