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Plot

A fishing boat accident sparks a serious of mysterious events in the ‘world’s mermaid capital’

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Quick Review

A sci-fi fantasy adventure that plays by its own rules Sirens is an interesting take on an overlooked myth

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The Deets

It’s strange to see a woman as the aggressor in fantasy romance shows, I was a teenager throughout the vampire craze so I automatically read brunette heroines as passive and weak (vampire diaries, fallen, twilight it  was a trope of the genre.)

Elin Powell plays our main mermaid ‘Ryn’ named after a children’s TV show character and she is ridiculously good in this role. She’s a fish out of water (I’m here all week people) and her physicality embodies that. From the first shot of her feet lagging behind her, the head movements and thousand yard stare you see something that isn’t of this world without any explanation except the audience figuring out she’s helping her captured mermaid sister. It’s fascinating to watch her work even if she says barely three words during the whole episode. More than anything her story feels natural even if we don’t know all the ins and outs of it.

Ben, our main character, our Elena Gilbert is doing excellent accent work (both of the main actors are British) but there isn’t much to hold onto in the way of character. He is the rebel son of the town’s founding family and a marine biologist, other than that we don’t really know anything. Bad Boy with a heart of gold? Misunderstood heartbreaker? Ted Bundy-esque Serial Killer? Who the fuck knows, at this point he’s the audience avatar.

The story unfolded naturally from the town’s founding day to the fisherman’s story of an attack and a mysterious sea creature. Interactions between our two leads as well as Ben with Maddie allowed us to get a feel for the main characters. Action scenes were also fun to watch and set the tone for what this series is going to be about. The introduction of the military and their awareness of mermaids provided another hook to the series.

Here the town and the marine wildlife are playing second fiddle. I have no idea about the mythology surrounding mermaids or sirens, breadcrumbs were dropped but you’re not going to find anything particularly significant. Rather than just hints towards the mermaid/siren of it all it would have been better to see scenes such as the sirens song through a pov (such as being told ‘oh sirens songs do xyz’)

I overall enjoyed the pilot and the subsequent episode however with the pacing I’m worried that this show won’t find it’s audience. The post-college mermaid drama crowd isn’t all that big and there isn’t a clear definition of the show’s type to bring in genre fans it may need to drop a full season (+netflix!) before it starts getting the attention it deserves.

This new freeform show is solid sci-fi that refuses to push its story too quickly and right now I’m definitely tunaing next week.