Helix Rant

Helix Rant: If I had to describe Helix in one word, I would choose bizarre. What started off as a very gritty and grotesque, to the point of almost being hard to watch, show about CDC scientists combating a mysterious virus spreading throughout an arctic research facility, devolved into what was practically a parody of itself. So how did it happen? How did a mostly decent tv series nosedive so hard and so quick?

Season 1: The beginning of the show swiftly introduces the main characters and conflict. The premise doesn’t seem like anything that I could call original at first. The disease essentially turns people into zombies, except that instead of biting people, they vomit into their mouths, so you naturally just think of them as mindless monsters. The show does a decent job of wrangling with the themes of ethicacy. Should infected people be killed or should they be seen like any other patient? Some of the sent CDC members point out the bizarre nature of the disease and how it is unlike any that they have seen before, so they argue that the safety of everybody else should be placed above those they see as already gone. The main character however disagrees and counters that the point of the CDC is to cure the disease and to not stop trying to do so under any circumstance. It’s also apparent that the main character might have a personal bias as one of the infected is his own brother, who worked at the research facility. From the perspective of the audience, the correct side seems obvious. They’re just zombies, so of course it’s okay to kill them. Well guess what? They eventually find a cure. Now you’re left with the weight of knowing that members of the infected that were killed could have been saved. The way the show plays with your expectations is the by far the best part about it. Other similar moral dilemmas occur like whether to contain people who might have been exposed with those that definitely were and other such stuff. Everything else feels like an afterthought. Unfortunately, everything else is 99% of the show.

Characters: The characters by themselves aren’t anything to write home about. They lack depth and I definitely can’t call any of them likable.To the show’s credit, their portrayal is very much like what I would expect from actual CDC workers. Very cold, impersonal, and committed to the task. The problem is that this doesn’t make for an engaging story. So how does the show try and compensate? Relationship drama. The love triangle, drama and tension between the main character, his ex-wife, who is also a CDC worker who just happens to have been sent on the same mission, and the main character’s brother, who had an adulterous relationship with his brothers wife, feels like something straight out of a soap drama. The black sheep of the cast is a comic relief character that acts completely unprofessional. I did not care when she died and was eaten by a bunch of infected rats. The young, talented, assistant character has no personality. She exists to have sex with the main character that leads to a side plot in season 2. The writers tried to give her some personal struggles by giving her some unrelated neurological disease. Before almost succumbing to her illness she dedicates what she thinks is the rest of her life to trying to find a cure or something like that and it’s supposed to be all heroic, but I don’t care because I had no prior investment in her character. The infected characters noticeably become less threatening over time, which might have been intended, but leads to some unintentional comedy. At one point, the brother crawls around inside of vents and fawns over creep shots of his brother’s ex-wife. At another point, after a bunch of people get infected and for some reason they all act like the brother is their chief, he starts screeching really loudly for no reason and I felt more than a twinge of second-hand embarrassment.

Where everything falls apart: The entirety of what’s decent about this show is the disease and cure plot. Everything else is terrible and it all begins when the show tries to explain the origin of the disease. I don’t know how to express how bad this explanation is, so i’m just going to tell you it. The head of the research facility actually developed the disease on purpose and it accidentally spread because he is fucked up in some way, but actually he did on purpose for some reason, maybe? I don’t even remember because of how convoluted things get from this point onward. He made the disease because he is part of an illuminati like group composed of immortals, which he is one of. No, I did not make that up. This, “realistic”, show full of scientific jargon and a serious attempt at portraying the realistic containment and vaccination development of a hypothetical disease, actually has the illuminati as the main antagonists. Also, the son of the head researcher was actually stolen from a group of eskimos. Eskimos. In. The. Antarctic. You can’t make that shit up. Him meeting his twin brother and being conflicted over loving his father or resenting him for kidnapping him as a child also feels very soap operaish. It’s cheap, nonsensical drama for drama’s sake.

At some point, the ex-wife, who is apparently the daughter of the head researcher, gets turned into an immortal because the infected brother vomited into her mouth and that was the only way of saving her then. There's actually a twist about a character being related to another character, but not knowing because this fact was hidden from them. This show is starting to feel like it would belong on Lifetime. The assistant also gets cured by becoming an immortal by getting the ex-wife’s spinal fluid transferred into her. By the way, your eyes turn silver when you become an immortal; this will be important later. Also, some government guy gets sent to monitor the CDC’s progress and he does some stuff. He’s basically just a plot device that becomes totally useless and unimportant later on. The actual cure for the virus is found, but it only works because of an invention made by the head researcher’s adoptive son, which makes no sense and comes totally out of nowhere. It’s a complete ass-pull. So after that, the illuminati guys send agents to fuck everything up because they want to spread the disease and kill everybody who isn’t immortal. To do that though, they need the original sample of the virus. The CDC guys try to get the sample too, which was moved to some other, much older Russian facility. The CDC guys reach it first, some shit happens, the son of the head research guy gets killed, and the ex-wife gets kidnapped by the illuminati. End of season one.

Season 2: While Lost gradually, if exponentially got worse with time, with Helix it’s like a switch was flipped. Season 1 was by no means perfect, but if i’m going to be honest, it’s no worse than most shows. When I describe everything that is wrong with season 2, I’m not going to be even a little hyperbolic. Hell, I probably won't even be able to properly describe to you how bad it gets.

Characters: Every character becomes a massive cunt for no reason. It’s implied that some shit went down in the massive time skip between seasons(yes, there is a time skip, and yes. it is awful), but that doesn’t change how utterly jarring it is see people who were previously normal, acting psychotic constantly. The main character, who previously was shown as the one to value human life the most, now has a weird genocidal complex against the immortals. Also, he has a beard now to visually indicate his decline in mental health because beards are a crazy person thing. You’d think health experts would know well enough to get therapy if they were really that traumatized by season 1’s events. Also a new guy is introduced.

Gates to Hell: Within the first minutes of season two something feels off. There’s the time skip and personality shifts of the main characters, but other than that, every single thing that happens is extremely fucking dumb. This time they’re on a tropical island(which trust me, won't be the only similarity to lost) because reports of missing sailors dying or being found with a strange disease or something started appearing frequently. So the CDC just sends a team of people to the island with no equipment or any sort of way that the could actually do something about it and there they are. Also the brother is there too despite not previously working for the CDC. What the hell's going on, what happened in between seasons? I don’t know. So they wander around this island for a little bit and discover that the disease turns you into a roid raging, cannibalistic maniac. So instead of regular zombies, 28 days later zombies that can talk. They eventually get cornered in some shack and are approached by mysterious hooded figures who claim to mean them no harm. With no other option, they confront the figures and are led to what seems to be a religious compound. The compound is inhabited by cultists who worship the head-honcho who is just another immortal guy. So the CDC guys just tell them they don’t give a fuck and just want to find a cure to the disease, which the compound already knew about, so they let them use their Botany lab. The show basically abandons any pretense of being scientifically accurate, like at all. The first season had the characters talk about specific studies and how the virus works, but all of that is placed totally on the sidelines now. Instead the focus shifts to the exploits and day to day lives of the cultists, all of which are a boring and thinly veiled jab at Christian fundamentalists.They get in the way of the containment effort and generally make things difficult for the CDC guys.

Holy Fuck: A small portion of every episode is taken up by a flash forward to the ex-wife running around the island and trying to find a cure to a new virus that only affects immortals. Sprinkled here and there are flashbacks to what happened in between seasons and flashbacks to way back to before the compound was made. In exactly the same way as Lost, questions and mysteries are created solely to lazily uphold viewer interest, and are then answered lazily by  the answer being shown to the audience, making the mystery feel pointless. So between seasons, the ex-wife became part of the illuminati and the main character starts running around trying to find the ex-wife and killing immortals at every opportunity. His brother is also running around doing stuff and they have a much more rocky relationship now. I think they were working together, but the brother was secretly working with the illuminati. One flashback is in Paris and I don’t know what the fuck was going on over there, but it was some spy movie shit that never gets properly explained. Every flashforward is transitioned into with a really long sequence showing how the compound falls into disrepair with time, and it gets really annoying the fifth time in one episode.
In these flash forwards, the ex-wife eventually runs into her father who has gone totally mental. Why he’s even on this random island, I don’t know. The list of contrivances only gets longer and longer the more you watch. So he’s basically delusional and thinks his son is still alive. This is revealed when the headless corpse of the son and the totally withered corpse of his wife are revealed. Yeah, I don’t even fucking know. Shock value for the sake of shock value. The father decides to kill the ex-wife so that she’ll be part of his delusions and truly be part of his, “family”. He does this by strapping her to a table and shoving a tube that leads to an iv of some poison or something into her. Some more jarring, off-color comedy happens here when she buys time by telling her father that his son wants to go fishing. The show then cuts back and forth between the father having a fishing trip with his imaginary son and the ex-wife desperately finding some way to escape.So he comes back, but she managed to get a hold  of a scalpel and frees herself. They then have a sword fight in the woods and she kills him.

Incest Shenanigans: So in the cult there’s this really creepy thing going on where the cult leader guy has a daughter with his daughter that’s the daughter of his daughter and so on and so on. Why he never has sons, I don’t know. For some unexplained reason this hasn’t had any adverse effect on his daughters’ health. He does this in the hope that one of his daughters will eventually be immortal like him. Why he thinks that would happen, I don’t know. + 10 shock value points. His office is full of the pictures of every generation of daughter. The three daughters currently alive are sort of in second of command to the cult leader. The youngest daughter is the main driver of conflict this season. She’s basically just a generic bratty, selfish, beautiful but ugly on the inside type character. She’s supposed to be machiavellian, but as you’ll find out later, she is dumb as fuck. Her henchman does stuff for her because he’s infatuated with her, she leads him on, and she gives him hand-jobs too. No joke, she actually does. She wants to leave the island, which is pretty understandable, and she aims to do this by breaking down the compound’s structure. Why she doesn’t just find some way to escape the island, I, nor anybody will ever know. You’ve probably noticed by this point that the writers for whatever reason have completely stopped giving a fuck at this point, but trust me, it gets even worse.

Operation Cunt: At some point, she tries to seduce new guy for some reason and this makes henchman guy get jealous. It’s around this point that both the main character and his brother are imprisoned in some hole for some reason. The main character leaves the brother behind because he hates his guts now. Their relationship shifted from something to humanize the characters, to being very strangely and extremely hostile and bitter. Their relationship reverses in development. I don’t know if the writers did this to look clever, or again, because they stopped giving a fuck. Somehow new guy gets captured by a bunch of infected cannibals and he gets helped by a one-eyed boy.  So he runs off and to avoid getting captured again and eaten by the cannibals, instead of continuing to run, he decides to eat some honey he had with him to get infected because apparently the cannibals don’t eat others with the disease. He does this while really ill-fitting 50s music plays in the background. This shows has a lot of that in an attempt to make itself charming or something. I suspect this aspect of the show was also lifted straight from Lost. This is totally pointless though because the CDC just rescues him before the cannibals can kill him. So while he was captured, he learned from the one-eyed boy(who is now traveling with the rescue group) that a type of red sap helps curb the disease’s symptoms, but it only comes from one tree for some reason. So now the group is trying to find the tree while the new guy slowly turns crazy from the honey. They find it and go back. This is an even more contrived way of finding the cure than in season 1.

So the cunt(the youngest daughter) starts actively sabotaging the CDC’s efforts by purposefully infecting people with Honey, the apparent source of the virus. Her plan works and social order starts to break down. This part of the show is also extremely violent and needlessly shocking.  At some point, the brother gets out and the main character reacts surprisingly nonchalantly. I don’t even remember when this happens, but it does. Somehow the oldest living daughter gets wind that there are other immortals and gently confronts the cult leader about it. He tells her that she was always his favorite daughter while she smiles and then he snaps her neck. +50 shock value points. The cult leader then decides to kill a large number of cult members in a group, koolaid suicide without them knowing about because he doesn't like them being annoyed with him. He’s done this before apparently. So the cult leader gets ousted and the cunt gets put in charge. She does this by tricking him into thinking she’s finally going to let him fuck her to get them in an isolated place and having the henchman guy tie him up. Because she can’t just kill him, she puts him in the hole cell. For no reason, her goal totally shifts from leaving the island to becoming immortal and ruling over the island.

Tumbling Down: So in the flash forwards, the imprisonment of the cult leader coincides with the ex-wife finding his hole. So he’s totally crazy at this point and tricks the ex-wife into being near a cliff by telling her the cure is on the rocky wall somewhere. Why he tries to do this, I don’t know. Before he can push her off, his head gets cut off by a katana by the grown up one-eyed boy. Okay. +30 shock value points. So after that, in the current time the cunt somehow cuts out the assistant’s fetus, who is also immortal, and puts it in a jar.  Apparently on this technologically obsolete island they figured out a way to keep a fetus alive in a jar. So she uses the fetus as leverage to get her assistant to give her some spinal fluid so she can be immortal. The problem is that just putting the spinal fluid of a person who has been immortal for a really long time into a non-immortal doesn't work. The cunt knows this, but wants to do it anyway. The henchman also want to do the operation so he can be with the cunt forever and the cunt begrudgingly agrees to this so she can use him as a test subject. Surprise suprise, it doesn’t work, but instead of just killing him, it makes one of his eyes silver and bloats him up like he had an allergic reaction or something. They throw his body down some pit, but while the cunt’s manservants are trying to move his body, he turns out to be alive and kills them. Somehow nobody notices this.

The illuminati shows up after that for some reason I can’t remember and that just means the ex-wife and the government guy from season 1 who I forgot about show up to the party. The conversation where the ex-wife colludes with the brother to fuck over the cunt is the most unintentionally hilarious part of the the whole show. The dialogue exchange between them goes something like this, Ex Wife: You have no problem with betraying anybody. You’re a real pig, you know that? Brother: Pigs Get Fed. Something about those three words and the delivery was hysterical to me. It was like a scene from a bad porno. I can’t imagine what was going through the head of the guy who came up with that line. Somewhere in that conversation he goes on some long spiel about loving the power he felt when he was the chief zombie and how resentful he is of his brother. So the illuminati want some tree root for some reason and if the cunt can bring them it they’ll make her immortal and if she doesn’t, they’ll kill her. The government guy is tasked with following her around. So she tears the place apart looking for the tree root, which the hentchmen hid for her before, but she didn’t think to ask him location of the hiding spot before allowing him to get fucked up. Why she doesn’t just send her man servants to look around, I don’t know, you don’t know, god doesn’t know.

Fuuuuuuck: So I don’t know, she finds it, I guess? Or at least the location. In the process, she kills the government guy and nobody seems to care, including the ex-wife. So the ex-wife agrees to give her immortality, but she actually doesn't. The cult leader guy apparently had a device to change his eye color because he didn’t want people to know about his silver eyes for some reason. Somehow the ex-wife and the assistant figure out a way of making the eye thing make somebody's eyes silver, so they just do that to the cunt. Why the cunt doesn’t test her powers by giving herself a paper cut and seeing if it would heal(which is a power of this show’s immortals), I don’t know. I just don’t know. So the cunt is super happy and runs outside to do some twirls or something. While all of this is going on, the second oldest daughter goes behind the cunt’s back and tried to get the brother to be the new leader. She shows him around the place, including the breeding chamber. Yes, apparently there is a breeding chamber. Every person on the island is the child of the cult guy and disobedient women who were forced into the breeding chamber and had all of their teeth pulled out so they can be fed through a tube. +500 shock value points. Nevermind that this doesn’t make any fucking sense for every reason. How nobody knows about it, I don’t know.

Light at the End of the Tunnel: Before this, at the CDC, they figured out some way of making a gas that can instantly kill everything and the show makes a big spectacle out of showing a bunch of monkeys be turned into charred black messes. Very shocking, I just couldn't believe my eyes. The CDC gave an ultimatum to the CDC guys on the island where if they don’t find a cure quickly enough, they’ll just gas the whole island. Why the cunt doesn’t care about this is anybody’s guess. For some reason she just started being extremely oblivious and mismanaging all at once, and none of her man servants seem to question her leadership skills. A bunch of military guys come to tell them about the ultimatum. Well right as the gas comes down, the military guys just happen to be outside, and are locked out by the CDC guys, and the cunt is spinning around and shit. So the ex-wife does a mad dash to try and get the tree root, but it’s too late. She’s fine though because she’s an actual immortal. The cunt however gets her face melted very slowly. +100 shock value points. What the gas actually does is unclear. It charred the monkeys but just seemed to burn the soldier guys a little, but for whatever the fuck reason it melted the face of the cunt. Not only that, but it didn’t even kill her like it did with the military guys, so the fucking thing doesn’t even work properly. It’s obvious that this is supposed to be a metaphor for how she is ugly on the inside and other stupid shit. It doesn’t work.

So now everything starts falling apart even more both in the show and in the writer room. The pacing of the rest of the show is extremely rushed, probably because of all the unnecessary shit thrown in before. The henchman and now deformed cunt team up and try to fuck everything up. A whole bunch of shit happens, the cunt gets killed by the toothless women, the assistant gets the jar back, and the whole compound gets set on fire. Everything just totally turns to shit and they leave the island. In the flash forwards, the ex-wife figures out that the one eyed boy is the cure and she just needs some of his blood. She starts feeling some self-hatred due to her immortality and questions if she has the right to live, but he tells her to just take the cure so she does. Every second of the last five minutes of this show is like somebody punching you in the gut over and over again. You have to see it for yourself to understand. The stupidity reaches critical mass and implodes on itself. The main character wakes up in a hospital and sees that he now has silver eyes and gets super pissed off. Some other stuff happens and then a women enters the assistant’s super futuristic laboratory, which is somehow being controlled by the fetus? Some other stuff happens and the suffering is finally put to an end.

Death: This show got cancelled after season two and it’s pretty easy to see why. Save yourself
and don’t watch this show.