Welcome back for the tenth and last instalment of the biweekly October Faction review! What a ride we’ve been on guys, through the depths of Netflix high school cliches and over the crests of monster hunting highs, it’s been a journey. So strap in one last time for the final joyride through Barington-on-Hudson. Spoilers ahead
1. Harlow’s Homecoming
Alice Harlow’s oogly-boogly super powers reached their peak right at the start of this episode and it turns out her purposes were pretty wholesome. She brought her whole House back from the dead (albeit by snatching up the bodies of Barington-on-Hudson’s country bumpkins). She’s really lucky that her husband didn’t come back in the body of a teenage kid, especially since he gets shot almost immediately. I like how Omari’s biggest argument against the ritual was “You can’t interfere with the natural order of life and death” even though it’s established that their House does that already. Also “the natural order of life and death” probably isn’t the biggest issue here when the main component of this ritual was mass-body snatching. I wonder if Phillip was offended that no one wanted to steal his body?
Now, why did October Faction save the coolest parts of Alice’s backstory for two episodes after her feature, just to offhandedly mention it in a throwaway conversation? She joined a MONSTER MILITIA then got CHAINED TO THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN only to be freed by her long dead daughter’s seace. That’s metal as fuck. Why did we spend 40 minutes on drug addled baby sitting when we could have had THAT! It even rationalises Alice’s turn to cold-hearted murder well! But you know what flashback we did get? A POINTLESS EXPLANATION OF WHY THE HOUSE BLEW UP!!! I FUCKING CALLED IT. Why is this show so obsessed with explaining its own contrived plot in giant pointless flashbacks? Just let it die.
2. Super Action Cops Go!
If this episode proved anything it’s that you don’t fuck with Barington-on-Hudson PD. Sure, there maybe only be three cops in the whole town, but they are more than willing to bust open the weapons locker and fuck up supposed FBI agents based on the smallest of hunches. Honestly Presidio were not ready for the hell those three country cops unleashed, what absolute loose units. I love how the two others trust Fernandez enough to instantly lock and load straight after she gets out of hospital and will take in Moshe under very little scrutiny, but they’re also distrustful enough to shoot armed men in the head based on no evidence. I feel like everyone in Barington-on-Hudson is perpetually ready to riot and I’m here for it.
When Moshe joins the team it feels like a pretty good fit, Dayo Ade is a really great actor. He and Fernandez have a great scene at the episode’s end, even if it feels like a really quick de-escalation and it injects the two with a ton of random sexual tension. He has a good character arc, but it is a little squiffy that (to my memory) we never actually learn what Harlow did specifically to piss him off so much in the first place. Sidenote, is he ever going to get a change of clothes? He was so incredibly conspicuous the whole ep and he’s been through a lot in that uniform, I’m afraid to think of how much sweat and blood is ponging up that thing.
3. The Soap Bubble Pops
This was a weird episode for the teenage Allens. Both of their subplots had wrapped up by the end of last episode, so this one didn’t have much they could do. Despite that we still inexplicably spend a disproportionately large amount of time with them. Viv has a bunch of awkward scenes with a warlock boy trapped in Cathy’s body where they try to pretend the cringy Lord of the Rings references from episode 2 were emotionally impactful. Their conversation ends on a nice note at least, mostly because I forgot how annoying original recipe Cathy was until she came back. I miss that body-thieving boy already.
Geoff has one really good scene with Deloris which stands out. Those two mostly have hardly had a chance to interact at all so this was sorely welcome. It buries the hatchet with nuance and also just feels believable, mostly because of how Tamara Taylor manages to speed the scene along perfectly, not bogging them down in melodrama. On the complete flip-side of that you have the scenes between Geoff and Phillip where Darku has the single worst line-delivery of any episode yet, letting out a “you’re so hot when you’re mad” that’s as stiff as cardboard. Their scenes together are kind of nice, but they just feel so pointless and schlock, by the end they half-start a (fairly useless) riot among those trapped in the Allen House, but the fact that Phillip doesn’t just get shot in the head immediately is a small miracle.
Continued belowThe one saving grace for this tangle of useless threads though is the forever magnificent Mr. Erickson, what a mad lad. He’s so loyal to his student and he’s the one who really starts up that riot, so much bottled rage. Also if Presidio really wanted to pass the whole thing off as a chemical contamination then they should probably have their guards in medical scrubs and not just let people bust into the creepy old mansion full of guys in ski masks with machine guns. But I guess if they were that smart they wouldn’t have all died.
4. Presidio’s GenoCIAde
I feel like I’m stating the obvious at this point, but Presidio are REALLY willing to fuck people up. This episode they’re guilty of attempted baby murder, mass conspiracy, eugenic experimentation, torture, unlawful detainment and a whole grocery list of other crimes. Honestly the most impressive feat of theirs might be the ability to turn any room into a torture chamber. The scenes with Alice chained up definitely had that creepy, CIA enhanced interrogation feel, ripped straight from The Report. But it really grinds seeing all the Presidio agents get the stormtrooper treatment here. They’re comically malicious, frustratingly incapable and uncompellingly faceless. The show even calls them stormtroopers at one point, the writers know how lazy their script is but instead of actually fixing it they just slap a pop-culture band-aid on it.
I honestly don’t think I’ve mentioned Megan Follows’s Edith Mooreland once in these reviews and there might be a good reason for it. Honestly she’s fine, she’s a perfectly serviceable villain but she’s just not interesting, I got a bit of an adrenaline rush when she said “The Age of the Allens” has ended, but that was mostly because i thought the episode was ending twenty minutes early. It was pretty great when Presidio first busted in to the Harlow reunion and all the other guards are firing tranquilizer darts but she just plants a 9mm in Omari’s back, not very on mission, but it definitely gets a message across. But here’s the rub. Her Latin pronunciation is wrong. At one point she says “scientia revelare” with a hard V, rather than pronouncing it softly as “rewelare.” The only thing I hate more than shows uselessly using Latin to sound smart is when they use it to sound smart and then screw it up anyway. Don’t use Latin in your show if you can’t be fucked doing it properly. But Edith’s dead anyway, so once they off Cathy we should be free from pointless Latin.
5. A new direction for the Allens
So Fred is quite obviously going to be okay. Like they explained away his death during the episode, there’s no suspense there. But to be fair, the actual scenes from Fred’s detour into Death were pretty good. There was some nice mise-en-scene, Omari got to be worse Dumbeldore and there was some properly good acting from J.C MacKenzie after a bunch of dud episodes. I think this ep did a really good job of having both fathers of Viv and Geoff’s interact, then both of their mothers. It was done really organically and insightfully.
Last time I made a bunch of finale predictions and surprisingly I wasn’t that far off. Maggie did end helping finish off Presidio, although it was sort of passed over in dialogue. Ultimately it had nothing to do with Sam or Seth, so she didn’t really break good, but I think that might set her up as a good slow burn antagonist if this show returns for a second season. My second prediction was spot on, Sheriff Fernandez and Barington-On-Hudson PD definitely cracked some Presidio skulls, maybe a little too enthusiastically. The thing I got most wrong was the fate of Sam and Seth. Neither of them died in the end, instead Fred carked it, which pretty neatly solves the same issues I was talking about last time. Nifty.
Looking ahead, there’s not really a giant looming threat but there were some crumbs. Fred and Maggie seem like the central points of tension with Fred trying to claw his way back to life and Maggie serving as the new evil head of Presidio. It’s nothing mind-blowing but it’s a jumping off point. The last thing we get for the episode though is the threat of a monster under the Allen house that’s Jurassic Park-ing every cup of water in the building. It’s such a weak, inexplicable stinger for the episode, but honestly I’m hoping that Sam’s just brought all his dead ancestors back as Octobernators.
So with that we’re done for the season. I think it was a pretty good cap on things overall, the show definitely ended better than it started and the character arcs all wrapped up neatly. Personally I think I’ve been pretty hard on the show, but I’m hoping all of you got a kick out of it and enjoyed my whiny commentary on it all. If you can think of a better premise for season two than “The Allens vs All their dead cyborg relatives” then let me know. Until then, praise Mr. Erickson.
