The Fades, Season 1, Episode 6: Season Finale

So, the people have left town in fear, Paul has super powers an refuses to walk in Neil’s increasingly more extreme footsteps while Neil has jumped off the deep end and kidnapped Mac to make Paul obey

Starting with the Evil Fades, with everyone leaving town they’re having a problem with food supply – no fresh humans to snack on. But John, leader of the Fades is focused on Paul whose super shiny powers remain the only way to kill them. John’s unwilling to move on until Paul is dead, butchered and his body parts scattered

Meanwhile Paul is still having his apocalyptic ash dreams – that now include his own death by stabbing. Only this time he has some more information – the ashy death dream is today. Paul and his angelic side-kick Alice are running through the empty streets, dodging past the Fades looking for them. Random body parts and corpses scatter the deserted streets. It has an almost Walking Dead feel to it – and the same amount of menace and tension without the oozy make up.

Unfortunately Alice still has bad amounts of Neil disease – forget the little people, don’t be distracted, the family don’t matter etc etc. The Angelics really need to deal with that. But an encounter with the Fades and Paul’s unwillingness to blast them into itty bitty pieces results in them discovering the blast ray is actually multi-purpose and also can open the Ascension point.

For those who haven’t kept up – Ascension is what the Fades should be doing rather than hanging around, getting all icky then eating people but it was sadly broken (the theory is by World War 2) and needs fixing to get the Fades where they belong

Meanwhile Paul’s mum and sister Anna and girlfriend Jay haven’t left and are still hanging around waiting for Paul. Not the wisest of moves, especially with the Fades surrounding the house. Anna keeps trying to get them away while heir mum keeps insisting she can’t abandon her son. Again, I’m glad to see Anna speaking up, pointing out that she’s her daughter as well.

Mac and Neil are continuing the kidnap tour – and Mac is keeping up his usual skilful level of amusing and witty babble and banter including drawing Neil into a discussion as to who is more like Jesus Christ. It’s slowly driving Neil up the wall (which is extremely amusing to see) while he tries to contact Paul.  Neil goes well and truly off the deep end and kidnaps them all – holding Jay at gunpoint to try and force Paul to go around killing the Fades. He doesn’t listen, is completely lost to reason – and shoots Jay

Ok, sigh moment. This is the second time Jay has been kidnapped to get at Paul. I really dislike this trope of female love interests having no role except to be victimised in order to get at their men. That is the only role Jay has served in this series – in 6 episodes she has beenvictimised twice both to get at Paul. 

Neil now has an ultimatum to Paul – kill John or he will kill Paul’s family. Leaving Alice to beg him not to, to fix ascension (harking back to the “family isn’t important now” speech she had earlier)

Speaking of the family – Mac’s father Detective Armstrong finds Paul’s mum tied up and she tells him about Neil. While Mac and Anna, in a storage container, have a beautiful scene together… only to be found by Fades (Paul’s old therapist)

And on to the distraction characters, we also drop in on Ghost!Sarah (who, as you recall, has a new diet plan of human flesh, nomnom) and her husband Mark who really needs to find some point in this story C’mon, it’s the last episode. Anyway they have sex but Ghost!Sarah has a problem – she wants to eat him (no, not a euphemism) which naturally causes some consternation.  I’m not sure what role they’re supposed to serve – a humanising element? But the villains and protagonists in this series are very human already

Rather upset that she nearly snacked on her dearly beloved, Sarah goes to confront John, the Fade leader, asking him what she is and what he’s done to which John replies with the charming Biblical story of Sodom and how he’s creating a new nation which requires a little unfortunate bloodshed – this is the evil villain self-justification clause.

Of course, with Sarah on his side John gets the benefit of her own special kind of fluffy positive thinking – it doesn’t matter, everything’s dead, everything’s ash, there’s no hope. Cheerful sort. In her fatalism, Sarah, for some reason feels compelled to protect John, albeit rather ineffectually

Paul and Neil find John  and have a gun fight and limerick match. There then follows several rhetoric battles – Sarah vs Alice, Neil vs John – debate time! Moral viewpoints! Philosophies and tragic stories – go! Actually that sounds kind of dull and though I’m vaguely amused at the dramatic show down being an exchange of impassioned speeches, it’s pretty tense, a good way to finish off the world and fill in any gaps – and have an epic battle – even if it is with words

The Fades, Season 1, Episode 5

Last episode we had a lot of coming back to life. John, the Big Bad Fade came back to life eating human flesh and also helped Natalie, another Fade do the same – and they’re getting an army of flesh eating Fades. Meanwhile Paul, our hero, also came back to life because he’s that powerful an Angelic, and the Angelics have their own Fade, Sarah, snacking on human flesh so she can become real as well (though I wonder how much of that is to help the side of goodness and how much of it is so she can reconcile with her husband Mark who is accused of the murders and pushing her away because he can’t stand the idea that she could be there but be utterly unable to sense her).

This episode we open with Mac’s father, Detective Armstrong looking at an investigation board covered in missing and murdered people – the casualties in the Fades’ quest to gain flesh to manifest. I like this scene if nothing else because there tends to be a lot of series/books in urban fantasy with a high bodycount and very little of the repercussions of that being shown (except hero angst). Here we have a sense of that much loss.

And the large numbers of new, naked fades being born. The good news is that Detective Armstrong’s arsehole, racist boss gets eaten by John the Evil!Fade. good, I was hoping he would be eaten (Walking Dead, take note – unpleasant people get eaten by the undead. Please have Shane eaten now). The escalating missing rate leads to a crisis centre being set up in the school

Meanwhile Paul is out of hospital (I want a Got Well Soon cake) against Doctor’s orders simply because they can’t imagine someone coming out of a coma healthier than when he went in (go go Angelic power) but Mac declares him geekily cured. Can I say for the hundredth time how amazingly good the relationship between Mac and Paul is? I mean the relationships in this series are amazing anyway – Paul and his mother, Paul and Jay, even Anna came into her own this episode – but Paul and Mac are such perfect, real, amazingly portrayed friends who bounce off each other most excellently

The Fades, Season 1, Episode 4

We left last episode with some major developments – Evil!fade that eats Angelics has gone and got himself a new body. Meanwhile Paul was hit by a truck and has gone all dead. Which is why we start now with Paul as a ghost in the hospital looking at his grieving family and comatose body.  His family and friends have to deal with him on life support, and deal with whether to turn the machines off or not – and deal with him being dead. And Paul learning how to be a ghost with all the restrictions and limits there are on a Fade.

Neil and the Angelics continue to leap over the deep end – and with Paul’s death, Neil goes even further. Superman is dead, their hope, their saviour is dead. Without outside hope they aim for more extreme measures – including torturing information out of Natalie. Something 2 of the other Angelics cannot stand for – nor can Paul’s ghost.

The Fades, Season 1, Episode 3

The dead can’t touch people, in fact being touched hurts them, maybe even kills them. So now they’re eating human flesh so they can fight back. And mac sums this up? “So far so pacman”. That line alone is worth a standing ovation.

In other news, strip rock, paper scissors. Y’know it’s novel and it’s quick but I don’t think it’ll catch on. But that’s a new side-effect to masturbation. Not quite as menacing as the hairy palms threat really.  It certainly beats A Wonderful Life’s method in giving an angel wings.

Other than angelic ejaculation, Paul is becoming so quickly wrapped up with Jay that he is ignoring other people – including Mac and Neil. I’d much rather have more of the main plot rather than kisses that kill the thought-brain. And Jay’s favourite film is Twilight alas, now I want a Fade to eat her. Then Anna got involved and I was cringing – but another angelic power kicks in – the power to silence extremely annoying siblings! Which leads to him being adorkably cute in convincing Jay he’s not scary weird. And yes, he is adorkable.

The Fades, Season 1, Episode 2

Ok… I am faintly bemused and had to check if I missed an episode because there seems to be information covered in the “previous episode” recap that wasn’t there in the previous episode. Maybe I missed it.

Anyway, we rejoin the action with the Angelics (apparently the word for the humans with odd powers) trying to stop the pissed off trapped dead ghosts (the Fades) from destroying the world.

One of the brain breaking parts about this series I’m going to have to try and get round is the way that death is not the end – after all it is all about dead ghosts, right? So while we had both Sarah and Helen die in the last episode, Sarah’s still walking around talking Neil. Unfortunately having Sarah hang around isn’t that damn useful since she’s an extremely fatalistic dead person. Not exactly full of hope and light – she is convinced that the end of the world is inevitable.

Fangs for the Fantasy podcast, episode 41

Another week, another instalment of our podcast, discussing what we've watched and read this week and also seeing which of us has suffered reading or watching the most painful content this week.

We continue our struggles with the Vampire Diaries, wonder exactly where the Walking Dead is going along with the American Horror Story, sigh over Secret Circle and consider the problematic erasures in Once Upon a Time, yet also discuss what we like about it and Grimm. We also discuss our new catch up series, The Fades. We also cry over the sheer horror of the CW defiling our beloved Hollows series

Looking at the books we've read we discuss Chloe Neil's Chicagoland Vampires, Rachel Vincent's series and Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires

We also discuss the extremely problematic way many Urban Fantasy appropriates teh language of equality movements

And next week we'll be reading Gail Carriger's Blameless, book 2 of the Parasol Protectorate series

The Fades, Season 1, Episode 1

This week we have a new series to catch up on – BBC’s The Fades. As usual we will have several episode reviews to bring us up to date.

We follow Paul and his friend Mac as they explore an abandoned shopping center for props for Mac’s horror film (or just to mess around just as happily). Paul is separated from Mac and runs into Neil and Sarah – Neil with a gun and Sarah with severe injuries. And something chasing and attacking them and doing something really freaky with Neil’s eye that is extremely creepy and way beyond Paul’s experience

The Fades are coming, the trapped remains of the dead growing increasingly more enraged. The Fades are becoming stronger, able to touch people, able to break through into our world, and more is coming besides – and according to Sarah and her frightening apocalyptic vision, they’re going to destroy the world  – a vision that is shared by Paul in his nightmares.  One of many which are prophetic  coupled with the ability to see the Fades that are hidden from everyone else