But I Wanna Esplode! Helix 1x03 274

Previously on Helix! An unknown mutation zombie disease, going with most of the zombie/slash/outbreak tropes so far, including the one where anyone who says "People have to know what's going on up here" dies. So that's cheerful!

No jaunty music when we come back from the very brief previouslies, and mostly they're brief because the first two episodes were fairly concise and general to establishing setting, tone, and characters. Very minimalist, to go with the first couple of shots of water dripping from the tap. Very serene, in a way, water dripping is often used to indicate serenity, except it also serves to contrast Julia's experience a moment ago which was anything but. Julia's unconscious on the floor, as it turns out, or semi-conscious when Alan gets to her. She claims she passed out while taking a shower for standard decontamination procedures, and from her behavior it's hard to say whether or not she consciously is putting it out of her mind, unconsciously blocking it because it was traumatic, or lying through her teeth because it was traumatic and she doesn't want to think about the possibility of having been exposed to the black goo of doom. We do get very rapid cut flashbacks,  but that could still be subconscious mind. In any case, Alan will walk her back to her quarters because it's not safe to be out there alone. He's not wrong, either.

So Very Alive And Full Of Goo Helix 1x02 Vector

Day 2 of zombie outbreak hell starts with interviews with the people locked in the room with Vector!Peter. Apparently he held them down and vomited black bile into their mouths. Ew. And worse than that, there are three more who ran after the attack. Peter's behavior suggests that the goal may not necessarily be something conscious (things are of course happening that we'll find out about later) but a drive by the virus to spread itself in this case by bodily fluid contact, and again I say Ew. Buuuut I'm also getting ahead of myself.

So Very Alive And Full Of Goo Helix 1x02 Vector

Day 2 of zombie outbreak hell starts with interviews with the people locked in the room with Vector!Peter. Apparently he held them down and vomited black bile into their mouths. Ew. And worse than that, there are three more who ran after the attack. Peter's behavior suggests that the goal may not necessarily be something conscious (things are of course happening that we'll find out about later) but a drive by the virus to spread itself in this case by bodily fluid contact, and again I say Ew. Buuuut I'm also getting ahead of myself.

No GIR That's Bad Helix - 1x01 Pilot

So, we open with whiteness, because that's not an overarching motif or anything, the whiteness that swallows everything. It's two days before The Event. And then we have some zombie horror staple, people in clean suits walking down a corridor while a computer says very loudly over the very loud machine humming, Contamination! Contamination! Yes, we get it, computer, we get it, shut up. This is why all alarms of this type should come with an Okay-We-All-Know-Noise-Off switch. This is intercut with flashes of Peter all black-bloodied up, I'm having fond memories of X-Files and the oil slick of doom. Different corridor! The flashbacks become more clear, Peter was running, dragged into this room, and now we have something that's going to become a staple of Helix as we know it, the juxtaposition of jaunty pleasant music and horror. We have a horrific scene playing out mute before our eyes, but when I say mute I mean very little sound is coming from the scene itself especially when compared to the machine humming and the loudass Glados knockoff a second or three ago, but rather the sounds are coming from the jaunty fun soundtrack playing over the background. I've got a pair of brand new roller-skates, do you know the way to San Jose, etc. Though only one of those will become a set of arc words. Well, I'm unnerved, as no doubt they meant me to be, how about you?

The State of the Blog Awakens

As promised, the state of the blog post-Haven, post-holidays, and post-sleeping like we're teaching ourselves to hibernate.

What we're never doing again: That. We are never, ever working to weekly deadline again. It was fun while it lasted, but we're frankly not getting any younger, and we're rapidly becoming the sort of stodgy 30-somethings who want our weekends back for housework. And TV marathons. And sleep. Shut up. Besides, we want to try to bring you better quality analysis, including a lot of the technical aspects that we know we let drop in recent posts in an effort to ensure everything got out on time.

What we'll be replacing live +24-blogging with: Anna is going to start up with The Librarians s1 & s2; Kitty will tackle Helix which has a limited run of two seasons. We'll aim to alternate weeks starting the middle to end of March, after we build up some backlog, so that we have time to continue writing at a reasonably leisurely pace.

The other great thing about this is that we're going to post during any currently-running show's hiatus, which will allow us to evaluate each ep in light of the larger whole of each season. With the move toward a significantly more serialized form of storytelling on TV, this is honestly the best way to continue giving you recaplyses without second-guessing every single week's developments. Sometimes this is fun! A lot of the time it leads to disappointment.

As a result, we're also considering branching out some: we've had at least one request for Jessica Jones, which will have to wait for us to finish watching before we make a decision yea or nay. (Hopefully this week/end!) There's a couple other shows we might do, but frankly we think you'll have plenty to keep you busy reading from now until the next time our lineup changes.