Hex Season 1



Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a big hit in England, so I suppose it was inevitable that a British channel would come up with a show aimed at all those Buffy watchers who no longer have a slayer to watch. Enter Hex, which aired it's first five episodes late last year on Sky One.


"And now I'm off to Cash in the Attic!"

The main character is Cassie Hughes (Christina Cole), a teenage girl going to a remote boarding school. Her roommate Thelma (Jemima Rooper) is a lesbian who is not so secretly in love with her, and she has a thing for hunky Troy (Joseph Morgan). One day Cassie finds an antique vase while sneaking a smoke in an abandoned carriage house on the school's grounds. The vase is some sort of supernatural artifact, and it awakens telekinetic powers in Cassie. It turns out that Cassie is instrumental in the plans of Azazeal (Michael Fassbender), a fallen angel. Azazeal manipulates events so that Thelma willingly sacrifices herself to save Cassie, then proceeds to try to seduce Cassie for reasons that only become clear in the fifth episode.

From the first episode you'd probably get the impression that Hex will be defined by sex. In the first episode all the students and even the teachers at the school talk about sex in a very frank manner. Once Thelma is killed, however, the series takes a turn for the more serious. In fact Hex is largely defined by wild changes in tone and direction. I'm not sure if writer Lucy Watkins knew what she was getting into when she decided to write a supernatural teen soap.


Did Thelma die on her way to a costume party, dressed as Neil Gaiman's Death?

Perhaps the most obvious example is Thelma. After she is murdered (or does she commit suicide by drowning?) she returns as a ghost. What's strange is that the show never establishes any consistent rules for how being a ghost works. Sometimes it seems like only Cassie can see Thelma, yet other times Thelma hides when other people are around and at one point she uses a phone to call a "help line." Yet other times she sits and eats bags of chips in crowded rooms. Are they ghost chips? No, she gets them out of a vending machine. A ghost vending machine? Apparently not. Thelma doesn't seem to have any problem manipulating physical objects, including the change she puts in the vending machine, but she says a couple of times that she can't touch Cassie. It would be nice to know why that is. The exact powers and motives of Azazeal also remain fuzzy.

There's also a certain choppiness to the narrative. After the first episode sets up Cassie's powers and Thelma being a ghost, the second episode picks up weeks later with Cassie apparently used to having run-ins Azazeal's minions, though it's not clear who they are. Episode 3 is mostly about Troy and Cassie finally meeting cute. In episode 4 Azazael "possesses" Cassie, though this mostly means she becomes "a total whore", which seems less like possession and more like a spell that removed her inhibitions. In the last episode the show finally begins to live up the potential of the premise with some genuinely creepy scenes. Not really creepy in the darkness and cobwebs way, but creepy in that intellectual way The Wicker Man was creepy.


Guess which version of Cassie this is.

The real reason to watch Hex is the cast. Jemima Cooper is great fun as Thelma, and Christina Cole brings more depth to the part of Cassie than I would have expected. Cole's transformation into slut-tastic Cassie is shocking because she plays both version of Cassie so well. I also really enjoyed Colin Salmon as the headmaster of the school. He doesn't get many scenes, but he makes the most of the ones he has.

Hex was picked up for a second season that's airing in Britain right now. It looks like the first season must have been successful because the new episodes look like they have more money for cast, locations and effects. I hope the new episodes can bring a stronger narrative to the series as well.


Why does England in 2004 look like America in 1984?

Posted: Sun - November 6, 2005 at      

©