Welcome back for the sixth instalment of the biweekly October Faction review! This one was a puzzler, definitely not as big as last episode, but there’s still a lot of good in it. I feel like the episode shoves most of its plot into the start and end of the episode and leaves the middle pretty barren, but spoilers ahead nonetheless.
1. The Fate of Fernandez
It was sort of disappointing to see Deloris get shunted from the action and forced to Gina’s bedside after such an impactful entrance to action last episode. I thought we would be done with the whole suspicious police plotline after last episode, but it’s still going for whatever reason. Deloris is such a good character but all of her subplots are so hollow and boring.
However, we got to meet Deloris’s dad for the first time and he was fun! He’s terrible at being a cop but his heart is in the right place! I mean Maggie has blood on her knuckles after he’s gotten reports of people hearing screams and he still just shrugs and leaves. Also I was so excited to see he had a casefile about aliens, until I realised it was Allens and I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much of a let-down.
Deloris seems to have inherited some of her dad’s poor decision-making abilities too, seeing as when she goes back into the house after it’s been stormed by Harlow and Presidio and needs to grab a gun she inexplicably takes a soldier’s pistol rather than the sub-machine guy sitting right in the center of the frame. A for effort, F for forward thinking.
2. Alice on the Ropes
Alice Harlow has been a freight train for the last five episodes, just running through anything and anyone in her way, so when she became an underdog this ep, things felt endlessly compelling. The vampire task force tracking her down were a bit over the top, but they were a great antithesis to Alice, being an ordered, communicative collective coming after an unpredictable silent killer.
This change in dynamic helped make Alice’s slow build up into a slasher villain feel especially cathartic, I was honestly rooting for her (not that I haven’t been for the last five episodes). She’s just so cutthroat, literally! She straight up gets her throat slit and just walks it off, responding with a bare-knuckle decapitation.
I mean, she tore through two whole squads of soldiers in one episode and broke Deloris in a way I didn’t think was possible, the ending to this episode was so strong and it’s entirely because of her. She’s such a strong villain and elevates this show so much, when you compare the Alice-less pilot to this episode you can see just how wide the quality divide is.
3. Geoff and Phillip: The World’s shortest lasting couple
Although I liked Phillip going on an out-the-closet-crusade, this felt like the most rushed relationship on Earth. Like they both kissed in Phillip’s car and then Geoff immediately starts driving him around so he can go and tell everyone in his life that he’s gay. I get that it’s supposed to be cathartic and that it’s more dramatic than him waiting three weeks and doing some soul searching, but it just feels flippant, like the show deciding that sexuality is a binary thing, he was straight but then he kissed a boy so now he’s gay. Who knows, maybe I’m reading it wrong.
Geoff and Phillip start to get cheesy this episode, and it’s almost a good thing? I don’t know, I think I’m still just excited to see shows that can normalise same sex relationships, one day we’ll get an LGBTQIA sit-com that’s just as terrible as every other sit-com and I really can’t wait. Of course this is all gets snatched away when the two break up 20 minutes after getting together. It’s such a contrived thing, like Phillip has to do the hardest thing he’s ever done, gets denied and then when he wants to compartmentalise that he gets torn to shreds by Geoff instead of receiving some actual sympathy. Geoff got so close to not being a prick, but then he went and did this.
Continued belowThis subplot did manage to give a lot of two-dimensional characters some more depth at least. For one, mayoral candidate Will Mishra (who I very incorrectly theorised about) finally found a personality, turns out he’s an egotistical social-climber who sacrifices the happiness of his family to achieve his own dreams (oh wow that’s really harsh when I put it onto the page). On top of that we see a little more compassion from Madison, Phillip’s girlfriend. Or at least we would have if we actually saw them break up, rather than just having Phillip tell us what happened in a scene we didn’t get to see. I really don’t get the motivation behind that, why have Phillip just tell us what a nice person Madison is when you could just show us.
4. Fred suits up for no reason. again.
Once again we had a scene where Fred dresses up in his tacti-cool gear, goes out into the woods and finds out that everyone is already dead. I’m starting to wonder how he got his job. There was such a good set up too, the intro gave it all dramatic weight and he had the real great scene with Viv beforehand, but then it just becomes him rifling through vampire corpses and catching up with old friends from work.
This was another really great opening though. Having young Fred and Seth in danger was genuinely unsettling, like it felt close to a horror show for a full three minutes. There were some pretty questionable moments though, like somehow they got a noise complaint even though they live on a giant estate that backs onto a forest and has no neighbours in sight. Plus there wasn’t even that much noise, if there had been then how was Fred still asleep by the start of the scene? Does Daredevil live next door to them? He could have been more helpful. Typical Daredevil.
5. C’mon, we all know Seth’s back
He’s back. We all know this. Seth is the Octobernator and he’s back and we know this. Also seeming him in normal lighting makes him kinda derpy. He went in the summoning circle and he had his whole intro at the start and he looked at Maggie when she was dying. It’s him. He’s Seth.
Anyway, plot-holes aside, I’m really liking the interactions between Viv and the Octobernator, mostly because it reminds me of The Iron Giant which was my favourite movie between the ages of 3-10 (and also from ten to when I die as a shriveled old raisin of a man). Having a monster with some moral ambiguity really helps spotlight just how cruel Presidio are. Maggie Allen’s bedside chat about how Viv is part of a proud family-tree who’ve made a legacy out of the genocide of monsters came off as a very thinly veiled allegory for white supremacy, and I eat up allegory like peanut butter and nutella toasties. God I was happy when Alice stabbed her. But yeah, Presidio have become unequivocal bad guys, they’ve got casual office murder, trendy CIA sleep deprivation torture techniques, secret dead dads, it’s a whole thing and it’s fun seeing the show commit to making Presidio just the worst people on Earth.
“Open Your Eyes” was a great episode that pushed its heroes and villains to their extremes, I’m probably the most excited I’ve been for another episode, so come back next time for episode seven, “Nadir.”
