Welcome back for the fourth instalment of the biweekly October Faction review! Today I’ll be going through “Soirees of Future Past” beat for beat to find what worked, what didn’t and what kept me watching. With all that in mind, spoilers ahead.
1. New Directions, Old Revelations
October Faction feels like it’s finally finished planting its story seeds and is happy to start watching them grow this episode. In “Soirees of Future Past” we see a progression in some of the threads left dangling throughout these last few episodes. At the start of the episode we have another flashback to Fred and Deloris at the beginning of the career on another by-the-numbers monster hunt. Only this time we see Deloris sustain a grievous injury, leading to the revelation that she’s been rendered infertile. This throws Viv and Geoff’s history into the air and creates a whole new host of possible causes for their paranormality, speculate to your heart’s content.
On that front we see both Viv and Geoff delve further into their powers. Viv has a moment of connection with Cathy that weirdly seemed like awkward sexual tension, only to have it cut off by a premonition of her friend mid-immolation. Meanwhile, Geoff’s powers filled the spotlight, with Steve’s haunting becoming the driving force behind his own guilts and his newfound sympathies for Phillip. While we don’t learn anything new about their powers this episode, I like that the show is branching out into the supernatural more, and that their powers are becoming a more central part of their identity, rather than a side note.
The lingering threat of Viv and Geoff’s recruitment into Presidio has also gotten a lot more immediate with them learning about Deloris and Fred’s night-job, it’s another great twist in a show that has a knack for throwing curveballs at the 40 minute mark. I feel like there could be a the risk of the show lingering too long on the hows, whats and whys from Viv and Geoff, but it was a good (if inevitable) reveal nonetheless.
2. Feels and Flops
This episode takes another stab at some authentic themes and emotion, it only succeeds about half the time but I can appreciate it anyway. Praneet Akillar’s Phillip takes a sharp left turn into depression this episode, finally giving some tragic depth to a fairly flat character. It’s the first chance Akillar has had to really act on a proper emotional spectrum. In his defining scene with Geoff we get a well written, novel and emotional connection between him and Steve. However, this might be the first time the writing has beaten out the acting in the show; while Geoff talking down Phillip is really touching, Darku’s delivery sometimes just falls flat and can’t keep up with the great supplementary editing. But having Steve haunt Geoff through the party was interesting, and it’s kinda funny just seeing him killing the vibe of every keg-stand and cup-flip around him.
At times, the show felt flippant in its implications. For example, Viv talking about the privilege of her classmates, even though she belongs to the richest family in town is a bit hypocritical. And even though kids talking about netflix in this universe makes sense, it still feels weirdly self-referential.
3. Teen schlock, back on the block
This episode fell prey to the show’s usual teen fodder, but it was a house party episode, so I would be an idiot not to see the tropes coming. The whole party jumps between cliches like those two kids jumped between impractically long lines of cocaine that would wreak havoc on the minimum wage. However the prize for the most awkwardly inserted trope has to go to a spin the bottle scene with a bunch of kids who seem to sit far outside the spin the bottle age group. Good on them for beating a dead horse as hard as they can.
High school sucks shit, it’s unequivocally bad. But lines like “High School Is A War of Attrition” just dramatise something that doesn’t need to be dramatised even more. High school is full of enough pessimism without Netflix selling its own doom and gloom. Maybe I wouldn’t mind how much the show harps on about teenagehood if it had something new to say, but I feel like October Faction has just repackaged and reused the same old tropes that have plagued YA fiction for as long as the genre has been around. The only true innovation at this party was by these picassos.
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4. #aesthetic
I can’t describe how nice it was to get so many different locations in this episode. For once we weren’t just chained to Barington-On-Hudson! Even if the set design felt cheap in places, I was very excited to see crowded streets, clean-cut compounds and open gardens rather than the usual school lockers and wood-panel corridors. The car crash set used in Phillip’s flashback was particularly stand-out with a mix of emotional weight, expert camerawork and dynamic set design punctuating the scene soberingly.
Deloris and Fred’s detour to Presidio was another great thread to unravel through the episode; full of great verbal tidbits and reliably impressive displays by the costume team. At one point there’s a jumpcut to a monster’s summary execution which is a WILD scene transition that really works, instantly giving Michelle Nolden’s Hannah Mercer a sense of dangerous authority.
This was also the first time that I’ve really got to appreciate all the illustrations the props team did for Viv’s art book, top stuff.
5. Villains ahoy
This episode was a BOON for stoic villain scenes. At this point I’m not even surprised that our reintroduction to Alice Harlow is her scrubbing the blood out of a leather jacket, that’s just her level of metal. I just love the stop-start camera work her power-set entails, especially because I can say that when Alice busts into the party, everybody stops. Literally. Her trip through the house party is a great shot that shows how casually risky every kid at this party is. It’s a shame that her actually heist in the Allen mansion is pretty hollow after that.
We got more of of the Octobernator (what I’m calling him until we get a better name) this episode and even though I’m still riding on the absolute amazement of this show having a SURPRISE TERMINATOR in it, his scenes were… squiffy. For one, Viv is weirdly happy to just clean up vomit and beer cans at 3am even though she just met the FUCKING TERMINATOR. Why is she even surprised at the break-in and her parent’s double-life?! She met the Terminator!! Maybe she got Men-in-Blacked or was just black-out drunk, but neither of those feel particularly obvious.
Aside from that, I’m still looking forward to more of Octobernator shenanigans, as well as figuring out what his relation to Presidio and Harlow are. I was really expecting a time travel reveal, especially with two time travel related episode titles in his appearances, but no dice on that front.
“Soirees of Future Past” was another of the show’s stronger episodes, it had more emotional weight and was backed by a greater variety of eye-candy by the production team than any other episode so far. Although it’s held back by a couple of weird choices and miscommunications, I’m genuinely excited for episode five, “Truth and Consequences.”
