Helix: Love it or Hate it? (Awards Given)

[Overmind One]

Episode 4

This one has the show fully swerved off the road and into Lost territory, seemingly for the long run (bad). It feels like the major swerve that NuBSG did about halfway through season 2. This island has become a mysterious cult story, with Julia sword fighting with her father in the forest, dramatic pseudo torturing and mysterious philosophical musings. Its gone full tilt in a completely different and horrible direction than it began in season 1. It is no longer that show. They only kept the actors, but everything else is gone and the focus is no longer really the virus. Oh, and I wont get into the immortal fetus who refuses to be born after 15 months. .

This episode has bees, and several refrains of Flight of the Bumblebee, the cast now all wears dirty clothes and the makeup is gone from the female actresses, giving it a proper rustic/apocalyptic feel. But the show is going nowhere. The plot is going everywhere, and the show is just a wreck. This is 4 episodes now, and I do not see any improvement, just getting worse. Why even broadcast this crap? I will be extremely surprised if this show gets another season.

 

[Jim of WVa]

Helix Season 2 Episode 5

Jim of WVa - 0.8 million

 

[Overmind One]

Helix Season 2 Episode 5

Jim of WVa - 0.8 million

Im downloading this right now. I need to exercise my eyeballs in a circular fashion in their sockets. It helps me relax...wait...that's just boredom.

 

[Overmind One]

Episode 5

Wow, big reveal. Yawn. Now this thing allegedly spans 500 years? And the pathogen is not engineered in modern times, it's just...what? There arent anymore zombie-ish creatures, now they are just infected people who act all angsty and chase people. But they can talk and think and set traps and stuff. Exciting. Mysterious. Not.

Now that the show is really about infected bees and honey, the black blood on the Helix opening scene dripping off the title is now golden honey. Gone is the cool 70s road music, replaced by long drawn out haunting violin cords and synthesized strings. Sorta haunted and creepy-like.

This show is beyond jumping the shark. Season 2 Helix is not the same show as season 1 at all. Completely different shows.

 

[shavedape]

Episode 5

Wow, big reveal. Yawn. Now this thing allegedly spans 500 years? And the pathogen is not engineered in modern times, it's just...what? There arent anymore zombie-ish creatures, now they are just infected people who act all angsty and chase people. But they can talk and think and set traps and stuff. Exciting. Mysterious. Not.

Now that the show is really about infected bees and honey, the black blood on the Helix opening scene dripping off the title is now golden honey. Gone is the cool 70s road music, replaced by long drawn out haunting violin cords and synthesized strings. Sorta haunted and creepy-like.

This show is beyond jumping the shark. Season 2 Helix is not the same show as season 1 at all. Completely different shows.

OMG, what show did you just describe? It just sounds soooooo bizarre! How can it be season 2 when it sounds completely different than season 1? Thank God I had the good sense to bail on this one.

 

[Overmind One]

OMG, what show did you just describe? It just sounds soooooo bizarre! How can it be season 2 when it sounds completely different than season 1? Thank God I had the good sense to bail on this one.

Im not exaggerating when I say they are two different shows. They literally are. The characters are mostly the same, but everything else is different. Season 1 was about the mysterious pathogen that turned people into zombies who had an urge to attack others and infect them by vomiting black blood into their mouths. There were two pathogens, one that did the blood thing and the other that turned people into immortals. There was the mysterious doctor, the para-military Ilaria Corporation (made up of immortals) who wanted to use an engineered pathogen to de-populate the earth, but needed only a cure for the pathogen to safely release it. It was a bit soapy and had too much interpersonal drama, but it was watchable. And the soundtrack was nostalgic.

Season 2 is about people on an island populated sparsely by a cult of Greenies Gone Wild, who grow their own GMO foods which have properties beyond their genetics because the mysterious "Michael" is a genetic biologist who knows how to engineer organisms to do his bidding. But our characters only slowly are realizing this. They attempt to unravel the "mystery" and trace it to infected honeybees (evidently GMO as well) which spread the pathogen through their honey. Tonight, we discover that Michael himself is an immortal, and he has promised his followers that he will find a way to reverse aging. But wait, many of the females, even one old lady, turn out to be his daughters because he is like 500 years old and all. . MAJOR eyeball exercise from that one.

The show is just off the rails and careening across the landscape without direction. It would be a trainwreck, but there is just no plot to crash into. It feels like that round-robin campfire game where everyone tells part of a haunted house story, adding their own chapters off the cuff before passing the story off to the next person. Only after the circle of storytellers was complete could the first storyteller tell an ending (if he or she chose). But if the first storyteller did not end it, the circle had to continue the story until it came back around to the second storyteller, who could end it (if they chose). This show is like that game but nobody will MERCIFULLY end it.

 

[Overmind One]

Ow wow...Im glad Im not the only one.

http://www.avclub.com/review/helix-stoned-college-sophomore-tv-sci-fi-213820

The header of that article says it all:

How apropos.

I particularly liked this paragraph:

The crux of the issue here is that Helix can’t get away with the same bag of tricks it used to draw viewers in the first time. This is season two, and there’s a boatload of dangling plot threads, a few addressed sporadically, but most of them seemingly dropped, perhaps to be picked up later on when the show wants to goose its story forward a bit. It does make one profound deviation from the structure of last season, however. Halfway through the first episode, the show makes a choice so unexpected, so bold, and so seemingly ludicrous, that it almost earns continued watching just to see what the hell the writers were thinking. To say any more would be to spoil the surprise, but the choice to enact an inferior (and unearned) version of another, richer show’s key storyline is a testament to Helix’s daft “we’ll try anything, only crazier and less justified” attitude. (The above grade is largely earned through the chutzpah of this decision, though the elusive F+ was briefly considered.)

 

[Overmind One]

Oh my...the word is spreading faster than a rebooted, pathogen carrying, angsty GMO honeybee. TV.com was not kind:

http://www.tv.com/shows/helix/community/post/helix-season-2-episode-1-san-jose-review-142126583169/

The abrupt change in scenery wasn't so much a refreshing change of pace as it was a viewer-kidnapping ambush, complete with a blindfold, a pistol whip, and a long ride in a van with dark windows. We didn't know where we were headed and we certainly didn't know why, we just knew we didn't want to be there.

Ouch...

The Season 2 premiere, "San Jose," all but confirmed that Helix is a runaway series on a downhill slope with its brakes cut. Arctic Biosystems? Gone. That cafe in France? Extinct. Boardroom meetings with immortal execs? Vamoose. The episode dropped us onto an island where a (probably) new virus is causing its victims to spew mustard-colored cauliflower out of their mouths. There were very few references to the past save for a couple conversational mentions (Sarah hasn't seen Alan in over a year), there wasn't much set-up for what's happening now, and the show's main character was absent for 99.999999 percent of the episode. What the Helix?

Double ouch (with bleeding).

 

[Joelist]

So basically the show is worthless now.

 

[Overmind One]

So basically the show is worthless now.

Pretty much. Ratings are already below 1m (significantly). No way there will be another season. I have been watching this entire 2nd season run and it can't get much worse.

What I can't get over is how much different this show is. It is a completely different animal. Not even the same species as the original. Its like the difference between a dog and a cat. The new one is aping Lost BIG TIME. But it is a big fat fail.

 

[shavedape]

This whole thing is so bizarre I can't even think of a good joke to make about it. I mean, WTF are the writers thinking? And what is SyFy thinking giving the green light to this season? Did no one in the SyFy offices read any of the scripts? Obviously not.

This might explain why they closed the forums over at SyFy. They knew they were going to get eaten alive by angry viewers.

 

[Jim of WVa]

I still kinda like it. It is like a Bizzaro world of biology based science fiction.

Syfy has yet to show a program that captures the space science fiction zeitgeist of the first decade of the 21st century. Until it does so, it will never recover its former viewership.

 

[shavedape]

I still kinda like it. It is like a Bizzaro world of biology based science fiction.

Syfy has yet to show a program that captures the space science fiction zeitgeist of the first decade of the 21st century. Until it does so, it will never recover its former viewership.

You can have Tricia Helfer's tits ala Ascension or genuine space science fiction. You can't have both. Choose wisely.

 

[Overmind One]

I still kinda like it. It is like a Bizzaro world of biology based science fiction.

Syfy has yet to show a program that captures the space science fiction zeitgeist of the first decade of the 21st century. Until it does so, it will never recover its former viewership.

You are okay with the abrupt transformation of the original Helix to Helix 2.0? They are not even the same show.

 

[Overmind One]

You can have Tricia Helfer's tits ala Ascension or genuine space science fiction. You can't have both. Choose wisely.

Why don't they just give Tricia a show of her own where she is some sort of Captain of a ship, or perhaps do a series version of Species? She is hot, but not over the top hot (no fake boobs or botox). She needs an action role, not a Vogue role. Drop the haute couture and put her in a skimpy outfit and shove her out there in some thrown together show. The teen males will flock to it, and women will watch it for ideas.

 

[Joelist]

The problem would be she doesn't really project strongly enough to pull of a role as a captain or such. In contrast, Kate Mulgrew did project strongly enough to make Janeway work and work well on Star Trek Voyager.

 

[Overmind One]

The problem would be she doesn't really project strongly enough to pull of a role as a captain or such. In contrast, Kate Mulgrew did project strongly enough to make Janeway work and work well on Star Trek Voyager.

No...Im thinking more along the lines of a modern Barbarella. A 100% feminine Captain perhaps with an all female crew. Maybe her people have so very few males they have to kidnap them or search the galaxy for them. Maybe she has a small ship with a small crew, and they are all escaped slaves who captured the ship and they spend each episode running from their pursuers, trying to hide their tracks. Something like that.

I think Captain Janeway would be insulted if you compared her to Tricia.

 

[Jim of WVa]

You are okay with the abrupt transformation of the original Helix to Helix 2.0? They are not even the same show.

Yeah, that adds to the Bizzaro world vibe.

 

[Jim of WVa]

 

[Jim of WVa]