Helstrom Season One Review

Helstrom [2021]

I have watched a bunch of superhero adaptations that I knew were 'orphaned' in its first season. DC's Constantine (which would eventually be picked up, in spirit, by the CW) and Swamp Thing (due to budgetary reasons) were both supernatural-themed superhero shows that were cancelled after their first season. Helstrom was... a bit of a different beast. It was meant to be part of the quasi-MCU television universe where they are technically kind of set in the same MCU universe, but the mainline movies won't ever reference the shows. It's produced by Hulu, which also made Runaways and Cloak and Dagger, and, as I remember, it's also meant to be part of a greater horror/supernatural project for Marvel characters. Only... the Disney+ streaming service happened. Most of the other Netflix and Hulu Marvel TV projects were, at least, allowed to end in their final seasons. Poor Helstrom debuted last year with little fanfare, and while it was produced with being part of the Marvel universe in mind, by the time it reached the air it didn't even have the Marvel logo left. 

Still, it was a superhero show, and I am at least tangentially familiar with who Hellstorm (a.k.a. "Son of Satan", a.k.a. Daimon Helstrom... Marvel comics were never subtle) is as a character. And ten episodes aren't too big of a commitment, especially since the show at least was allowed to wrap up its first-season plotline. It fit with the October Halloween vibe as well, so I watched it. 

I'm not sure how far along production was along when the decision to divorce Helstrom from the rest of its Marvel shows was made, but the final product most certainly stands on its own. Other than a brief cameo by a Roxxon-brand oil truck in an early episode, Helstrom's characters all stand on its own. It's free to tell its story of the two half-demon children Daimon and Satana Ana Helstrom, who are estranged from each other after their demon-possessed dad plagued them when they were children. Daimon is left with his mother Victoria, possessed by a demon (initially called 'Mother', later we know she's called Kthara) and stuck in an asylum. Ana, meanwhile, travels the world and alternates between killing people who deserve it to satiate a niggling urge to kill people, while also looking for supernatural artifacts. 

Each Helstrom sibling comes with their own supportive cast and a surrogate parent. Daimon's surrogate mom is dr. Hastings, who doubles as the doctor who takes care of the asylum that the possessed Victoria is stuck in. He also hangs out with the nun-initiate Gabriella Rosetti, an 'almost nun' from the Vatican who acts as the 'whoa what is all this demon possession stuff' audience surrogate that allows the show to exposition this show's take on demons. Ana hangs out with her partner Chris Yen, a wise-cracking and long-suffering good friend of hers that helps her to stake out victims and manage her artifact business; as well as the enigmatic "Caretaker", her surrogate dad and someone who would later be revealed to be part of the demon-hunting organization called the Blood. 

The show itself has a story that it wants to tell, and, for its credit, a lot of the casting is pretty decent. The Helstrom siblings are at least likable (Sydney Lemmon, who plays Ana, clearly gets a lot more range to do, and is easily the better-written protagonist), and I feel like the unquestioned star of the show is Elizabeth Marvel, who does double duty as the Helstrom mother Victoria Helstrom, but also as the deep-spoken demon Kthara that possesses her, and later on when they get separated. 

The main plot of the season, at least up until the eighth episode, is to free Victoria from the demon tormenting her, and the show itself moves relatively slowly until that happens. More and more demons show up and possess random people (and with the exception of Basar and his Resident Evil ribcage mouth, none of them really look like anything more than angry humans) and for a while, the Helstrom siblings think that their evil father is back. It's not -- it's just one of Kthara's children that masquerades as their dad, which, again, with so many named demons that jump across bodies making it just a bit confusing early on. The fact that among the villains, one of them (Magoth) isn't part of Kthara's little cabal of children, adds to the confusion. 

There's a fun bit of world-building when the various characters find out a bunch of other magical-related stuff. Chris Yen gets accidentally possessed (and turned into) a Keeper Demon, which is a special kind of demon with the ability to suppress other demons. Gabriella gets brought by the Caretaker to see what the Blood is doing, which is to keep the possessed people in a comatose state to keep the demons at bay... and eventually the other non-Caretaker members of the Blood decide to exterminate the Helstrom siblings anyway. 

And then we get the final two episodes -- some of the secondary villains are driven off or dealt with, and in the lull, Kthara and Basar end up possessing Daimon and Gabriella, force them to have sex, and then kidnap Gabriella so she can give birth to Kthara/Mother's new body. There's a rather poorly-handled back-and-forth as Gabriella (who's probably already the least interesting of the supporting cast) vacillates between wanting to keep the baby or to purge it, and then at the end she decides all the half-demons are evil and joins the Blood. For the rather dark tone of the show, it's surprising that all the supporting cast make it out okay -- no one we really care about gets killed, and even dr. Hastings (who has lung cancer) and Yen (who gets the whole Keeper demon thing) both get out okay, with the only real casualty being Yen's relationship with his boyfriend.  

Oh, and "Mother" gets reincarnated into Gabriella's baby, who the Helstrom family decide to raise? Which is a bit of a huge WTF moment, but then the baby gets stolen by Keeper Yen, and then grows to a young child in about a month, at which point the Helstrom siblings's real dad show up to take her away? Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of the conclusion. I get that it's meant to be a parallel with the parental nurture/demonic nature themes that Daimon and Ana have been sort-of exploring, but the specifics of that part of the plot, plus the frankly unnecessarily gross bit with the rape-pregnancy, kind of took me out of the show in the final episodes. 

The show itself is... it's decent. It lacks a lot of the flair and panache, and for all the talk about the main siblings being half-demons, they really don't do anything too interesting with their supernatural powers. Sure, there's the odd bit of telekinesis and we get a version of Hellstorm's comic-book counterpart's fire trident (it's a spear here) in the final episode, but for the most part their powers are basically whatever's convenient for the plot. As I mention before, I'm not the biggest fan of the final two episodes. Plus, the constant flashbacks to the rather telegraphed backstory of the Helstrom siblings' childhood kind of just drag on and on, and among the siblings Daimon really doesn't get much to do in the first half of the show, sort of spinning his wheels on being the 'good sibling' that stays behind to take care of mom. Still, most of the casting and acting are pretty all right, and the show itself at least works as a spooky demon horror show. The final product ends up being more-or-less okay, but while there's a fair amount to like, Helstrom in general also feels like it's just kind of a generic supernatural spooky show without much of its own identity.