This episode tones down some of the endless ominousness of the series so far. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of ominous music and ominous scenes – like a long painful recitation of atrocities that Damien has witnessed with Ann deciding it’s all because of Damien and his dark evilness. This is also sprinkled with lots of reminders of Damien’s ominous past and evil childhood.
Still while there is the ominousness, we also get some actual advancement of the plot: Damien turns to one of his high powered contacts: a former secretary of state called Jack who does his very best to warn him off Ann, the ominous ominous Ann. He even implies she *gasps* murders people who get in her way
But, surprise, he and Ann are part of the same organisation (and she’s made the point that there are several ominous organisations all interested in Damien, anarchists, Satanists, people who want to bring about the second coming, people who want to keep the world the way it is…. All the while carefully not telling Damien which organisation she is from). Only he’s decided Ann is being too softly-softly for his taste.
Jack wants to force the issue – he wants to “bring Damien in” and he wants to force the plan forwards. Ann doesn’t agree with this, but Jack assumes she’s gone soft and decides his lackey Troy will take over
Ann’s not having that. Taking advantage of Damien watching her (because he’s not entirely a fool to completely trust his stalker) she manages to set up a nice scenario, pushing Troy’s buttons, faking and attack and setting Troy running with Damien chasing after him. The chase leads to a subway and poor Troy having a nasty accident with an escalator. There’s certainly something worse than Ann watching him
And Jack has been taught a nice lesson there as well. Do Not Mess With Ann.
While on the Subway Damien gives up the chase to save the life of a boy that fell on the tracks – yes, an unsubtle message that Damien may be the son of satan but there’s still good in him.
That bit of heroism nearly throws off suspicious detective who is, for reasons that don’t really make a lot of sense, really trying to pin all these scary accidents on Damien. Which is when he’s attacked by a demon dog – and manages to kill it so he doesn’t get brutally mauled. This proves that the evil forces of satan aren’t necessarily smart, because this guy was willing to back off before the cute puppy decided to turn up.
Some other force is also giving Simone ominous visions – which she takes to be her dead sister, but who knows what it could be… as Ann pointed out, there’s a lot of players in this game.
Ominous Ann is also carving “666” into her leg – and whatever else she’s done she’s managed to raise Damien’s trust enough to show her his spooky 666 birthmark. This causes her to cringe in fear/collapse in pain/orgasm/possibly all three. What is that look?
This episode gives me some hope – after the first two episodes, Damien was thoroughly boring me. I felt like we had huge chunks of the show where poor Bradley James just had to EMOTE at the camera while the music ratcheted it up to 11 and went all out for ominous with nothing actually happening. And ominous isn’t sufficient - the show is called Damien. It’s the sequel to the Omen for crying out loud. There’s no need to foreshadow here, this isn’t a cross country trek, it’s a train running down very clear rails.
So now it’s set the tone, maybe it’s time to bring in the actual plot line, the factions duelling each other and Damien’s growing realisation of what he is and what that means.
