I spent an hour kneeling by the TV set trying to make out the dialogue, so you can't say I didn't give it a shot. The fantasy elements, like most fantasy, seems like tiresome elaborations on old, old tropes worn out in many hours of movies and television (not to mentions forests of dead trees.)
The young man who plays the teen lead looks too old for the part as it is, but when they have the character play grossly immature (clapping his own hand over his mouth? sneaking cigarettes? completely inarticulate in the "thereapy" session?) willing suspension of disbelief gets a kick in the nuts. The bedwetting is pretty extreme by US television standards, which usually insists that its heroes' flaws are either peccadillos, or even in the final analysis, virtues.
The adults in the series seem like a peculiar lot. The closest to a normal human being is the teacher. But normal or not, the herky jerky way they adult segments are sped around makes it hard to get any sense of the characters. The scruffy mentor cliche doesn't seem to have any real sense of loss over the teachers wife/not-wife, for instance. The priestess is I suppose C of E, which lives down to the cliche that it's a social club for nonbelievers, which asks the question of how she's taking any of this seriously?
Or am I just in a bad mood because it's so hard to understand? (Accents, volume of sound, not plotting.) Does the lead get more believable? Do the adults start acting normal?
The young man who plays the teen lead looks too old for the part as it is, but when they have the character play grossly immature (clapping his own hand over his mouth? sneaking cigarettes? completely inarticulate in the "thereapy" session?) willing suspension of disbelief gets a kick in the nuts. The bedwetting is pretty extreme by US television standards, which usually insists that its heroes' flaws are either peccadillos, or even in the final analysis, virtues.
The adults in the series seem like a peculiar lot. The closest to a normal human being is the teacher. But normal or not, the herky jerky way they adult segments are sped around makes it hard to get any sense of the characters. The scruffy mentor cliche doesn't seem to have any real sense of loss over the teachers wife/not-wife, for instance. The priestess is I suppose C of E, which lives down to the cliche that it's a social club for nonbelievers, which asks the question of how she's taking any of this seriously?
Or am I just in a bad mood because it's so hard to understand? (Accents, volume of sound, not plotting.) Does the lead get more believable? Do the adults start acting normal?
