A hunter takes the most dangerous game to a supernatural level.
If you find Mike
Celluci interesting and appealing, "Wild Blood" is the episode for
you. As it happens, I'm in that select group, so I'd like to note that if Mike
Celluci smiled at me the way he smiled at the suspect in the interrogation room
when they were not-really-flirting...I'd not only confess to the murder in
question, I'd confess to anything he wanted.
Now that I've
gotten that out of the way, let's move on. Although there were some great
moments with Henry and Vicki (especially the meaningful discussion of
territoriality), "Wild Blood" was really a turning point in Mike's
story.
Near the end of
the episode, Mike tells Kate to trust him, but I suspect that the trusting
times are almost, if not completely, over. Crowley's pissed, Kate's apoplectic,
and Mike's made the transition from the guy who doesn't believe in this spooky
stuff to the guy who enlists Vicki's help because he suspects something spooky
is going on.
And it's not a
transition Mike is pleased about. (Of course, Henry loves it because it makes
Mike uncomfortable, and Vicki is glad because she wants Mike back on her side.)
Deep down, Mike
believed that eventually all this weird stuff would go away and things could go
back the way they were. And by the end of "Wild Blood," he's starting
to see that it's not going to happen that way.
In fact, if Mike
was observant, he might have noticed that, emotionally, he connected better
with the werejaguar than he did with his own partner.
Speaking of said
jaguar, I was impressed by Ellen Dubin's acting as Felicia Bannock, but I
thought that her father and sister were played somewhat...stereotypically.
Maybe it's an American thing, but I kept expecting the two of them to stand in
front of their farmhouse with a pitchfork and a matching set of frowns. I never
really worked up any feelings for them, even when Alyssa was telling the story
of her brother's death.
But the scenes
with Mike and Felicia were definitely one of the highlights of the episode,
full of tension as both of them danced around the topics of lycanthropy and murder.
Oh, and I can't
forget another highlight: the early scene in which Mike asks Vicki and Henry
for help. Très sexy and filled with flirting and sheer
adorableness. That scene alone was worth the price of admission, capped by the fabulous
final snark between Mike (bowing, "Your lordship") and Henry
("Constable").
I do have a one
quibble: If the werejaguars had control over the change and their behavior, why
would Felicia have a storage locker to lock herself in? Why not just curl up on
her bed whenever she felt like changing?
I also wondered why
Henry was lying on a table to draw, but I suspect that's simple fangirlservice.
However, there's no way I'm touching Henry's fantasy of Mike being eaten by hellhounds
or werewolves.
The real meat of
the episode (if that's not too unfortunate a pun), of course, was the
werejaguar's dilemma: hide and allow her brother's death to go unavenged, or
take the law into her own claws? I think this tied very nicely into last week's
episode, in which Vicki starts to wonder about what side of the law she's
really on.
This week it's
Mike's turn to wonder, as he lets a confessed murderer go free, knowing that he
can't punish her and he's not entirely sure he'd even want to.
What we have
shaping up is a situation in which Vicki, Henry, and Mike are becoming the go-to team for supernatural folk who are
in trouble. They're going to start to get a reputation for helping ghosts,
goblins, and werewolves in trouble. Of course, that also means that more of the
bad guys are going to start going after them, don't you think?
This week's take-home message seems to be about justice, and how hard it
is to find when you're an oppressed minority. Especially if you're a minority
that nobody even believes in!