Lolli123456

Its a continuation of The Vampire Diaries. Alaric Saltzman is now running a school for supernatural creatures. The school has a library called The Stephan Salvator Memorial Library, which is kind of fun. The guy that is the cop in Mystic Falls, Matt Donovan, does a cameo in a couple episodes. No other main characters from the Vampires show.

The 'evil' fraternal twin witch girls have grown up and are a major part of the season one plot. It's a bad sister good sister thing, much like Damon and Stephan. And Claus' girl has grown up and she is going to be interesting. I never watched The Originals so some of the history is disjointed for me. The school reminded me a bit of X-Men. Kind of a rip off of the concept.

The plot is a bit thin in most of the episodes (up to episode 14), and one of the witch sisters appears to have the emotion maturity of a 2 year old, which comes off as bad acting. Its basically a monster hunt. Every episode is a new monster to fight. Its geared toward kids than the original Vampires.

Spoilers: The Merge happens in the final episode and the cute innocent sister wins out.

There are maybe two half-laughs per episode. Its tries waaaay too hard and falls short on almost every gag. It mostly just comes off weird.

Especially the main hypochondriac character played by Jen Garner. If you wanted to hate someone in a TV show, this is the show to watch to have someone to hate. The character is written sooooo annoyingly. I'm not sure why Garner keeps playing these uptight woman, it doesn't seem to work for her, but she gets these parts a lot.

Ex-Doctor Who is extra boring. The only slightly interesting thing is watching him try to fake a mid-west american accent.

Juliette Lewis is probably the best part of the show. That wild gypsy slut kind of thing just works for her.

Its unclear why they bothered making this. Its definitely going to be canceled.

I described it to a friend as a gothic love story but with witches and vampires. I'm not usually into fantasy shows, but this one is well done and the two main characters are excellent actors.

I've been following Mathew Goode's career for a few years and first became aware of him in the non-fiction show called The Wine Show that is still airing. But I had probably seen him in other things before and not realized, as he is one of those actors that blends into their character so well that you hardly realize its the same actor.

Teresa Palmer is captivating. I'm totally in love with her character. Smart, worldly, beautiful, physically fit(sigh). What's not to love. There was a romatic scene in the 2nd or 3rd episode between her and Mathew and it was beautiful. The chemistry between them is perfect. Although I do think Mathrew Goode is a little too old for the part. There is a definite father and daughter age difference between them. Ewww.

The settings are great, who knew there was a magically hidden island in Venice, Italy. I love the Cambridge setting, and the library, and the castle.

The "magic" was selectively done and not overly magical for several episodes. Some shows just keep using the super powers in every scene, but they have done a great job building up her powers in a slow anticipatory way that makes you want more.

Unfortunately, as the show goes on, they are using more overtly fairytale magic which is bringing it down imo, like the house rattling when the vampire approached, that was kind of dumb. And the mother's 'ghost', I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Its fairytale nonsense in an otherwise good show. There is a difference between 'magic' superpowers and bad writing. I took off a star for dumbing it down to pre-school level.

I do have another complaint. The Norwegian witch is physically (almost sexually) abused by two different men as if its totally normal. I sincerely hope she kills both of their characters in the end. I can only imagine the uproar there would be if the female witch had abused the men. A national disgrace they would say. Investigations into the writer's mental health are being demanded by the fake president.

Lessons you learn from watching this show:

1) 95% of all people smoke cigarettes incessantly, even people that quit smoking.
2) Any person of interest will be beaten or shot even though they were totally innocent.
3) Totally innocent people withhold information that would easily clear them of the crime for no good reason until its too late and they are beaten or shot and end up hospitalized.
4) Women are "emotional" and that is why they make such bad detectives.
5) One murder case can drag on for two seasons if the detectives ignore obvious clues from the first episode.

Its almost completely *not* about Mars. It is about all the family and team and government drama surrounding a space operation like going to Mars. It gets really bogged down in the Penn character's family drama, and entire episodes go by with less than 5% of the show being in any way about Mars.

The glaring error is that Penn is far too old to be in NASA as an active astronaut. Its totally unrealistic. They should have cast a man 20 years younger. Although Penn got all buff for the role, he looks like he is on steroids. And what is with his hair?

I have no idea who the weird narrator with the phones was suppose to be. Its nonsensical and adds nothing to the plot except confusion.

It was suspenceful for about half of the first episode, then it just got stupid. Why would they see an older man except when they look in the mirror its a young girl. The conscieous body jumping was stupid enough but the mirror aspect was just dumb.

It gets slightly better with the story of the boy and girl running away and going on adventures. Accepting the non-logical body jumping with the mirror thing and the very weird "treatment" going on in Norway is testing my suspension of disbelief. Yeah, pictures of whales always send me into an out of body tizzy as well. @@