Sanctuary – Kush

by Jason Hughes

SciFi

(Season 1, Episode 5)

I’ll give credit where it’s due. What started off as a typical monster horror episode evolved into something slightly more interesting and sustained this for at least most of the episode. That’s not to say that we haven’t seen pretty much everything that happened in this hour about a hundred times or more, but at least they had me intrigued for about twenty minutes there in the middle.

I think they forgot the strength of the show, which is the intrigue about the Sanctuary itself and the menagerie of creatures that make up this world. Sure, there was a monster in this episode (of course), but at the same time … there wasn’t.

Every time there’s a movie or a show where there’s a wreck of some sort, there’s always a fat guy or girl right off the bat who starts bitching and complaining until everyone tells him to shut up. Tonight, it was “Good for you!” guy. In his defense, the wreck was Helen and Team Sanctuary’s fault … completely! Of course, then he spiraled into “conspiracy theory guy.”

Exotic Specimens

You knew something was going to happen with the regular rescue that would force Ashley to get involved personally. Because she loves her mommy.
It’s kind of a waste of time to threaten people who don’t speak the language. Sure, they may get the tone of what you’re saying, but you’d do just as well to growl at them. Less effort.
Poor Ashley was too late to do anything. At least she got to stage a hallucination rescue so she could do something in the episode.

The whole thing became a lot more interesting when Helen and Will realized they saw different wounds on the same arm. It quickly became a greater problem than night visions. Suddenly everything they, and subsequently we, were seeing was subject to doubt. That’s interesting! So then why trust what they see when their little blood test comes back and fingers Braun as the monster? Of course the monster, who can control what people perceive, would point the blame off of himself.

It was nice to get a bit more on the depth of the feelings Helen and John had for one another. It’s too bad he’s such a monster. I thought, though, that we’d get more than we did but I guess it makes sense to keep as much of her past as mysterious as possible. It was a little forced when Will was talking to his mother, all the time knowing she wasn’t real and he really needed to be saving Helen’s life.

Oh, and in the end, it fell right back to horror movie cliche by having only the two main characters survive the monster’s attacks.