TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I have an ongoing hate/hate relationship with Moonlight. I hate it because it’s a sci-fi/vampire show which means I can’t bring myself to delete it from the DVR. I also hate it because, since it’s on my DVR I have to watch it. I hate it again because it’s a shameless rip-off of Angel and doesn’t really pretend to be otherwise. And I hate it a fourth time because the show’s ongoing plots are dumb to the point of brain-melting.

I laid a lot of criticism on it in the original review and I wasn’t that much kinder to it in the Mid-Season Checkup. I made reference to bad storylines, bad writing, characters that weren’t really that interesting, storylines that made no sense, and other such nonsense. In fairness, I wanted to give it the whole season to get into a groove and start moving through the plot points and such. With the strike-shortened season now finished, I’m much more comfortable in my initial criticisms of the show. By setting the show as a vampire-PI-in-LA show, it screams to be compared to Angel by the sci-fi crowd and comes up very short. For any flaws you can point out in either Buffy or Angel one thing always remained consistent: the storylines made sense in the context of the universe. Characters had very clearly defined motivations and, even if they were annoying, you could usually understand the reason they were annoying.

Setting aside the actors for a moment, let’s start with the writing. Mick St. John is the lead vampire character in Moonlight. He was turned in the 1950s so he’s been a vampire for 60ish years. The over-arcing storyline for the first season was him hating what he is and being excited by the possibility of a cure. He hates being a monster. He hates not being like everyone else. He hates that he can’t spend his life with the lead female character Beth because she’s mortal and won’t understand that he’s a monster and she’ll die while he will go on.

The problem with this: no one is really explaining what’s so bad about being a Moonlight-universe vampire. They are relying on the audience believing his assertions that it’s horrible rather than making it, you know, horrible. We’ve met about ten vampires over the season. Mick: who’s a PI and tries to protect humans and help them. Josef: who’s a day-trader and doesn’t kill anyone for fun… in fact, he has women over who volunteer their blood. An Los Angeles County Medical Examiner who has a standard everyday job and sells blood on the side. A computer geek who apparently spends his days hacking into websites and playing Guitar Hero. A college professor who turned someone by mistake and was very sorry he did. Mick’s ex-wife Coraline who was kinda evil in the first episode but who has now repented and become a good guy. Mick’s brother-in-law who is apparently very evil… although he hasn’t really done anything evil yet except force Coraline to return to France with him. And, like, two standard one-episode bad guys.

What can we gather from this? Well, besides the fact that they’ve still never explained exactly why Coraline kidnapped Beth when she was a child, only to reappear 20 years later (unrecognizable to Beth of course because, you know, you probably wouldn’t remember the face of the pretty woman who kidnapped you… oh, and because Beth is an idiot) and be a reformed vampire who wants to help Mick do good… we can pretty much gather that the percentage of good and evil vampires is about the same as the percentage of good and evil humans. Which further implies that a vampire in the Moonlight universe is just about the same person that they were before they were turned and their ongoing experience influence what they want out of undeath. They can be both redeemed and led down dark paths… just like a real boy.

The respective writers used the same “I want to be human” storyline with both Mick and Angel. But: here’s why it works for Angel. We know why Angel wants to be human. The vampires in Joss Whedon’s universe are horribly, unquestionably, disgustingly evil. They are demons. They are what people would be without conscience, guilt, or fear. Take away the angel on a person’s shoulder preventing them from taking whatever they feel like and killing what gets in their way: that’s a Whedonverse vampire. Angelus’s first action as a vampire is to kill his entire family. He did this out of hatred for his father. As a vampire, the fear and respect keeping him in line is gone and that little part of him that hates his father becomes the only part that matters. To punish his father, Angelus kills his entire family. He starting with his pre-teen sister who invites him in thinking him an angel returned from the dead. He saves his father for last so his father will know what has been done to his family before being killed. Every story you get from Angelus’s past involves him massacring, torturing, or brutalizing someone over a 150-year, bloody rampage. He massacres convents. He tortures people for fun. He enjoys killing babies and puppies. He’s a bad dude.

When his soul is returned to his body, the conscience he lost eats at him because of this body count. Eventually he discovers that he can never be happy because, if he experiences a single moment of true happiness, he will lose his soul and become that brutal killer again. He will become the creature that revels in torturing his victims physically and mentally; the creature who killed Jenny Calendar, put her in Giles’s bed, and set up the house as though she was waiting upstairs intent on a romantic evening. Angel is tortured. He wants to return to being human so Angelus is destroyed. He can’t ever be happy. If he falls in love with a mortal, we know WHY he can’t turn them. He can’t turn people into vampires because they become soulless killers with no real hope for redemption.

In the Moonlight universe, the vampires are nothing like that. Really, they’ve never even gave me any indication as to why it’s a bad deal. The vampires in Moonlight’s Los Angeles have formed a tight knit little community. They’re community frowns on murdering humans in the street. All of their feeding is either done via bloodbank or by volunteers. They hold regular jobs. Mick is a private eye who saves people and buys blood from a hospital’s coroner. What exactly is he trying to escape from? What is weighing on his conscience so badly that he needs to escape this torment of being young forever with no fear of disease or death? On the entire run of the show so far he’s killed exactly one human and the writers were very sure to make it so the audience wanted to see him die.

Sorry guys… proof by forceful insistence is not a proof.

Further: If Beth and he love each other so much, why wouldn’t he just turn her? In one episode they explicitly state that it’s the responsibility of a sire to take the new vampire under his wing and teach them the ways of the world. The new vampire comes into the world feral with no idea what’s going on… but the sire is supposed to teach them how to live in this world. The premise that he wouldn’t just turn Beth and teach her how to be a productive member of vampire society was so ridiculous that they had to create an entire episode about how Mick’s friend Josef tried to sire the love of his life to be with her forever but “something went wrong and she’s been a vampire in a coma for 50 years.” So she’s a vampire… a magical being who can not be felled by anything short of decapitation or fire… but she’s subject to a coma? And he has absolutely no idea what he did wrong? She’s the first and only vampire he’s ever sired? I’m calling it the most ridiculous concept in a show about undead creatures… and that’s saying something.

Then there’s Coraline, who has gone from hopelessly evil vampire who kidnapped a child to feed on, to burned to death, to missing for 20 years, to human, to vampire who is from the royal bloodline of Louis XIV. Not only that, but her family discovered an organic compound that allows a vampire to be human for short periods of time. But her brother is upset she stole it and brought it to the states. But….. why? Did they lose the recipe? Have they been living off the same stash of it for 400 years? It doesn’t make any sense.

One thing they have been very consistent about in Moonlight is that vampires in their universe have the ability to make their own decisions. They are not soulless killers. They do not (necessarily) think of human beings as cattle. They do not murder without remorse. They feel the same emotions as everyone else. In fact, no one’s really mentioned why vampires don’t just turn all their friends into vampires. They also don’t really mention why, in the Moonlight universe, that anyone wouldn’t WANT to be a vampire. Mick complains… a lot… but I can’t be the only person who is constantly wondering what the big deal is. He’s not evil. He helps people. He has a soul. Short of being burned to death or decapitated he can’t die. What is the downside of being a superhero? He can’t have a relationship? Why? Can you give me a reason why turning Beth would be such a bad thing? Is it because of the completely unsatisfying answer you gave to me when Josef killed-but-didn’t-kill his one true love?

I know that the show has won awards and was renewed for a second season. Maybe the gaping plot holes aren’t that bad to other people… maybe I’m not being fair and I need to let it play out before passing judgement on it. But until they give me some indication as to what reason a vampire in this universe has to be angsty, it’s really got nothing for me. So far, the only way it’s separated itself from Angel is by being vastly inferior with worse writing, a confused, plot-hole filled mythology, and semi-good to bad acting.

Figure out your universe and give me some logic, guys. It’s not that hard.