Almost a Good Thing: A Review of October Faction

My favorite genre is probably urban fantasy. What’s not to like? Magic and crime mixed together, plus the fun of seeing how each story posits magical events happening in an otherwise regular modern world. I devour the books, and I devour the television shows. The Lost Room, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Haunted, Supernatural, The Umbrella Academy… you name it, I’ll show up eager to give it a try.

All of this is to say that when Netflix showed me a trailer for October Faction, I popped it right into my list to watch.

After the first episode, I thought, I am gonna love this show.

Sadly, that feeling did not last. In fact, not only did the show turn my original excitement into disappointment, it turned my feelings into bewildered resentment. How could this show go so wrong?

Spoilers below. So many spoilers.

I know this is based on a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Damien Worm, but it’s not one I’ve read. I don’t know if the show is faithful to it, or takes terrible liberties. I’m only talking about the show.

I loved the premise: two middle-aged monster hunters (Fred and Deloris Allen) get called back to their small hometown when Fred’s estranged father Samuel dies. So Fred and Deloris pick up their teenaged children from their swanky Osaka school and go back to a small town in upstate New York that doesn’t particularly like the Allens. It becomes very clear that even Fred Allen doesn’t much like the Allens.

The first episode gives us a looming mansion full of secrets both arcane and militaristic. It gives us Viv and Geoff Allen, a close-knit pair of twins that tend to speak in Japanese to shut others out. It gives us a funeral reception so awful that Fred and Deloris flee to get drunk and high in a grocery story parking lot before going shopping for more booze. Because life likes to kick you when you’re down, they stumble on some monsters and have to have an impromptu hunt. In the interim, Geoff hooks up with a waiter, but their tryst is interrupted by a ghost. Viv, pitched into a pile of popular mean kids, leads a séance that goes wrong, and wakes a mysterious woman chained underwater.

So yeah, there’s a lot there to like.

The problem is the writers can’t keep it up.

October Faction has kind of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel to it, where the storyline keeps piling stuff up whether it works or not. Some of it, I’m sure, is supposed to be story seeds for later seasons, but some of it just feels random. Even the elements that will undoubtedly show up as important future plots feel awkwardly shoe-horned in.

The elements included are:

• The Presidio — an organization that kills monsters, which includes all non-humans, plus human warlocks, but is obviously shady and run by a psychopath. Everyone’s jockeying for position there.
• There are the Allen family shenanigans: hostile dad Samuel, mercenary and aggravated mom Maggie, the dead, favored son, Seth, barely tolerated second son, Fred, Fred’s barely tolerated wife, Deloris, and the two kids. Fred’s dad makes John Winchester look soft and permissive.
• There are the school issues: no one likes the Allens in town and that’s before Viv and Geoff let their freak flags fly during school hours, with Geoff mouthing off to teachers and seeing ghosts, and Viv seeing the future and causing nosebleeds.
• There are the townies: Deloris’s old and only school friend who’s now the sheriff and who rightly twigs that the Allens are killing people. And there are random old enmities playing out.
• There’s the terrifying warlock, Alice, freed by Viv’s séance (somehow), who’s hunting Presidio agents for revenge.
• There are monsters who aren’t acting at all the way that Fred and Deloris have been taught monsters should act.
• And then there’s the (take a deep breath) magical cyborg created in a magical experiment based on warlock reincarnations that summons the dead son to inhabit the body of a living killer, whereupon he loses the ability to talk, but gains a Borg-style eye goggle that turns colors to communicate and makes him a monster killing machine/Allen family guard dog. I don’t know. It never made sense.

Even with this assortment of storylines — horror, political infighting, family drama, monster mayhem — it could work, except the writing team doesn’t handle it well. They throw a whole lot of balls in the air and hope they juggle themselves. The pacing is all over the place. Some episodes are jam-packed with so much events and information that the actors seem like they barely have time to read their lines.

As a result, about halfway through I started disliking the twins a lot. It’s not the actors’ fault; it’s the storylines! Viv and Geoff are whatever the story needs them to be at the minute, and it makes them seem like really inconstant people. Viv starts out distrustful of sharing her secrets, then immediately shares her secrets with a girl who then passes them along to the head mean girl. Viv constantly veers between resentful, distrustful, and ride-or-die true friendship. Geoff starts out as a popular playboy, then reveals he has a boyfriend in Japan who he seems to love, even if he’s randomly cheating on him with waiters. Then he’s the unpopular boy at school, then he’s coaxing the quarterback out of the closet and omg, it’s love, and in the middle of that, Viv and he learn that their parents are monster-hunters… it’s just a mess.

One of the things I liked most about the twins was how close they were, but the plot requires Geoff to ignore urgent phone calls (not texts? Who calls these days?) from his sister, just after their parents have revealed that they’re trained killers. It’s not that I don’t believe teens can act out in dumb ways at inappropriate times, it’s just that here their behavior didn’t feel earned. Instead of the story letting them grow as characters reacting to bizarre and upsetting circumstances, it turned them to plot cutouts.

They’ve become so erratic that when the really big reveal hits — that their biological mother is the murderous warlock who’s sworn vengeance on the monster-hunting organization, that they’re her baby warlocks who were stolen by the Allens and who’ve had their gifts stifled — there’s nothing to really build on. Their reaction is just another emotional outburst and another change of attitude. They leave the parents who raised them to be tortured, and go off to learn magic with their “real” mother. For half an episode anyway, before they change their minds again.

Basically, it’s like this show set out to say, hey, every ounce of goodwill you have for the genre and our first episode? We’re going to squander it.

That’s not to say there aren’t some genuinely good moments. The “big reveal” about Alice the warlock being Viv and Geoff’s biological mother is so telegraphed, it’s not even really a reveal. But there are good reveals. I particularly loved the moment when Fred and Deloris learn that monsters actually have a society and a police force made up of disparate monster races, counter to all Presidio intelligence. I loved that Fred is flexible enough to accept this truth and make an allegiance with a vampire. Not only a vampire, but the one who killed his brother years ago.

Which spurs its own reveal that really worked: that the golden son of the Allens was a psychopath who got off on hurting and killing the monsters. Where Fred sees it as a duty, Seth just enjoyed it. This means that Fred has two personal shocks, one after the other, that he has to roll with. I liked that adaptability, and it set Fred and Deloris up to see the Presidio as a potential enemy. That’s where the plot works really well.

However; because this show can’t ever leave well enough alone, they have to undercut this by revealing the identity of the magical cyborg who’s following Viv around like a stray dog. It’s Seth Allen!

Wait. This makes no sense. Either the vampire is telling the truth — Seth was a psycho — or he was lying. Everything else Moshe does is trustworthy, so I have to assume he’s telling the truth. Which means that Patriarch Allen called back the soul of his psycho son and put it into the body of a killer and somehow ended up with a loyal guard dog who will die to protect the warlock teenager? How does that work? How is that consistent at any point with either character?

See what I mean? A great moment that is later undercut.

Similarly, Alice as a villain is both terrifying and sympathetic…until episode 8, at which point she’s just the source of the single most boring episode possible. It’s an extended flashback that says basically that warlocks just want to lead a peaceful Mayberry life. They’re also dangerously powerful, using Alice as an example. Alice can get sliced up, drowned for decades, and still keep moving. Yet all these warlocks are easily killed by soldiers. Also, warlocks are apparently terrifying enough to monsters that there are kill squads sent to get them. It’s shaky all the way through. Plus, the flashback episode shows Alice to be kind of an idiot. She ignores everyone cautioning her about the dangerous humans and reveals their secrets to her new human best friend, who is a Presidio agent.

The problem comes down to this: we already know that her people were killed at this point, we don’t need the long lead up to it. And there are no surprises! So watching it, we already know how it ends, and so we’re left to stew, wondering how Alice the warlock doesn’t.

But then magic is unclear all the way through this series. Viv has the gift of future sight, and Geoff can see the past. Great! Except how does that explain séances and electrocuting enemies and making obnoxious school kids’ noses bleed, and the super strength Viv shows once and never again?

So warlocks can do anything, survive anything, except when they can’t. There’s a lot of “oh no, Alice practices blood magic and that’s why she’s so powerful,” but… it’s chicken and egg. For her to kill people the way she does to collect the blood to fuel her, she needs to be very powerful, which takes blood…

Then there’s magical cyborg boy, who has enough backstory and plot shenanigans to have his own series. There’s a whole Presidio subplot happening about where he is, and how they can get hold of him — and we don’t really know why or what he represents. The ultimate monster killer? A second chance for Seth? The father’s experiment with humans using warlock magic for immortality?

The final episode should be wonderful. Alice’s plan unfurls and it’s great! I didn’t see her final plan coming, even with all the clues laid down.  She’s been such a blood-and-guts sort of villain that I assumed her primary goal would be destroying the Presidio. Or grabbing her kids and running. But no. It’s a clever plan. More, it’s sympathetic, even if wrong.

And it definitely shifts the Big Bad role to the Presidio, which I loved. A pity that the episode was desperately rushed.

That’s the part that’s making me so crazy. There are so many things I love about this show, but the writing choices and execution make me sad. The casting was good. I love Fred and Deloris; I love the way they bicker. I love them as a competent, yet compassionate, killing team. I like the screwed-up Allen family and the weirdly mercenary Maggie. I like the magic and the monsters. Yet I hate the twins’ dialogue half the time, and the poor pacing and and and…

And so here I sit, irritable at the show and myself, because I am annoyed at the wasted hours I spent watching, and also pretty sure that I’ll tune in for the next season. At least to see what happens to Fred and Deloris.