Welcome to the debut of October Faction and consequentially, this far less creative retrospective on it! In this first episode we met the Allen family, were introduced to the cheery and not-so-casual racists of Barington-On-Hudson and saw the murky workings of Presidio in its age-old battle against the forces of evil.
Let’s get to it, Minor spoilers below
1. Monster hunting is an old man’s game
Going into October Faction, I wasn’t sure what sort of show I would be watching, I haven’t read the graphic novel in a while and I feel like Netflix hasn’t gotten a distinctive factory flavor to look out for yet. One episode in, I can pretty confidently say that October Faction might be the first domestic monster hunter TV series. It’s sort of like Buffy crossed with Family Matters.
J.C MacKenzie is perfectly cast as a mild-mannered dad who can hover perfectly between sincerity and exclusionary stoicism. His chemistry with Tamara Taylor is the show’s high point; mostly because the two of them aren’t trying to fill the scene, they know how to be endearingly understated and feel comfortable acting around one another. While the two of them do well in their scenes alongside younger actors Gabriel Darku and Aurora Burghart, their roles force them to leave a layer up that never really allows for equal footing, but when they share a scene they can spar and support one another engagingly. They make a great emotional core at the show’s center.
2. Moody(TM) Teens
The pilot spends a lot of its time establishing who Viv and Geoff are, how they get along and how they act, but at the end of the day they’re pretty much occult-y Bart and Lisa. Geoff is the popular one who gets to use relatable slang like ‘super-cray’ and ‘crap-tacular’ while Viv is smart, shy and somehow triggers unwarranted acts of cruelty from anyone under the age of 18.
Aurora Burghart and Gabriel Darku manage to lend a sense of informality to their pretty wooden dialogue but there’s only so many teenage tropes that their relationship can shine through. Whether it’s them constantly hounding after wi-fi or speaking in unison every time they want to remind the audience they’re twins, it feels like the writers didn’t want to bother with the nuanced relationship they made for Fred and Deloris and instead hoped to build them into a catch-all for gothic twin/modern teen cliches.
This only sinks deeper once the other teenage supporting characters show up in their young funeral chic. All of them are weirdly over-articulate but try to hide it by throwing in an “OMG” mid-sentence like a conversational flare. I’m a big fan of their incredibly low effort séance though. Three cheers for eye-rolling and hand-holding.
3. This actually feels grounded
On the flipside of that, a lot of the show is pleasantly present in the real world, which definitely caught me off guard. When Deloris is faced with small-town racism, you realise that the Allen family are wading into that part of Middle America. I’m also impressed that October Faction managed to make a society of monster hunters who don’t come off as borderline eugenicists!
I also appreciate that a show (seemingly?) aimed at teenagers can have a casual relationship with drugs and alcohol instead of damning or fetishizing them. Fred leans on alcohol to get through his dad’s funeral but it’s not like he comes across as an alcoholic, he’s just a flawed guy looking to get out of his head for a while. The one leap in logic I refuse to make is that Fred and Deloris can just smoke a twenty year old joint that’s been sitting in the glovebox of a car without ralphing it up immediately. I don’t think I believed Fred was actually stoned until we saw him stocking up on munchies and vibing with a predator-esque monster over pizza ad jingles.
4. Chekhov’s mayor
Okay, I’ve got to get my bold prediction in now before I binge the rest of the series, but the fact that aspiring mayor Bill Mishra gets name-dropped twice means he’s almost definitely going to be the surprise villain, he’s already got a mean son who can be his sidekick!
I’m guessing we’ll see some kind of rigged election to get Bill Mishra, monster mayor in power so Fred and Deloris can literally fight the demons of their past in sunny ol’ Barington-on-Hudson. This might feel like a stretch but the fact that I had to google every other character’s name yet somehow Bill Mishra’s shot straight into my brain just goes to show that the writers are burning it into our cortices early. I don’t know, maybe I just watched too much Scooby-Doo as a kid and now I see mystery villains everywhere.
5. So what’s the conflict?
I think it’s a little annoying that there’s no clear trajectory for the season after this first episode other than Fred and Deloris getting *lowers cowboy hat* Too damn old for this. It’s a pretty quiet episode that slows down dramatically after a misleadingly hardcore introduction. The pace still works pretty well, we get to spend time with our main cast and get a look at what’s tearing each member of this family up.
Fred Allen gets the meatiest chunk of backstory in episode 1. However, the flashbacks to his teen misadventures very quickly goes from shudders and snippets to a full breakdown and fratricide reveal in a way that detracts a lot of emotional quandary. The relationships with all his old family members are varied; Fred’s mum, Maggie, is set up as a weird aloof antagonist who wants the house, but Fred constantly goes out of its way to show just how badly he wants to get rid of it anyway, so there’s no real threat there. The relationship between Fred and his father has the makings of something interesting, with Fred pushing away his father all through his childhood yet taking up the family business in his adulthood (sidenote, did Fred’s dad have a photo of him with George Bush that was just never touched on again??). We don’t know much about Fred and Seth other than that they either ended on a sour note or Fred just never learnt his knife etiquette.
As for the rest of the family, they each have fairly one-note conflicts. Deloris is sick of moving her family around, even though I sort of wish they could go to Oslo, a whole Netflix series on Norwegian monster hunters would have me 110% invested. Geoff is getting haunted by a ghost perv. Viv has séance-induced concrete shoes and high school shyness. I’m sure they’ll each get more to bounce off of later down the road, but this was very much Fred’s homecoming episode and for most of the episode his family just became moving parts around him.
I don’t think this was a perfect pilot, but it definitely wasn’t boring and it’s got a lot of forward momentum, so here’s to episode two, “No Country For Old Vamps.”
