Helix has a MacGuffin and I think I know where the show is going

No, Doreen! You can't be dead. This really did kind of suck. Sigh.

So, I've been watching SyFy's Helix on Friday nights (yes I know my social life is just banging) but as one who is all too familiar with "income inequality," it's the more affordable mode of entertainment for me (that and cooking my meals at home really does save money). However, since it premiered about three weeks ago, I've been a little "meh" about the series as a whole (wrongfully comparing it to The Walking Dead at times). I have my reasons for my immediate eye-rolls in watching the episodes. For example, I don't really like anyone in the cast, the weird "elevator" music when the title credits roll took a bit of getting used to, and I was kind of primed for this to be a twist on zombies in the arctic. Either that or a really cool Outbreak-esque apocalyptic tale. But both of these scenarios never really materialized, and I think that's a good thing.

In addition, it turns out that the whole "zombie breakout" thing that I expected turned out to be a MacGuffin. Do you guys know what this is? In fiction, a MacGuffin is a plot device that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. MacGuffins are usually the central focus of a film's first act, and decline in importance as the story progresses. This is exactly what's going on in Helix, and the result has finally piqued my interest (if just a wee bit).

Now, I don't think that I have an unusually short attention span. In my defense, I tend to hold onto a series a lot longer than I should (this is happening with Almost Human, which has just about reached the intolerable level in the "boring" department). But I was just about ready to give up on Helix when the episode this last Friday aired and everything seemed to coalesce.

Dr. Peter Farragut infected with the Helix Vector (they call the zombies "vectors".)

Mysteries in Helix are plentiful much in the vein of Lost, but by far the most intriguing thing about the show are the characters themselves. At the center of this evolution are characters who may act like psychopaths but may in fact be on the side of good. Peter (brother to Alan) is one of these as it turns out that he was doing grunt work, i.e., he knows nothing about the disease. Hiroshi was the one running the show the entire time, and Hiroshi has this whole creepy fascination with Julia (which seems oddly compelling). This "creepiness" gets another layer when Julia comes to a realization that she's been to the arctic laboratory before and doesn't remember any of it. Why?

Hiroshi Hatake with the strange glowing eyes that he hides behind contacts. It's
another mystery that needs some explanation. But then I'd also like to know about
all the frozen monkeys and about the message supposedly encoded in the RNA
strands of the Helix Vector disease. Sigh.

Is it possible that Hiroshi used Julia as one of his experiments? And what do we know about Hiroshi? One, he has many secrets. He has a secret scrapbook of all things Julia, a secret stairway down to the quarantine level, and has the ability to stare down one of the zombies (and they just let him walk on by). He's also a cold-blooded killer, willing to murder unarmed men over clean air (when they could just open a window to get clean air).

Then we have Sergio who murdered Doreen and fed her to hairless rats right after a great bonding moment. WTF? For the record, I really liked Doreen. She was the one true scientist on the show, given that Alan is self-absorbed and incompetent and Sarah is just useless. It's unfortunate really that she pretty much had a target on her back, being the one that got close to Sergio and being fat and unattractive (as deemed by Hollywood). This show also has other problems: the "zombies" are all black people with the exception of Peter, and the "villain" is turning out to be a Japanese guy. It makes me wonder if the show's being written by paranoid white men who secretly wish we could return to a time when it was okay to sexually harass a young attractive woman (and suffer no repercussion).

I hope they explain the black goo before the series finale though. I have so many questions about it.

TL;DR: Helix has a MacGuffin, and I think I know where the show is going.

The first 15 minutes of Helix is cut awkwardly in parts but still manages to reel me in

Notice the black goo dripping from this guy's left ear. Chilling, isn't it?

So Helix starts tonight on SyFy, and if memory serves me correctly, we get another episode tomorrow night as well. But don't quote me on that (I think I saw something on my DVR).

My first impression in watching the trailer and then the first 15-minutes was that it has a setting I like, i.e., Antarctica, and it looks to kind of be an end of the world thriller about a disease that turns your blood black, leaves its victims disfigured with horrific black veins all over their body (and bleeding from every orifice), and also imbues them with maddening strength and just sheer crazy.

There were parts of it that are cut awkwardly to truncate conversation and maybe not reveal so much to the audience. That's okay as I'm willing to watch the uncut pilot tonight. I know that they're just trying to pique my interest, and I consider this "mission accomplished" by the cliffhanger left in the last few seconds.

This is my favorite story that takes place in Antarctica. It was remade by
John Carpenter into a great all male film that still leads me to question
which of the survivors at the end was the Thing and which wasn't? Maybe
Helix is going to take this question and say that the disease is going to
have some kind of outer space origin. That would be really cool.

There are a few questions that come to mind. Most notably, I ask, "So is this a reinvention of the whole zombie apocalypse?" If it does turn out to be that I won't care much. I love zombie-esque stories. I also love stories where the stakes are incredibly high (as in the movie "Outbreak" with Renee Russo and Dustin Hoffman).

Additionally we are treated to a real science fiction atmosphere with the base in Antarctica. This is no remote all male outpost with the survivors of The Thing from Another World eeking out an existence amid sled dogs and low technology. The base more than anything, resembles the facility you saw underground in Cabin in the Woods, with glass elevators that descend into the ice for thousands of feet to vaults where dangerous disease strains are held in cryogenic storage away from the population centers of the world.

So here is the question of the day: Are any of you out there going to either record or watch Helix tonight? I've been excited about it for a few months now, but still don't know much about it. I guess I shall see soon enough.