Helstrom “Mother’s Little Helpers”

Well, this was unexpected…and not because I usually write up horror and/or superhero series on Fridays.  No, here we are with the Hulu series based on the old Marvel antihero Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, sometimes called Hellstorm.

It’s supposedly set in the MCU, but we’ll see what exactly that means as we go forward.  Or, we’ll try to.

“Try” might be the operative word.  Sure, the operative time to watch a show like this might be at night, but I have stuff to do, so I put the pilot on to watch in the middle of the day as I did my daily exercise of twenty minutes on the stationary bike, planning to finish the episode after I got my pedaling done.  And that was a bad idea, not because exercise is bad.  Heck, Daimon in the opening scene is acting as an exorcist, so that’s too obvious a joke.

Not too obvious to refrain from using it in the series banner image I created for my write-ups…

No, the problem was the glare of light hitting my TV screen made it hard to see what was happening for those twenty minutes, especially as the episode seems to be set mostly at night, and the opening (when Daimon exposes a boy pretending to be possessed) was something I had trouble following when my own carpet was reflected off the characters’ faces.

But, I do have an idea what’s going on.  The two Helstrom siblings, Daimon and (Sat)Ana live in separate cities and have as little to do with each other as possible.  They’re father was an abusive serial killer.  Their mother is possessed by a powerful demon named Mother.  Daimon lives in the Portland area, teaches ethics like he’s getting ready to move to the Good Place, and exorcises demons on the side.  Currently, he’s saddled with a Vatican agent named Gabriella Rosetti who wants to meet Mother, and it goes badly for her when she tries.

As for Ana, she has some psychic powers to match Daimon’s more magical ones, and runs an auction house in San Francisco where she occasionally takes out evildoers who come by to shop there.  She meets with the mysterious Caretaker and learns of a demon skeleton buried in a graveyard.

Daimon finds some symbols similar to the one on the dead demon’s skull on his own, forcing the two to work together.  Ana’s first words on seeing her brother in this episode are to ask if the bitch (their mother) is finally dead.

She is not.

Instead, she convinced a guard, Keith Spivey (played by former X-Men movie actor Daniel Cudmore) to go off with some other folks, but he’s possessed and attacks a trucker even though it looks like he currently only has half a face.

So, this is the show we have:  two damaged people with special powers may be hunting demons on the West Coast.  We’ll see where it goes from here, I suppose.