Betwixt is now Changelings / Review of pilot episode

If you know anything about me, you know that my interest is always piqued when there’s something supernatural afoot in a TV show. Just so we’re clear.

There are some interesting character turns and cliffhangers presented at the end of the draft of the pilot I read, as well as love triangle set up. So I see the series… and I’m incredibly interested in seeing what happens next on Betwixt, though I’m not sure how long that interest will remain. The pilot is one of those things that seems to do too much and give too much away and progress the plot too quickly. That kind of thing can be AWESOME for a pilot and can lead to a really lame series that spins its wheels too much, can lead to an AWESOME first season and then the story feels played and burnt out… or the writers can rise above and keep the series going strong. Or the pilot can come in incredibly confusing / long / in need of cuts and fixes.

But, also to be clear, I far prefer an overly ambitious pilot script to something with no aspirations.

It seems that Betwixt has been designed to lead out of The Vampire Diaries (a series that, if you’ll recall, I was incredibly harsh on in its pilot stages – both script and screener – but have absolutely fallen in love with as the show took off after a bumpy first couple of episodes). You’ve got the mystical element. You’ve got a sense of history / show mythology that promises to go much deeper. You’ve got high school characters and love triangles a plenty to see what actually works between the cast. You’ve got some dark flair (actually, Betwixt is a lot darker on its surface than Vampire Diaries, with a lead character making some pretty dark choices by episode’s end).

Sorry, let me highlight something. Betwixt is about fairies, though the term is introduced and quickly swapped for "changeling" (which are fairies / fey who replaced human children at a young age). I fear this will present a giant marketing challenge to the CW. It’s just not as simple to sell as a show about vampires (to paraphrase Buffy, "Vampires are real, a lot of them live in Mystic Falls").

Anyway. Marketing hurdles aside… there’s a show here. The script started a bit rough for me (and, again, it’s likely an earlier draft than the shooting version, so plenty of opportunity for improvement / smoothing out here as well as for other projects). After a dark, tension-building tease, we flit between what will become our three lead characters – Nix (who is a guy, BTW), Celine, and Morgan (le Fay, get it! Hah!) It’s very staccato and we aren’t really attached to any single one of them yet. But we should be intrigued because they have powers. Powers that confuse and scare them. This is important to know because the next 10 pages until a bus crash, action-y Act One climax are pure teen soap (an element that gets a little lost in the back half of the script as the action ramps up) with these three and various people in their lives. There are also two adult-ish (because they aren’t teens but they aren’t parents, so, adult-ish) characters in "Moth" and "Bleek." Guess which one is evil. Seriously. Guess.

I mean, it’s good, evocative naming, but that the plot asks us to be mislead… didn’t quite work for me. Just because of a name.

The pilot deals with the fallout from the bus crash, but not in a Veronica Mars season mystery sense. These kids need answers. And they’re going to get them. As are we. Lots of answers and mythology and backstory. Again… I felt the script, at times, leaned too heavily on explaining things outright here and now. It gets a little bogged down in the exposition and giving names and classifications to various elements of the mythology (dust! cutters! fairies! powers! guides! fairies’ weaknesses!) It’s a lot to take in on the page, though we’ll see how it plays coming out of an actor’s mouth. I suspect that quite a bit of it will have to be cut down either in revisions or in the editing bay.

There are some specific things in the script I wish weren’t there. For instance, I’m REALLY tired or hearing or reading the line "if I/they wanted you dead, you’d already be dead." It was on Tuesday night’s episode of V and I rolled my eyes at the "wow, that’s an overused line" and then it showed up in this script, so… yeah. Please change it! Also, we really need to find new ways to describe people "going over to the dark side" because "going over to the dark side" is also overused.

I’m also not 100% certain what the intended tone of the show is. The characters don’t have enough fun so I wonder just how campy it’s all going to come across.

But I will be curious to see how it comes out.