Sanctuary 4x08 Recap/Review
Getting this out of the way since they're jumping the gun with the next new episode. I don't want to be TWO episodes behind on my reviews, so here we go. ~rubs hands together~ This was a fun one to write, but I kept stopping myself from transcribing all the lyrics to all the songs. ~g~
Opinions expressed in my review are not the... ~looks around~ Wait, there's no establishment. I'm rogue, baby! Until February, at least.
"Fugue"
04.08
Written by: Damian Kindler
Directed by: Damian Kindler
Songs by: Andrew Lockington and Damian Kindler
US Airdate: November 25, 2011
In short: Abby is attacked by an Abnormal that makes her unable to understand normal speech, so the Sanctuary team is forced to sing.
Recommended: Yes!
"Because her DNA is being overwritten, she can only perceive certain harmonic frequencies."
"Music?"
"Music!"
- Helen and Will discussing Abby's condition
This episode has been the subject of much discussion since the word "musical" was first uttered at a convention while Season 3 was airing. Some people didn't believe it, other people were flat-out determined to hate it. Many series have tried this, and the success rate is varied. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is probably the pinnacle, depending on who you talk to. I find it hard to talk about the Scrubs musical without cringing. Xena: Warrior Princess actually did it twice, once seriously and once... not so much. I was fearful, but I was willing to give the show a chance to prove itself.
The device used to get the Sanctuary crew to start crooning is a clever one: Abby is brought to the Sanctuary after a call results in her being attacked by an Abnormal. She begins transforming into a large, super-strong creature that tears up a guest room before Helen finally beats it into submission. Henry and Gavin (Abby's partner, introduced in Monsoon) search the alley and find a cocoon.
Meanwhile, when Declan begins playing music while watching over Abby, she wakes up and begins singing to them for help. Will and Declan are too confused to respond and report what happened to Helen. She deduces that the part of Abby's brain that processes auditory input is in overdrive and she can only respond to certain harmonic frequencies. Will is skeptical, but Helen sings to Abby and explains the situation in a way that she can understand. Abby unfortunately doesn't remember the details of the attack.
Henry brings the cocoon back to the Sanctuary. Helen examines it and declares it's probably red-list, similar to the larval pocket of a galvanic blood tick. The blood tick often partners with parasitic organisms, in this case one that can mutate human DNA. She doesn't think they would be found in an urban environment on accident, which means someone must have planted it there. Someone being Hollow Earth insurgents. Abby's transformation is a trial by fire for her; if she can't find a solution, insurgents will begin infesting humans in bulk to create a foothold for a Hollow Earth invasion of the surface.
Will sits with Abby and reveals that his mother used to sing to him when he was hurt or scared. After she died, singing became a source of sadness and pain for him, but he's willing to try for Abby. While he's singing, Gavin comes in and Will blows up at him for putting Abby in danger by being crappy at his job. Gavin accepts Will's vitriol and doesn't fight back, which is the first time I've actually kind of respected him. He knew that Will needed to blow up and was willing to play the villain.
Later, Abby wakes up and Will tries singing to her again. Unfortunately the creature has taken over. She attacks Will and, at the same time, pokes holes into his psyche. ("I'm the thing you fear the most/I'm here to give you a dose/of reality...I'm the sickness without a cure/I'm the loved one who disappears...the terror you feel.") After some more threatening ("It's gonna get bloody"), during which she fights off Will's attempts to sedate her, Helen and Declan arrive and sedate her.
Later, Henry takes his shift and offers Will a bit of comfort. Will reminds him of a song he and Erika sang to them in a Dublin pub ("The Parting Glass") and Henry quietly sings it to the sleeping Abby through the glass of the observation room. I really loved the emotion of the scene; Henry could have been watching his best friend's girl dying, and all he could do was sing to comfort her. He was obviously uncomfortable doing it (and if anyone else had been around he probably wouldn't have) but he was willing to do it. Maybe for Will more than for Abby.
Helen has to take a break from her research to deal with a conference call. Yusuf, Feliz, and some other Sanctuary heads have a crapload of problems for her to deal with. They not only talk over her, they interrupt her before she can get two words out. Helen loses her patience with them all and inadvertently breaks into song when she tells them what to do.
HELEN: "Risks in doing business/Since when is that hot news?/Have we ever shied away from things/Others wouldn't do?/If you think we've lost our way/Feel free to step aside/There's other pressing business/I'm afraid we're out of time."
She succeeds in shutting everyone up, and she sheepishly continues the conference call (presumably without rhyming). I really loved this moment. Helen's head is so fully consumed with Abby's problem that she breaks into song without even realizing it. She effectively sweeps all the current problems into a box and sets them aside for later (some of her solutions were basically to put a pin in it and they'd revisit when things calm down).
Helen is suffering under two deadlines: one, she has to save Will's girlfriend and apparently has no idea how to do it. When someone who has been studying transformations since 1885 doesn't have an answer, that means the answer is evasive. It doesn't mean she's not working hard enough (WILL). She also has to solve the current problem or risk an epidemic of humans suffering the same fate. Hollow Earth insurgents tossed her a grenade to see if she could defuse it. If she can't, grenades will fly all over the place. It's her job to do the juggling.
Later, Will falls asleep while watching Abby. He wakes to find her gone and follows her to the roof (although why the machinery that alerted Declan and Helen earlier didn't set off alarms this time, they never explain). Will confidently sings to Abby to tell her that he knows how she feels (due to Metamorphosis and, I think, Warriors). He admits that he thinks she's "the one" for him, but Abby admits she's too scared of not being herself and leaps from the parapet when she feels it taking control.
She transforms into the creature and survives the fall, but Helen, Declan and Henry arrive and stun it before it can get away. Helen does a scan and discovers half her cerebral cortex has been transformed. Will confronts Helen about her assertion that singing would help keep her normal. Helen says that it did work... for a time. Music apparently isn't working anymore and Will snaps at her.
WILL: "What is the point of this entire place if we can't save the people that-- oh. Magnus..."
Kudos to him for stopping himself before he made that huge slip. You do not argue with Helen Magnus about losing someone you love. Sure, Will has lost Clara. But Helen has lost everybody. Will once said that anyone would lose a name-dropping contest with her, but she'd also take home the gold in a heartbreak contest. Helen immediately goes back to the library and begins pouring through her father's journals.
One of the best scenes of the episode is when Helen pauses in frustration and exhaustion and imagines her father at her side, singing to her.
GREGORY: "I will search for light in the darkness/Though I stumble through shadow and shade/Oh, if you are with me/Of whom shall I be afraid?"
During the song, Helen has a flash of intuition and discovers something in the notes that can help her. She thanks her father for his help. Amanda Tapping deserves every award she's gotten and more, simply because of the raw emotion she puts into her scenes. A transcript for these two scenes would show a few lines of technobabble and an expression of gratitude. The pain, sorrow, exhaustion, and dedication of Helen Magnus comes through almost entirely from Amanda's posture, her eyes, and the way she's carrying herself.
The presence of Gregory Magnus could be construed as a cheat; having Jim Byrnes as a recurring character and not using him in a musical episode would be a crime. Instead, it showed where Helen draws her strength. The last scene drove home the fact that she's lost so much, but this scene revealed that those people are always with her. They give her strength when she's weary. As long as she remembers them and keeps them close to her, what can't she face? ("What can't we face when--" wait, that's from the Buffy musical. Never mind).
Helen presents her plan to Will, stating the risks right off the bat. That's never a good sign. Her father's theories about the origins of the most powerful Abnormals (vampires, HAPs, shape-shifters) have DNA that aggressively attempts to define itself. The cells invading Abby's body are determined to become something more. The only solution Helen can see is to harvest a larval segmented annelid and implant it into Abby's stomach wall to give the infestation something more malleable to hone in on. The annelid would be infected and change rapidly, but once it reached maturity it would violently leave her body.
Helen insists she can save Abby, but Will isn't ready to risk her life on it. He claims Helen is blinded by the possibility of creating a new life form that she's ignoring other possibilities. Helen calmly refutes his claim. She assures him that Abby is her only concern and, considering the fact that she's endangering a larval Abnormal annelid in order to save Abby kind of points toward that. She tells him that she wasn't asking for permission; she was explaining what was going to happen. Will levels a veiled threat at her and storms out.
Declan and Henry are recruited to take Will into protective custody, and he turns on Henry and Declan claiming he wouldn't be so trusting of Helen if it was Erika in danger. I wonder if Will forgot about the little thing five episodes back where Henry allowed Helen to play with his pregnant girlfriend's hormones to protect their baby. He didn't bitch about how she was just trying to protect the first HAP baby in ages. The situations aren't exactly similar, but I couldn't help thinking of it as Will threw his tantrum in the isolation room.
Helen and Declan go through with the procedure, and Will is released from containment by Gavin (who overheard the fight and Helen's order to keep Will out of her way). He arrives just in time to see the creature burst out of Abby well ahead of schedule, and he weakly sings as Helen and Declan try to save her. They manage to stabilize her, just barely, and Will and Helen see each other: even more separated than they've been for the rest of the episode.
Later, Will visits Abby to check on her. She says she's fine, and that their relationship is now 'disaster-proof.' Will tells her that he feels cursed, and anyone who gets close to him has a target on their back. Abby promises he won't lose her, and they kiss before he leaves so she can get some rest.
Once the dust has settled, Helen finds him at a window looking out over the city, and tells him she hopes he's not avoiding her. He thanks her for saving Abby, but she doesn't buy it. I don't know why... maybe the utter lack of sincerity when he says it. He admits that her idea worked and Abby was safe, but she should never have gone through with the plan.
WILL: "You've never met a compromise you didn't steamroll right through."
He's upset with her because she shut him down and went ahead with her own plans. She calls him a wonderful soldier and says he could run the Sanctuary network brilliantly because he is always willing to fight her.
HELEN: "I'm not too proud to admit I am very used to getting my own way. Sometimes to a fault. You never compromise, Will. And that's the man I hired to be my protégé."
WILL: "How am I doing?"
HELEN: "Honestly? I couldn't be more proud."
Will walks away at that, and almost - almost - seemed to take it as an insult. Helen doesn't stop him, turns toward the window, and apparently accepts it as a victory ("The battle's done, and we kind of won"... wait, that's Buffy too. Damn it!).
Will gets some leeway for jerkass behavior in this episode. He thought he was watching his girlfriend die, the girlfriend he had admitted to himself could be The One, and the mythical Helen Magnus didn't have an answer. That's bound to make anyone tetchy. But if Helen still thinks he's ready to run the Sanctuary after his little tantrum, she needs to take another vacation. Will is like the favorite child who keeps getting groomed to run a family business he has no real proclivity to.
Casting reasons aside, I think the fact that Kate got sent to Hollow Earth instead of Will is a true bellwether of how ready he is. If Will was really ready to run the Sanctuary network, he should have been the one to take such a huge project. Helen is wise enough to see the endgame, and she could see what Will was going to become. But he is not there yet, not by a long shot. Whether it was intentional or not, the episode proved that by having Henry and Helen both snapping at Gavin when he said "monster" instead of "Abnormal." Even in Helen's first song, she says, "We never use that word." In the last scene with Abby, Will referred to them as "monsters" as well.
After three and a half seasons, Will shouldn't still be the outsider of the group. He shouldn't have to be reminded that they work with Abnormals, not monsters. His best friends are a HAP and a Sasquatch. He doesn't seem to have fully made the jump to a Sanctuary agent, let alone the next in succession to run the whole place.
I sincerely hope that he takes this as a lesson. As harsh as it may seem, the Sanctuary is bigger than his relationship. Earlier this season, Helen was willing to shut down Tesla's energy node and effectively kill Henry. She didn't do it without emotion, but she was willing to push the button because it was the right thing to do. Two and a half centuries of life have taught her that sometimes the greater good is a painful, awful thing. Will doesn't have the luxury of those experiences, but maybe going through this will get him closer to the person he needs to be to one day take Helen's place. Fingers crossed!
Of course, it could be a moot point... Helen has already technically lived 116 more years after she recruited Will. There's a chance he'll never have to take her place because she'll just go on and on and on. That would be nice. Helen to infinity!
I really think this episode succeeded. They've established in the past that Abnormals don't necessarily communicate the way we do. In Fragments, they helped an Abnormal who only understood sign language. It's not so far out of the real of possibility that there's a creature who can only understand music. The songs felt authentic, especially with Will's reluctance. Helen was truly impressive in the way she rose to the occasion.
While the music really was impressive, I hope people don't dismiss the impact of the episode. Only about ten and a half minutes of the episode was musical; the rest was full of dramatic tension, great character moments, and amazing acting. After all this time we shouldn't be surprised by anything Amanda Tapping knocks out of the park. But at least half the emotion in this episode was played out in her eyes and in the way she reacted to something that was said. She's just an amazing actress.
So Sanctuary did a musical episode. All things considered, I'll take a musical episode over a clip show any day of the week. Clip shows are lazy, musical episodes show that someone at the show decided to take a risk. Not to mention the fact that all the actors had to agree they were going to sing. It probably wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world for them, but they came through with flying colors.
So they've had a musical episode, they did an episode from Will's POV, they did the suburbanite alternate universe, and they had the documentary crew episode. What awaits us in Season 5? Claymation Magnus? We haven't had a Groundhog Day episode yet, have we? Bring it on, show. After this, I have nothing but faith.
Originally written for Geek Speak Magazine
Opinions expressed in my review are not the... ~looks around~ Wait, there's no establishment. I'm rogue, baby! Until February, at least.
"Fugue"
04.08
Written by: Damian Kindler
Directed by: Damian Kindler
Songs by: Andrew Lockington and Damian Kindler
US Airdate: November 25, 2011
In short: Abby is attacked by an Abnormal that makes her unable to understand normal speech, so the Sanctuary team is forced to sing.
Recommended: Yes!
"Because her DNA is being overwritten, she can only perceive certain harmonic frequencies."
"Music?"
"Music!"
- Helen and Will discussing Abby's condition
This episode has been the subject of much discussion since the word "musical" was first uttered at a convention while Season 3 was airing. Some people didn't believe it, other people were flat-out determined to hate it. Many series have tried this, and the success rate is varied. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is probably the pinnacle, depending on who you talk to. I find it hard to talk about the Scrubs musical without cringing. Xena: Warrior Princess actually did it twice, once seriously and once... not so much. I was fearful, but I was willing to give the show a chance to prove itself.
The device used to get the Sanctuary crew to start crooning is a clever one: Abby is brought to the Sanctuary after a call results in her being attacked by an Abnormal. She begins transforming into a large, super-strong creature that tears up a guest room before Helen finally beats it into submission. Henry and Gavin (Abby's partner, introduced in Monsoon) search the alley and find a cocoon.
Meanwhile, when Declan begins playing music while watching over Abby, she wakes up and begins singing to them for help. Will and Declan are too confused to respond and report what happened to Helen. She deduces that the part of Abby's brain that processes auditory input is in overdrive and she can only respond to certain harmonic frequencies. Will is skeptical, but Helen sings to Abby and explains the situation in a way that she can understand. Abby unfortunately doesn't remember the details of the attack.
Henry brings the cocoon back to the Sanctuary. Helen examines it and declares it's probably red-list, similar to the larval pocket of a galvanic blood tick. The blood tick often partners with parasitic organisms, in this case one that can mutate human DNA. She doesn't think they would be found in an urban environment on accident, which means someone must have planted it there. Someone being Hollow Earth insurgents. Abby's transformation is a trial by fire for her; if she can't find a solution, insurgents will begin infesting humans in bulk to create a foothold for a Hollow Earth invasion of the surface.
Will sits with Abby and reveals that his mother used to sing to him when he was hurt or scared. After she died, singing became a source of sadness and pain for him, but he's willing to try for Abby. While he's singing, Gavin comes in and Will blows up at him for putting Abby in danger by being crappy at his job. Gavin accepts Will's vitriol and doesn't fight back, which is the first time I've actually kind of respected him. He knew that Will needed to blow up and was willing to play the villain.
Later, Abby wakes up and Will tries singing to her again. Unfortunately the creature has taken over. She attacks Will and, at the same time, pokes holes into his psyche. ("I'm the thing you fear the most/I'm here to give you a dose/of reality...I'm the sickness without a cure/I'm the loved one who disappears...the terror you feel.") After some more threatening ("It's gonna get bloody"), during which she fights off Will's attempts to sedate her, Helen and Declan arrive and sedate her.
Later, Henry takes his shift and offers Will a bit of comfort. Will reminds him of a song he and Erika sang to them in a Dublin pub ("The Parting Glass") and Henry quietly sings it to the sleeping Abby through the glass of the observation room. I really loved the emotion of the scene; Henry could have been watching his best friend's girl dying, and all he could do was sing to comfort her. He was obviously uncomfortable doing it (and if anyone else had been around he probably wouldn't have) but he was willing to do it. Maybe for Will more than for Abby.
Helen has to take a break from her research to deal with a conference call. Yusuf, Feliz, and some other Sanctuary heads have a crapload of problems for her to deal with. They not only talk over her, they interrupt her before she can get two words out. Helen loses her patience with them all and inadvertently breaks into song when she tells them what to do.
HELEN: "Risks in doing business/Since when is that hot news?/Have we ever shied away from things/Others wouldn't do?/If you think we've lost our way/Feel free to step aside/There's other pressing business/I'm afraid we're out of time."
She succeeds in shutting everyone up, and she sheepishly continues the conference call (presumably without rhyming). I really loved this moment. Helen's head is so fully consumed with Abby's problem that she breaks into song without even realizing it. She effectively sweeps all the current problems into a box and sets them aside for later (some of her solutions were basically to put a pin in it and they'd revisit when things calm down).
Helen is suffering under two deadlines: one, she has to save Will's girlfriend and apparently has no idea how to do it. When someone who has been studying transformations since 1885 doesn't have an answer, that means the answer is evasive. It doesn't mean she's not working hard enough (WILL). She also has to solve the current problem or risk an epidemic of humans suffering the same fate. Hollow Earth insurgents tossed her a grenade to see if she could defuse it. If she can't, grenades will fly all over the place. It's her job to do the juggling.
Later, Will falls asleep while watching Abby. He wakes to find her gone and follows her to the roof (although why the machinery that alerted Declan and Helen earlier didn't set off alarms this time, they never explain). Will confidently sings to Abby to tell her that he knows how she feels (due to Metamorphosis and, I think, Warriors). He admits that he thinks she's "the one" for him, but Abby admits she's too scared of not being herself and leaps from the parapet when she feels it taking control.
She transforms into the creature and survives the fall, but Helen, Declan and Henry arrive and stun it before it can get away. Helen does a scan and discovers half her cerebral cortex has been transformed. Will confronts Helen about her assertion that singing would help keep her normal. Helen says that it did work... for a time. Music apparently isn't working anymore and Will snaps at her.
WILL: "What is the point of this entire place if we can't save the people that-- oh. Magnus..."
Kudos to him for stopping himself before he made that huge slip. You do not argue with Helen Magnus about losing someone you love. Sure, Will has lost Clara. But Helen has lost everybody. Will once said that anyone would lose a name-dropping contest with her, but she'd also take home the gold in a heartbreak contest. Helen immediately goes back to the library and begins pouring through her father's journals.
One of the best scenes of the episode is when Helen pauses in frustration and exhaustion and imagines her father at her side, singing to her.
GREGORY: "I will search for light in the darkness/Though I stumble through shadow and shade/Oh, if you are with me/Of whom shall I be afraid?"
During the song, Helen has a flash of intuition and discovers something in the notes that can help her. She thanks her father for his help. Amanda Tapping deserves every award she's gotten and more, simply because of the raw emotion she puts into her scenes. A transcript for these two scenes would show a few lines of technobabble and an expression of gratitude. The pain, sorrow, exhaustion, and dedication of Helen Magnus comes through almost entirely from Amanda's posture, her eyes, and the way she's carrying herself.
The presence of Gregory Magnus could be construed as a cheat; having Jim Byrnes as a recurring character and not using him in a musical episode would be a crime. Instead, it showed where Helen draws her strength. The last scene drove home the fact that she's lost so much, but this scene revealed that those people are always with her. They give her strength when she's weary. As long as she remembers them and keeps them close to her, what can't she face? ("What can't we face when--" wait, that's from the Buffy musical. Never mind).
Helen presents her plan to Will, stating the risks right off the bat. That's never a good sign. Her father's theories about the origins of the most powerful Abnormals (vampires, HAPs, shape-shifters) have DNA that aggressively attempts to define itself. The cells invading Abby's body are determined to become something more. The only solution Helen can see is to harvest a larval segmented annelid and implant it into Abby's stomach wall to give the infestation something more malleable to hone in on. The annelid would be infected and change rapidly, but once it reached maturity it would violently leave her body.
Helen insists she can save Abby, but Will isn't ready to risk her life on it. He claims Helen is blinded by the possibility of creating a new life form that she's ignoring other possibilities. Helen calmly refutes his claim. She assures him that Abby is her only concern and, considering the fact that she's endangering a larval Abnormal annelid in order to save Abby kind of points toward that. She tells him that she wasn't asking for permission; she was explaining what was going to happen. Will levels a veiled threat at her and storms out.
Declan and Henry are recruited to take Will into protective custody, and he turns on Henry and Declan claiming he wouldn't be so trusting of Helen if it was Erika in danger. I wonder if Will forgot about the little thing five episodes back where Henry allowed Helen to play with his pregnant girlfriend's hormones to protect their baby. He didn't bitch about how she was just trying to protect the first HAP baby in ages. The situations aren't exactly similar, but I couldn't help thinking of it as Will threw his tantrum in the isolation room.
Helen and Declan go through with the procedure, and Will is released from containment by Gavin (who overheard the fight and Helen's order to keep Will out of her way). He arrives just in time to see the creature burst out of Abby well ahead of schedule, and he weakly sings as Helen and Declan try to save her. They manage to stabilize her, just barely, and Will and Helen see each other: even more separated than they've been for the rest of the episode.
Later, Will visits Abby to check on her. She says she's fine, and that their relationship is now 'disaster-proof.' Will tells her that he feels cursed, and anyone who gets close to him has a target on their back. Abby promises he won't lose her, and they kiss before he leaves so she can get some rest.
Once the dust has settled, Helen finds him at a window looking out over the city, and tells him she hopes he's not avoiding her. He thanks her for saving Abby, but she doesn't buy it. I don't know why... maybe the utter lack of sincerity when he says it. He admits that her idea worked and Abby was safe, but she should never have gone through with the plan.
WILL: "You've never met a compromise you didn't steamroll right through."
He's upset with her because she shut him down and went ahead with her own plans. She calls him a wonderful soldier and says he could run the Sanctuary network brilliantly because he is always willing to fight her.
HELEN: "I'm not too proud to admit I am very used to getting my own way. Sometimes to a fault. You never compromise, Will. And that's the man I hired to be my protégé."
WILL: "How am I doing?"
HELEN: "Honestly? I couldn't be more proud."
Will walks away at that, and almost - almost - seemed to take it as an insult. Helen doesn't stop him, turns toward the window, and apparently accepts it as a victory ("The battle's done, and we kind of won"... wait, that's Buffy too. Damn it!).
Will gets some leeway for jerkass behavior in this episode. He thought he was watching his girlfriend die, the girlfriend he had admitted to himself could be The One, and the mythical Helen Magnus didn't have an answer. That's bound to make anyone tetchy. But if Helen still thinks he's ready to run the Sanctuary after his little tantrum, she needs to take another vacation. Will is like the favorite child who keeps getting groomed to run a family business he has no real proclivity to.
Casting reasons aside, I think the fact that Kate got sent to Hollow Earth instead of Will is a true bellwether of how ready he is. If Will was really ready to run the Sanctuary network, he should have been the one to take such a huge project. Helen is wise enough to see the endgame, and she could see what Will was going to become. But he is not there yet, not by a long shot. Whether it was intentional or not, the episode proved that by having Henry and Helen both snapping at Gavin when he said "monster" instead of "Abnormal." Even in Helen's first song, she says, "We never use that word." In the last scene with Abby, Will referred to them as "monsters" as well.
After three and a half seasons, Will shouldn't still be the outsider of the group. He shouldn't have to be reminded that they work with Abnormals, not monsters. His best friends are a HAP and a Sasquatch. He doesn't seem to have fully made the jump to a Sanctuary agent, let alone the next in succession to run the whole place.
I sincerely hope that he takes this as a lesson. As harsh as it may seem, the Sanctuary is bigger than his relationship. Earlier this season, Helen was willing to shut down Tesla's energy node and effectively kill Henry. She didn't do it without emotion, but she was willing to push the button because it was the right thing to do. Two and a half centuries of life have taught her that sometimes the greater good is a painful, awful thing. Will doesn't have the luxury of those experiences, but maybe going through this will get him closer to the person he needs to be to one day take Helen's place. Fingers crossed!
Of course, it could be a moot point... Helen has already technically lived 116 more years after she recruited Will. There's a chance he'll never have to take her place because she'll just go on and on and on. That would be nice. Helen to infinity!
I really think this episode succeeded. They've established in the past that Abnormals don't necessarily communicate the way we do. In Fragments, they helped an Abnormal who only understood sign language. It's not so far out of the real of possibility that there's a creature who can only understand music. The songs felt authentic, especially with Will's reluctance. Helen was truly impressive in the way she rose to the occasion.
While the music really was impressive, I hope people don't dismiss the impact of the episode. Only about ten and a half minutes of the episode was musical; the rest was full of dramatic tension, great character moments, and amazing acting. After all this time we shouldn't be surprised by anything Amanda Tapping knocks out of the park. But at least half the emotion in this episode was played out in her eyes and in the way she reacted to something that was said. She's just an amazing actress.
So Sanctuary did a musical episode. All things considered, I'll take a musical episode over a clip show any day of the week. Clip shows are lazy, musical episodes show that someone at the show decided to take a risk. Not to mention the fact that all the actors had to agree they were going to sing. It probably wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world for them, but they came through with flying colors.
So they've had a musical episode, they did an episode from Will's POV, they did the suburbanite alternate universe, and they had the documentary crew episode. What awaits us in Season 5? Claymation Magnus? We haven't had a Groundhog Day episode yet, have we? Bring it on, show. After this, I have nothing but faith.
Originally written for Geek Speak Magazine