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London, 1891: Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) is an American
sharp-shooter with a wild west show, who is after one of his performances
hired by mysterious Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) to this night help her and
her colleague Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) to free Murray's daughter
Mina (Olivia Llewellyn) - from a lair of vampires, it turns out. And while
the mission as such is deemed a failure as far as saving the girl goes,
they do manage to kill and take with them a human/monster hybrid whose
inner skin is covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs - from the book of death.
Now Murray is pretty sure his daughter is not in the best of health, so he
also hires surgeon Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) to - well, bring her
back to life if necessary. What even Murray doesn't know yet is that
Frankenstein has a body in his lab stitched together from bodyparts -
which might or might not have to do with the grisly murder spree shaking
the city of late where mutilated bodies are left behind. Anyways, a freak
jolt of lightning brings Frankenstein's creature
(Alex Price) to life at the end of
this episode ...
Now I admit, it's always a good idea to see popular fiction
characters from the Victorian era being brought together on screen, and
this series opener certainly does a better job doing just that than League
of the Extraordinary Gentlemen (the movie) or Van
Helsing - but frankly, that alone isn't much of an achievement.
Now as a first episode, this one certainly makes you longing for more, but
that can't hide many insufficiencies it has taken by its own merits: For
one, the story is incredibly garbled, opens up too many narrative threads
all at once without developing a coherent story arc, also throwing too
many characters onto the audience without giving any of them depth, and
finally, the whole thing too often chooses spectacle over atmosphere, so
it hardly ever is creepy, at best mysterious. That said one has to wait
and see of course where the series might take us, and this first episode
has at least achieved to whet one's appetite.
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