Vixen arrives in England just in time to investigate a series of mysterious deaths at the Convent of Sisters of the Holy Ghost, eventually exposing the Mother Superior as a fiendish (and very male) vampire in disguise. Along the way, she and Sister Bernadette join forces in what is to become one of the great partnerships in TV history.
Not bothering to waste time with an origin story, the series gets off to a rapid start, thrusting our heroine into mortal combat with the Undead even before the opening credits have run. Viewers are given only a few tantalizing hints as to Vixen's enigmatic past, some of which later prove to be extremely misleading. (The show's creators, the esteemed Slayer Staff, claim to have carefully worked out Vix's entire backstory in advance, but I have my doubts; how come Vix refers here to her years of martial arts training in "far-off Cathay" when later episodes clearly place her younger self in Japan, not China? And why is it she can read Latin here, but seems to mysteriously lose this ability in later episodes, presumably to give Sister Bernadette something useful to do?)
Still and all, a good beginning.
Who is responsible for a ghastly series of full-moon murders? The struggling playwright? The haughty contessa? The sinister Italian physician? The kindly beggar woman? Vix reveals deductive acumen to rival her gymnastic skills as she exposes the homicidal lycanthrope among the guests at Queen Elizabeth's surprise birthday party.
Okay, the true identity of the concealed werewolf is so obvious that she might as well have a pentagram tattooed on her wrinkled forehead, but this is still a fun episode, with many creepy scenes of the snarling man-beast stalking its victims through the foggy streets of old London town. This episode also marks the first use of Full Earth's notorious All-Purpose Creature Armature. Here it stands in for the Wolf of Westminster in all its hirsute glory, but foam-rubber facelifts would later transform the APCA into such diverse (and economical) apparitions as the Grim Golem of Glastonbury and the demon Abraxodoceous.
Omens of Things to Come: Look carefully during the first funeral scene and you'll see that the service is being performed by none other than Father Diavolo himself, who would soon be seen again in far more incriminating circumstances.
Literary Alert! The title of this episode is lifted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: "now the hungry lion roars, now the wolf behowls the moon." (Who says fantasy isn't educational?)
Lured to the secluded country estate of Lord Raptor, a celebrated big game hunter, Vix soon finds herself the quarry in the jaded aristocrat's latest blood sport. A gripping chase through foggy moors ensues, with Raptor's bloodhounds literally chomping at Vixen's leather-shod heels, but she eventually turns the tables on her relentless foe, so that she ultimately hunts the hunter of the hunter! (I think I've got that right.)
Just about every action-adventure series gets around to ripping off "The Most Dangerous Game" eventually, but it was a bit alarming that TITAoVtS was falling back on the old hunting-humans chestnut by only its third episode! Were the Slayer Staff running out of ideas already? Thankfully, this proved not to be the case, but one could be forgiven for fearing otherwise at this point.
On its own terms, "Hunter" is a briskly paced, action-filled episode that gave Glory plenty of opportunities to show off her Olympics-caliber gymnastics skill. Interestingly, this is also the first ep to feature no overtly supernatural elements, although Lord Raptor is given a line or two about devil worship, no doubt to provide the episode a fig leaf of diabolism.
As for Sister Bernadette, Anne-Marie Campbell barely appears in this episode, showing up only briefly in the very first and last scenes. Her low profile here lends credence to the longstanding rumor that the Slayer Staff were initially unsure whether Vixen needed a sidekick at all, and even considered killing the character off! (Hard to imagine now, I know.)
Anachronism Alert! A stuffed gorilla is displayed prominently in Raptor's trophy room, despite the fact that the African gorilla was completely unknown to Europeans of the era. Oh well, what's a few centuries of zoological science between friends?
Vix takes the high road, and Sister Bernie takes the low road, but death—in the form of a notably gnawed-on corpse—gets to Scotland before either of them. The locals blame the legendary Loch Ness monster, of course, but Vixen soon pins the blame on a cannibalistic merman, recently escaped from a traveling carnival, who nearly makes a late-night snack of a skinnydipping Sister Bernadette before Vix feeds the greedy fish-man to the real Nessie.
The Musgrave Range in central Australia doubled (with mixed results) for the Scottish Highlands this time around, but much of the episode was actually shot in a leaky five-hundred-gallon tank located in a dank, chilly warehouse in Melbourne. Neither Glory nor Anne-Marie required lessons in Method acting to produce realistic-looking goosebumps during the episode's many aquatic scenes. One shot in particular, in which Vix and Sister Bernie's flimsy rowboat is capsized by a submerged menace from below, required so many takes that both stars were virtually water-logged by the end of the fourteen-hour working day. Guest-star Colin Piscatore (playing the voracious gill-man) fared even worse, nearly drowning when the hydraulically operated Nessie model went haywire and refused to release Piscatore from its mechanical jaws after diving back beneath the surface of the mock Loch. "Bloody hell!" he is reported to have hollered after being extricated (and none too soon) from the malfunctioning monster. "This is the twenty-first century, for chrissakes! Where's the goddamn CGI?"
In the end, "What Lurks" ran two days over schedule and nearly $25,000 over budget, inspiring the beleaguered Slayer Staff to vow, "No more sea monsters—ever!"
Or at least for awhile. (See "Sigh of the Selkie.")
When the aging Duke of Bleeksmore dies under mysterious circumstances, leaving his entire estate to his glamorous young wife, Vixen suspects foul play. At first, Vix suspects that the Duchess, who is seldom seen before sunset, is a vampire or succubus, but the truth proves far more alarming: Lilith Kane is the high priestess of a satanic coven who ultimate goal is nothing less than the total conquest of Europe! Already the Duchess has bribed, blackmailed, and seduced many prominent nobles into joining her cult, including trusted members of Queen Elizabeth's own court.
Our heroine almost ends up as a human sacrifice at a Black Mass, presided over by an unfrocked priest named Father Diavolo, before turning the tables on Lilith and her acolytes, and setting fire to Bleeksmore Manor with one of the Duchess's own monogrammed branding irons. Both Lilith and Diavolo perish in the resulting conflagration—or so we are led to believe.
Every great hero needs a worthy foe, and, her apparent fiery death notwithstanding, Lilith Kane rapidly became Vixen's number one enemy. Irreverent, sardonic, and deliciously decadent, the Duchess is the antithesis of the Slayer's somber and crusading persona, yet their mutual antagonism is leavened by a grudging respect (and perhaps even an unspoken attraction) between them. Recognizing a good thing when they saw one, the Slayer Staff wasted no time bringing the Duchess back from the dead . . . again and again and again.
Romy Blackburn is clearly having a ball playing Lilith, chewing up the scenery, both dungeons and drawing rooms alike, and firing off one outrageously evil one-liner after another. Although her, umm, eye-catching costume is brazenly lifted from Emma Peel's "Queen of Sin" outfit from that old Avengers episode, Romy makes the Duchess a memorable character in her own right.
Previously glimpsed in "Behowl the Moon," Father Diavolo is revealed in this episode to be Lilith's most reliable henchman and sidekick. Like his unholy mistress, he can be counted on to die horribly at the end of every episode in which he appears, yet he keeps coming back, forever at the side of the Duchess herself. In a perhaps overly candid moment, Anne-Marie Campbell once remarked that actor Dylan MacNee was "ideally" suited to play the sniveling, venal ex-priest, but let's hope that was just a bit of sidekick rivalry speaking. One hates to think that MacNee would ever willingly ally himself with the Dark Forces . . .
Our heroine hits the high seas in search of a pair of curvaceous female pirates who have accidentally looted a priceless (and very dangerous) mystic artifact from a captured Spanish galleon. Unfortunately, an Undead privateer named Cap'n Cadaver is also after the Inquisition's spoils, putting him on a collision course with a certain seagoing Slayer.
Avast, ye maties! I confess, I'm a sucker for a good pirate story. Heck, I even wrote a young-adult pirate novel once (now woefully out-of-print), so I devoured this episode as readily as a buccaneer downs his daily ration of rum, despite a few glaring historical inaccuracies.
For instance: Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the distaff pirates Vix tracks down (and eventually joins force with), are genuine historical figures, but they actually plied their swashbuckling trade in the early eighteenth century, a bit after Vixen's time. Both women are said to have posed as men for much of their careers, which suggests that they probably weren't costumed nearly as provocatively (read: skimpily) as their TV reincarnations, who favor bare midriffs, tight trousers, and plenty of cleavage. Cap'n Cadaver, on the other hand, is strictly a product of the Slayer Staff's bloodthirsty imaginations.
If our favorite Slayer occasionally seems to resemble Geena Davis during the climatic sea battle, that may be because the producers frugally and shamelessly incorporated several minutes of footage from Cutthroat Island into the finished episode. Granted, they were probably safe in assuming that not many viewers (except us diehard pirate aficionados) had ever seen those shots before. . . .
Intent on ferreting out the last vestiges of the late Duchess's cult, Vixen travels to Rome in the guise of Lilith Kane herself. Little does she know that (gasp!) the Duchess is still alive, and impersonating Vixen as part of an elaborate scheme to steal the forbidden Book of the Damned from the vaults of the Vatican. Confusion, misunderstandings, and many titillating costume changes ensue.
Silly, but fun. The coincidence-packed plot doesn't hold up to close examination (why exactly do Vixen and Lilith have to dress up as each other?), but it's undeniably amusing to watch Glory and Romy do each other's shtick. The general consensus among Vixites is that Romy did Glory better than Glory did Romy, but then again, soap-opera veteran Romy does have the edge when it comes to acting experience.
It's also unclear why Truxton the Troll is lurking beneath St. Peter's Cathedral (or computer-generated facsimile thereof), but at least it gives the producers a chance to get yet more mileage out of the good old APCA, while guaranteeing a bit of action amidst all the mistaken identity nonsense.
Me, I'm waiting for the episode where Sister Bernie and Father Diavolo have to change places. . . .
An explosion in an alchemist's lab renders Vixen sightless, and not even Sister Bernadette can predict if and when the blindness will pass. This seeming handicap proves a boon, however, when the Goddess Kali dispatches an invisible assassin to destroy the Slayer and her sidekick. Forced to rely on her other senses, the blinded heroine makes short work of the transparent thuggee, ultimately running him through with her blind man's cane. (Eventually, of course, Sister Bernie's secret herbal treatments—or maybe her impassioned prayers—restore Vixen's sight. After all, we viewers could hardly been deprived of the heart-stopping sight of Glory McArdle's lambent amber orbs forever!)
The use of an invisible antagonist meant that the All-Purpose Creature Armature got a much-needed break this week, with Full Earth's SFX team resorting to a combination of computer-processed opticals and old-fashioned trickery to pull off a variety of "invisibility" effects. They do a pretty good job, given the financial and time restraints of episodic television, but if you look closely you can see the wires supporting the spiked mace that seems to float up behind Vixen of its own volition, as though grasped by an unseen hand. Having the invisible man take refuge inside a complete suit of armor also kept the SFX budget down, except for those shots where the armor's visor is lifted, revealing a seemingly empty helmet. (Naturally, this doesn't stop Vixen from using hot coals to heat the metal of the armor to such a temperature that the see-through assassin is forced to abandon his protective sheathing of steel.)
Meanwhile, despite her best efforts, Gloria herself was reportedly unable to maintain the fixed, sightless stare the script required, forcing director Dave Mack to hide the star's overly active orbs behind a strip of all-concealing linen, effectively rendering the actress as blind as the character she was playing. Reliable sources testify that the blindfolded star was something of a menace on the set, eventually taking out two stuntpersons and a $500 klieg light with her flailing cane.
Good thing Vix got her sight back, before the entire cast ended up in the hospital!
Akira Okada, a valiant Japanese Samurai, arrives in London in search of the shape-changing ninja who slew his family. Thanks to the sort of misunderstanding that always seems to occur when two heroes meet each for the first time, he ends up crossing swords with Vixen for two acts, before Slayer and Samurai team up to stop the nefarious ninja from unleashing the Black Death upon the city. Along the way, we also learn much more about Vix's previously murky past.
At long last, the Slayer Staff starts filling us in on the Slayer's early years in the Far East, including the fascinating tidbit that her real name is Koroshiya. Mind you, as mentioned earlier, some of these new revelations don't mesh exactly with what we were told back in Episode 1, but I guess a super-heroine is entitled to change her backstory along with her mind.
"Ninja Nightmare" is also a thinly-disguised pilot for a spin-off series about a out-of-place samurai abroad in Merrie Olde England, which explains the surprising amount of screen time Okada gets, occasionally at Vix's expense, and why the nameless ninja gets away in the end. So far, nothing definite has come of this particular trial balloon, but who knows? If Gloria McArdle remains MIA much longer, we may well end watching the weekly exploits of Akira Okada, Samurai of London.
It just wouldn't be the same, though.
Seems Sir William Webster, a successful and recently knighted entrepreneur, promised the Dark Forces his firstborn child in exchange for worldly wealth and fame. Now the demon Abraxodoceous has come to collect, and Webster, having experienced a change of heart, begs Vixen to help him keep six-year-old Rebecca from the demon's foul clutches. What's worse, Webster himself dies early on, sticking the manifestly unmaternal Vix with both a kid and a curse to deal with. Needless to say, our heroine soon finds dealing with the demon infinitely preferable to tending to a spoiled six-year-old. . . .
Look, if we wanted to see bratty kids cutting up, we could tune into any number of interchangeable family sitcoms. Fans want to see Vix kicking demon butt, not mawkishly bonding with a weepy orphan, which may explain why "Mother for a Day" is nobody's favorite episode.
It doesn't help, of course, that lil' Rebecca, played by the odious Molsen twins, is more annoying than ingratiating, although one can amuse oneself by trying to figure out which of the twins is the worst actress. No easy task! From what I could tell, Wendy Molsen appears to specialize in smart-aleck remarks, while sister Cindy handles the more saccharine moments, so I suppose it's ultimately a matter of taste.
According to Anne-Marie Campbell, the twins were holy terrors on the set as well, throwing tantrums, breaking props, and almost accomplishing what Vixen herself has never been able to do: send the All-Purpose Creature Armature to the junkyard for good. (Apparently, Cindy and Wendy mistook it for a climbing gym.)
By the end of the episode, Vix has sworn off motherhood forever. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Gloria McArdle felt much the same.
Literary Plagiarism Alert! Sister Bernadette's withering observation that "to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness" is shamelessly lifted from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. No surprise, it's the best and funniest line in the episode.
Is the ghost of Anne Boleyn really haunting the Tower of London, or are her shocking manifestations just part of a machiavellian plot to steal the Crown Jewels? To uncover the truth, Vixen must arrange to get herself arrested and confined to the Tower, cut off from everyone except "spiritual advisor" Sister Bernadette. No surprise, the so-called "Ghost" turns out to be yet another pawn of the ever-scheming Lilith Kane, but Vix manages to escape her rat-infested cell in time to keep the Crown Jewels out of the Duchess's avaricious grip. Oh yeah, she also gets a full pardon in the end.
One of the things I like most about TITAoVtS is that you can never tell whether the creature of the week is a genuinely supernatural phenomenon or just a cunning hoax. Other, more predictable shows usually choose one strategy and stick to it with numbing regularity, but TITAoVtS always keeps you guessing.
Strange but true: on the day of filming, the bird wrangler, who was supposed to deliver feathered stand-ins for the Tower's celebrated ravens, was nowhere to be found. Undaunted, the resourceful Slayer Staff threw breadcrumbs all around the set, attracting a sizable supply of pigeons, then painted the poor birdies black! (Before PETA organizes a boycott, let me assure you that the paint was both non-toxic and water soluble!)
And, oh yes, Lilith dies again, this time by taking a fatal plunge from the top of the Tower to the murky Thames below. Was this at last the end of the despicable Duchess?
A mystic mirror reveals a view of a parallel England where the Slayer is an exotic Asian woman whose fighting style resembles our Vixen's to an astonishing degree. Watching this other Ninja Vampire Hunter defeat a horde of fearsome nosferatu provides the real Vixen with the key to vanquishing a similar horde in her own reality.
TV producers are a notoriously frugal lot, so it's no surprise that the Slayer Staff eventually found a way to get some cinematic mileage out of the original Ninja Vampire Hunter pilot starring Doreen Liu. (If you look closely, you can also spot a pre-Vixen Glory McArdle lurking in the background of some of the crowd scenes, although most of Glory's footage has been surgically excised to avoid confusing the casual viewer too much. Watch for the striking, red-haired peasant wench grappling with the undead blacksmith in the tavern scene.)
At this point, it's hard to imagine anyone but Glory playing our favorite Elizabethan scourge of evil, yet "Veil" does give us an intriguing, if undeniably offputting, peek at What Might Have Been. In the end, the effect is not unlike watching one of those old Batman episodes in which Catwoman is played by someone besides Julie Newmar: interesting, but not entirely satisfying.
(Internet rumors persist that Doreen Liu might someday make a genuine guest-appearance on the show, so that the two Vixens could actually fight side-by-side, but I'll believe it when I see it. Sounds more like fannish wishful thinking to me.)
Who needs plastic surgery when you have sorcery? At the Duchess's behest, Father Diavolo uses his black arts to transform Lilith into the Queen's identical twin (coyly referred to in the script as "Queen Elizabeth the Second"). When the imposter replaces the real Queen upon the throne, our heroines find themselves condemned as traitors and outlaws. While Sister Bernie cools her heels in the Tower, a fugitive Vix must rescue the real Elizabeth Regina before Lilith betrays England to the Spanish Armada. (Part One of Two.)
Gertrude Wallaby, the grande dame of Australian soap operas, gets a field day in this ambitious two-part episode, wherein she is called upon to play both the real Elizabeth and the disguised Duchess. A memorable comic high point is achieved when the bogus queen blows her cover by making a shameless pass at Vixen herself, something the actual Virgin Queen would never do (or so we assume). Certainly, any doubts Vixen may have had about what was going on were thoroughly dispelled by this ill-judged (if perfectly understandable) lapse on Lilith's part.
Devout Romy Blackburn fans were probably disappointed by her unavoidable lack of screen time this go-round, but otherwise it's hard to complain about this entertaining and ingenious episode. The cliffhanger ending, with the Armada approaching even as Sister Bernie faces the headman's axe, made for a long and suspenseful week as Vixites throughout the country waited avidly to find out what would happen next.
Trivia alert! As it happens, this is the only episode featuring Lilith Kane in which the Duchess doesn't appear to meet an untimely demise at the end—if only because her inevitably fatal comeuppance was postponed until next week's show!
While Sister Bernie stages a daring escape from the Tower, Vix must overcome a hulking Golem to rescue the real Queen. But can the Slayer and the monarch get back to Buckingham Palace before the treacherous Duchess spells England's doom?
One suspects that this particular adventure was stretched out over two episodes in order to get maximum value out of Full Earth's impressively computer-generated Armada, even if the final battle shipboard battle between Vixen and the counterfeit queen was filmed in that now-familiar 500-gallon tank in Melbourne.
The infamous All-Purpose Creature Armature gets another workout, too, this time providing support for the stony Golem that (briefly) stands between Vixen and the Queen. Too bad Vix doesn't realize that she's fighting the same monstrous skeleton show after show; otherwise she'd probably make sure the darn thing was reduced to ashes before leaving another vanquished monster to rot upon blood-soaked cobblestones or a misty mire.
To be honest, Part Two of this saga is not quite as fun as the preceding installment, mainly because the mistaken identity/evil Queen angle was pretty much milked for all it was worth in Part One. Still, it's undeniably satisfying to see Lilith revert to her usual seductive self just in time for the big finish, even if the Duchess ultimately goes to a watery grave . . . or does she?
Count Wolfgang von Blitzkrieg, a charmingly dissolute Prussian nobleman (complete with a highly decorative dueling scar) arrives as a special envoy to the court of Queen Elizabeth. Despite herself, Vixen finds herself attracted to the handsome young rake, only to discover that his public vices hide an even greater duplicity. To pay off his enormous gambling debts, Wolfie plans to steal top-secret military secrets from the British crown and sell them to the highest bidder. Not only that, his dueling scar is a fake!
Overcoming her brief infatuation, or so it seems, the Slayer recovers the precious papers, but "accidentally" allows Wolf to escape more or less unscathed, albeit with a genuine scar upon his cheek. Vix claims she did her best to apprehend the young scoundrel, but Sister Bernie, frankly, has her doubts.
The Slayer Staff originally intended the roguish Count to be a recurring villain and/or love interest for Vixen, providing an overtly heterosexual counterpoint to the subtextual undercurrents running through the Lilith Kane episodes. Unfortunately, any hopes for a long-running battle of the sexes between Wolfgang and the Slayer were dashed by the palpable lack of chemistry between Gloria McArdle and Bruno Carlino, a talent-impaired former underwear model, whose week-long stint on the series is remembered with loathing by just about every member of the cast and crew.
Asked at SlayerCon 2000 why the character of Wolfgang had never returned, McArdle diplomatically mumbled something about "creative differences" and "scheduling conflicts." In fact, evil rumors paint an unflattering picture of spoiled, temperamental boy toy who showed up late every morning, fumbled his lines, misread cue cards, and didn't even seem to be quite clear on which TV show he was guesting. (Outtakes exist of him addressing Vixen as "Buffy," "Xena," and even "Zorro.")
In retrospect, Anne-Marie Campbell had the easiest time of it filming this episode. Those dirty looks that Sister Bernadette keeps giving Wolfgang probably required little or no acting at all!
(Trivia alert: the original script for this episode, which was posted on the web, had the count plotting to steal the Crown Jewels instead of classified documents. Wisely, someone on the Slayer Staff remembered "The Bloody Tower," and realized that two jewel-heist episodes would have been one too many.)
Following a frenzied battle with an unusually hard-to-slay vampire, an exhausted Vixen collapses in a moonlit glen on Midsummer's Eve, only to wake in the Land of Faerie, where she encounters Robin Goodfellow, a.k.a. Puck, who explains that he has recruited her to save Oberon's fairy kingdom from a coup d'etat organized by the scheming yet seductive Titania (who bears a suspicious resemblance to the Duchess). Thanks to a powerful love potion, Vix briefly falls under the spell of Lilith . . . I mean, Titania . . . but snaps out of it in time to cut a swath through hordes of pointy-eared extras and foil the Fairy Queen's diabolical plot, before waking to find herself back in the real world again. It was all just a dream—or was it?
Even today, months after this episode first aired, you can still get a decent flame war going on the internet regarding just how much of "Midsummer" actually happened. Was this all just an elaborate dream sequence, or did our favorite Slayer really go traipsing through Faerie? The cast and crew have only fanned the flames of the debate by issuing contradictory explanations in various interviews and public appearances. Glory herself insists that the whole thing was just a goofy lark, taking place entirely in Vixen's fevered imagination, but Romy Blackburn (who, of course, plays Titania) maintains that the Fairy Queen was as real as any other character, and fully capable of making as many return appearances as the fans will (hint! hint!) demand. The screenwriter, an ink-stained wretch named Bryan Gregory Stephenson, has been no help at all, telling Camrado! that the (un) reality of the episode is up to each individual viewer to determine. A diplomatic, if weasely, response.
Still, let's face facts. This whole episode is just an excuse to finally get Glory and Romy into each other's arms, albeit with a layer of plausible deniability. As played by Blackburn, Titania is just the Duchess decked out in chartreuse greasepaint and sparkles. But is anybody complaining?
Meanwhile, the producers once again displayed their budgetary genius by frugally leasing a bushel of pointed ear prosthetics from the Star Trek folks, rather than commissioning their own from scratch. So what if the armies of Faerie looked like they had just beamed in from the Romulan Empire? Did I mention that Romy and Glory had a love scene?
A chance encounter with Sister Bernadette's childhood sweetheart, now the priest of country parish overrun with Undead, sparks an overlong flashback to the stalwart sidekick's early days as a young novice, when Sister Bernie briefly questioned her calling for love of a hunky, young seminary student. Ultimately, however, their nightmarish encounter with a satanic night-gaunt convinced the future Father to dedicate himself to the priesthood, breaking poor Bernie's heart. Now, years later, the former lovers finally lay their troubled past to rest, while Vixen rids the village of vampires (offstage).
Suddenly, killing off Sister Bernie didn't seem like such a bad idea. I mean, I love the chemistry and clever repartee between Vixen and Bernie as much as the next Vixite, but who wants to spend a hour reliving some boring romance that happened before she ever met the Slayer? Did Star Trek ever waste time showing a young Leonard McCoy cramming for med school exams? Do we really care what Gabrielle was doing on the family farm before she hooked up with Xena? Of course not.
Also, to be brutally honest, all the wigs and soft-focus lighting in the world cannot make Anne-Marie Campbell look like a dewy young maiden, a glaring visual distraction exacerbated by the twenty-something Leonardo DeCaprio clone cast as her long-lost swain. She looks ridiculous in the flashback sequences, while, buried beneath a ton of unconvincing old age make-up, he looks fakey in the present-day framing scenes, thus guaranteeing that none of their scenes together work at all.
Add to this the conspicuous absence of Glory McArdle (who was off doing a press tour in the States), and you have an episode that makes one yearn longingly for a nice, exciting rerun.
For once, the Slayer must come to the aid of a supernatural creature when an innocent seal-woman, or selkie, is captured by an unscrupulous Scottish fisherman, who puts her on display in a caged metal tank. (Sort of the Elizabethan equivalent of SeaWorld, when you think about it.) Sister Bernadette initially opposes risking their lives on behalf of such an "unnatural" creature, but eventually comes around as our heroines race against time to get the dying selkie back to the sea where she belongs.
Glory's Olympic roots paid off here when the producers recruited her former Olympic teammate, bronze medal-winning swimmer Julie Sluice, to play the captive selkie. The scene where she reluctantly performs various aquatic tricks in exchange for fresh fish, while a jury of stone-faced judges hold up signs scoring her performance, succeeds as a hilarious parody of both the Olympics and trained dolphin shows, although, admittedly, the whole sequence is a good deal campier than the series usually gets.
Having learned their lesson from "What Lurks in the Loch?" (4), the producers wisely contrived a literal fish-out-of-water plot that takes place mostly on dry land, only attempting to simulate actual ocean conditions at the very beginning and end of the episode. Even still, Sluice is rumored to have caught a nasty cold from the frigid water within her enclosed tank, which may explain why she's been in no hurry to reprise the role, her old athletic ties to Glory notwithstanding.
Geographical Trivia Alert. The seaside village of Blackwaterfoot, where this episode is set, is a real place, located on the Isle of Arran, off the coast of Scotland. You don't think the Slayer Staff could make up a name like that, do you?
At the request of Queen Elizabeth, Vixen must team up with Christopher Marlowe, dashing playwright and part-time secret agent to uncover Guy Fawke's nefarious plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Sparks fly between Marlowe and the Slayer, who ends up inspiring the warrior queen in his play Dido, Queen of Carthage, but their passionate romance ends tragically when she discovers that his most famous play, Doctor Faustus, is largely autobiographical; Marlowe has sold his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for literary immortality. Despite a fierce battle, Vixen is ultimately unable to stop the Dark Forces from claiming her lover.
Historical purists will no doubt point out that the real Marlowe died in 1593, a good twelve years before the notorious Gunpowder Plot, but who cares when an episode is this good! Clever, dramatic, and full-blooded, "Slayer in Love" has plenty of great dialogue ("Is this the face that stalked a thousand crypts?" Marlowe asks upon first meeting Vixen) and, for once, a genuinely moving love story that only the hardest hearts could resist. As the witty, doomed Marlowe, Canadian actor Malcolm Craigie makes a much better paramour for our favorite ninja vampire hunter than Count von Blitzkrieg ever did; even though he's ultimately dragged down to Hell, one hopes that the Slayer Staff will find a way to bring him back for a few more appearances.
Granted, Sister Bernadette doesn't have much to do in this episode, aside from clucking disapprovingly at Vix's growing infatuation with Marlowe, but I guess you can't have everything.
An ominous prophecy from The Book of the Damned, which Sister Bernadette filched from Father Diavolo in Episode 14, hints that Armageddon itself is drawing nigh, in the form of a brilliant alchemist who is on the verge of discovering the secret of cold fusion—in 1592! Vixen must reach the reckless genius's secret laboratory, protected by all manner of ingenious boobytraps and pitfalls, before all of England undergoes a catastrophic meltdown!
Not a lot of characterization or humor here, but plenty of nonstop action and suspense, that starts off with a bang in scene one, then just keeps accelerating towards the apocalyptic conclusion. Dr. Xavier Fell's steampunky gadgets and deathtraps are a hoot, too, although the candle-powered laser is a bit of stretch, and you've got to admire any show that has the chutzpah to do a nuclear countdown plot almost four hundred years before the Manhattan Project.
Unfortunately, "Doomsday" turned into a much more of a cliffhanger than intended when Gloria McArdle mysteriously disappeared while taping an MTV special in Hollywood, with the final scenes of the episode yet to be filmed, forcing the producers to tack a TO BE CONTINUED title over the truncated final scenes, and raising dire questions as to the entire future of TITAoVtS.
Will the missing star reappear in time to film September's big season premiere . . . or will it always be "Thirteen Minutes to Doomsday" for the show's devoted fans?
Let's cross our fingers and pray for the Slayer's safe return. Meanwhile, I wonder: what's Doreen Liu doing these days?