Sanctuary review

While I was bedridden earlier this year I couldn't make it upstairs to the family dinner table, so they joined me down in our family room. Before the accident, we had been watching through the TV show Stargate Atlantis, and with all the down time the accident gave me, we started through the ten seasons of Stargate SG-1. It was great to watch it all as a family together, and we grew pretty attached to it. Unfortunately, the show was canceled, but the actors moved on to new projects. And one of them is now a new TV show partially written and produced by one of the main Stargate actors, Amanda Tapping.

Sanctuary started off as a pet project of Tapping's, and she got together some of the friends she had made in the media business over ten years to help her create a show that would air only on the internet. I caught the "webisodes" when they first aired a while back, and thoroughly enjoyed them, so I was thrilled to hear that they had become a big enough phenomenon that a TV network picked up the idea for an actual TV show. Well, the pilot of Sanctuary just premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel this Friday, and here are my thoughts.

To be honest, I missed the short and fast-paced storytelling style of the webisodes—they were short and snappy, and sure, there wasn't much depth then, but I was hooked by the characters and the story. The pilot makes up for this lack, but it goes a little too far in the opposite direction. There is a lot of backstory and information for this show, and they decided to cram most of it into the first episode; many plot twists and revelations abound, some of which probably should have been saved for later episodes. Most shows start of with something interesting and full of action to get you hooked, and then viewers are willing to delve into deep character issues later. Purring Piggy, who watched it with me, said it wasn't too bad, but I wonder if I would have been bored if I wasn't already familiar with the characters.

The basic story is this: there are monsters and mythical creatures living in our world, but because we would be frightened of them and seek to kill them, a Dr. Helen Magnus operates a secret facility called the Sanctuary to either keep them safe, or keep us safe from them. Along with her Sasquatch bodyguard/butler and her gun-toting daughter, she also recruits forensic psychiatrist Will Zimmerman to help her with the various creatures. She has dual goals of scientific study and offering understanding or protection.

Though I said the pilot was a little boring, I greatly enjoy the characters and hope that I get to see more of them. Amanda Tapping played a serious, conscientious military scientist called Sam Carter on Stargate, but her character here, Helen Magnus, is miles apart. Apart from the visual change, with Helen having long dark hair and dressing in an almost-period and very feminine style (the opposite of Carter's camo and jeans), the characters' personalities are very separate. Sam started Stargate quite young and enthusiastic, a little inexperienced in personal matters, and though she grew over the ten years her character never lost all of that. Helen, on the other hand, is 157 years old, head of a secret facility and a mother of a young adult, and Amanda Tapping brings a sense of class and maturity to her that Sam never had. Tapping herself is a new parent, and it's obvious in her portrayal—the emotion in her face when her daughter is threatened went straight to my heart, and was totally believable.

Another brilliant character is Helen's nemesis, John Druitt. People who have seen Stargate Atlantis should recognize the voice if not the face of Todd the Wraith. It's really nice to see Christopher Heyerdahl not under prosthetics, and his voice is amazing, like a cross between Christopher Lee and Alan Rickman. As a character on Sanctuary says, "He had an accent like [Helen's], only more evil." The character moves with a quiet, smooth grace, and he's the sort of evil that charms you before he kills you. We find out that he was engaged to Helen in the past, and it's not surprising given the chemistry between Heyerdahl and Tapping. There's this dance between them of still wanting to get closer and then backing away because of the conflict.

The other characters have a lot of potential, but nothing outstanding in this episode. Setting and plot are nice, especially the visuals for Helen's sanctuary—I love how they blend the old with the new in her dress and style, living as a modern woman but literally remembering the past. The visual effects are outstanding much of the time, but there's no overworking when it would be obvious no matter how good they were. All the actors do well against the green screen, and since acting covers a multitude of effects sins, the show looks very sharp.

All in all, the pilot wasn't as great as the webisodes, but I have great hope for the series when it continues in a shorter timeslot which will make them amp up the pace. We don't have cable, but the Sci-Fi Channel is offering the episodes streaming on www.hulu.com for a limited time—you can still watch the pilot for Sanctuary there, but it will be gone in a couple days.