How to Spot a Psychopath

I've just finished watching the first, and only, series of the inventively-named "Blade: The Series".

The show's cancellation after 12 episodes was a lot less of a crime than the cancellation of Firefly, but I still quite enjoyed it. The feeling of foreboding you get when some rapper with a silly name gets cast in a nominally serious show is, in this case, unfounded. Blade is an absolutely relentless downer who avoids anything resembling dramatic acting at all costs, after all. He's easy enough for any schmuck to play.

Blade: The Series often doesn't quite make sense. You'd think, for instance, that the shutters on the windows of Vampire HQ would have anti-daylight interlocks that couldn't be defeated by anything short of a shaped charge, but apparently they prefer to give the good guys a sporting chance. And vampires are supposed to have superhuman senses, yet none of them ever seem to overhear anything, or even be able to smell a sweaty, bleeding human who seconds ago crossed their path, when to do so would be inconvenient for the plot.

The upper levels of the vampire hierarchy also appear to be reserved for the exceedingly pompous, but there's nothing new about soliloquising expository villains. And there's a good laugh based on this in the last episode.

The low-ish budget also shows through from time to time. When, late in the series, it becomes apparent that something important will be happening in Toronto, you can't help but laugh. The show's meant to be set in Detroit, a mere hop skip and jump from Toronto - but I live on the other side of the planet and could still see that everyone's actually been Rumbling in Vancouver all this time. So now Blade would appear to have to drive his Cool Car 2700 miles.

Oh, and in the Drinking Game for this series, "someone walks somewhere in slow motion" would only be one very small sip of your drink, and "someone who is actually still alive is confidently declared to be dead by someone who hasn't even checked" would not be very much bigger.

(I was also downright surprised when a vampire told a human employee "your well-deserved reward awaits you" and it turned out that, for once, the reward was not death.)

But the acting's pretty decent, the fight choreography is OK, and nobody decided to cut the guts out of the show by shooting for a PG-13 rating.

If you haven't seen the Blade series but you also haven't seen Ultraviolet (the British TV series, not the lousy movie), you should see Ultraviolet first.

If you've still got a hankering for vampire-based fun after that, check out Blade: The Series' movie-length pilot and see what you think.