Helstrom “Containment”

I’m still not completely sure how I feel about Helstrom.  It’s very much a slow burn of a show, and it has only done so much to catch my attention so far.  But I will say this much:  Elizabeth Marvel seems to be having a ball playing the demonically possessed Victoria Helstrom.

That’s enough for a start.

If anything, this episode seems to serve more as set-up for future pay-off.  That demon skull Ana found may be able to do something about the Helstrom’s back-from-the-dead father, so the two siblings head down to San Francisco to pick it up only to find Chris, Ana’s partner, must have run off with it and left a body in the vault.  Daimon finds out Ana kills bad people and the two bond.  They manage to put off Chris’s cop boyfriend and exorcise a frat boy.

Meanwhile, Louise gets to know Mother.

But the part of the show that interested me the most was Caretaker’s story.  He’s apparently part of some group called the Blood, and they fight demons.  He takes Gabriella to see a hotel where they do that.

Essentially, they capture demonically possessed people and, rather than expel the demons from these folks, something Daimon can probably easily do, they put all the possessed people into medically-induced comas and leave them like that.  Caretaker says something about if they expel the demons, then the demons go back to Hell, plot some more, and come back stronger or something.

There’s a certain cruel wisdom to that, something both Caretaker and Louise (who also knows) admit to but are essentially powerless to stop, and Gabriella’s threats to go to the Vatican and tell them don’t seem to mean much because, the implication is, the Vatican already knows.

Now, it seems to me there’s one real problem with this plan:  those people will eventually die and then the demons get to start all over again anyway.

So, really, wouldn’t it be better to exorcise the demons anyway?  These are immortal beings.  Holding them in a human body for a couple decades (at most) isn’t going to keep them from coming back stronger if that’s the running theory.

So, yeah, shortsighted.  But on the plus side, Ana has gotten really good at using her powers at body disposal.  True, that isn’t a good thing if you think about it, but it was kinda cool to look at she cubed a corpse.  But like I said, this episode felt like it was more about place-setting than anything else.