Over the weekend, I watched an amazing series finale. It built on all the relationships the characters created over the season, provided some tearjerking moments, had good action, and all around brought the story to a satisfying end.
Then when I was done watching The Mandalorian, I resigned myself to finishing Helstrom as well.
Okay, here we go.
PS. Since last episode needed a content warning, I figured I should mention here as well: this episode contains suicide and forced birth.
1. Sidelined
So Helstrom has a pretty well-established core cast of characters. You’d expect them all to come together for the finale, right? Well, most of them get put on the sidelines. Hastings gets impaled, and Caretaker decides that, despite his demon fighting expertise, his skills are best utilized by sitting outside her operating room and worrying.
Well, at least Chris Yen is given more of a role; turns out he’s a Keeper now. I guess you don’t have to be a demon? Either way, this lets him act as the Exposition Man to let everyone know what they need to re-forge the knife. That also lets Victoria contribute as she helps Ana reforge it in a scene that we’re told is supposed to be very painful, but is actually pretty uneventful. They clutch the knife, it glows, then they wince for a minute while the show keeps cutting to various flashbacks of evil looking things. Yay.
Anyways, the show decides to bench both its Black central characters for the final episode. So there’s that problematic choice.
2. The Blood is Still Useless
So Gabriella decides that the best thing she can do is go pray. That and contact the Blood. Well, they continue to be very bad at their jobs. First, Esther says that their best choice is for Gabriella to give birth so they can then put the demon child into a coma forever. Then there’s a little back and forth with the usual optimism vs pessimism debate; nothing new there.
Finally, when Basar (in Daimon’s body), Magoth and Raum show up to capture Gabriella, the Blood gets ready to fight. But they’re all nameless side-characters, so Gabriella just gives up rather than let the scene get any action.
Apparently they send some members to trail them so Ana and her team know where to go. But they don’t contribute to anything past that point in any way whatsoever.
3. Body Horror & Fight Scenes
Okay, this is the part where it really gets nasty. Gabriella, captured by the demons, is forced to give birth in an empty bathtub. But rather than doing it the normal way, the demon baby decides to come out Alien-style. Let’s just say that it’s worse than a c-section.
Holy sh*t this show is gross.
Now, Ana has her magic knife (which can become a flaming spear when wielded by a Helstrom) to exorcise Daimon. He had his own share of body horror recently, with the demon heart crawling through him last episode. So we get brother versus sister, powers versus powers.
And the scene is shot in a dark haunted house with all the characters wearing black, so we can barely see a thing. The episode also keeps cutting between the fight, Hastings in surgery, and Gabriella giving birth, so it’s impossible to follow. You’d think they’d at least use their fire powers to add a little lighting and extra effects to the scene, but no. The best we get is a psychic tug-of-war for the knife.
This was the most boring final battle I’ve ever seen.
4. Not a Happy Ending
So Daimon gets exorcised, but not in time to save Gabriella from her terrifying forced birth. It just gets worse from there.
The good news is: Hastings survived, although minus a lung. Other good news is, it was the cancerous lung, so… I guess that takes care of that plot point? Gabriella survived too, but she’s traumatized beyond belief.
Meanwhile, everyone seems to be forgetting that the child is literally born with Cathara possessing her. Apparently being born that way left her without her memories, so they can raise her properly? Maybe? But this is still the same Cathara that possessed Victoria for years and caused basically every problem the characters had to deal with this entire season. Seriously, there is so much wrong with this.
Continued belowWell, Gabriella is utterly broken. She’s lost her faith, she feels Daimon let her down by not breaking free of his possession by willpower alone, and generally regrets everything. After what she went through, who can blame her?
Yet everyone else is totally chill. Daimon and Ana have connected as siblings, they have their mother back, Hastings is recovering, and Caretaker is there too. Yen is now okay with being a Keeper and is off to fix things with Derrick, and apparently they’re all cool with raising a demon baby born of possession. Victoria even gives a little toast about how bad things happen to good people, but what matters is how they get through it.
Except for Gabriella, who clearly didn’t get through it all that well. Yep, she’s joined the Blood, since who better to join after getting possessed and forced to give birth to a demon baby than the people who were literally useless every step of the way?
5. Not a Sequel Hook
Helstrom is not going to have a season two, but we still get a stinger setting up for one. In this, we see Chris Yen with a little girl who calls him “Uncle Chris.” Now, this is just one month after the last scene, but apparently she’s Cathara, having grown up significantly in very little time.
Then a bald guy approaches, calls out Yen as the new Keeper, reminds Cathara of her real name, then takes her away. She calls him “Papa,” which would suggest that he’s the Helstrom father that caused everything to begin with… even though Cathara possessed Victoria, who was his wife, and was then born when her demon son, Basar, possessed Daimon (Victoria’s human son) to give birth to… herself. This is a messed up-family tree.
So the father smiles, and people just randomly start dropping dead. This doesn’t exactly cause mass panic so much as it does… people standing there confused but not really reacting at all. Then he walks away, having appeared in the last three minutes of the final episode after an entire season of build-up.
And no one could do anything to prevent this.
Everyone in this show is just really bad at what they do.
Final Thoughts
It’s over. It’s finally over.
The first episode of Helstrom had me thinking “Okay, let’s see where this goes.” Well, it went to very bad places. Between plot holes, pacing problems, uninteresting characters, and all the other problems that plagued this show, every episode just got worse and worse (as my reviews got more snarky and frustrated).
The last few episodes were the worst, starting with a possession-induced semi-incestuous sex scene with non-consenting hosts, and ending with forced birth body horror, where none of our so-called protagonists really acknowledge any of the plethora of problems at hand, much less the trauma that Gabriella went through.
Well, this show is over, and I’m over it too. Out of all the horrible things that happened in 2020, I’m glad that this is one thing that won’t be coming with us to 2021.
So happy holidays, and I’ll see you in 2021 – a year that will almost certainly have better shows than this.
