Sanctuary: Trail of Blood

The Sanctuary receives a distress call from Nikola Tesla.  Bigfoot investigates the death of an old friend.

Finally, Tesla is back!  Without contest, Nikola is the most interesting character in “Sanctuary” and it’s always a pleasure to see him on the show.

In the catacombs of the Sanctuary a very old device is restarted as a message is transmitted.  As an invention of Nikola Tesla’s, Helen knows that it can only be him trying to contact them.  They trace the signal and travel to caves in Columbia where they find him trapped by a group of giant centipedes.  After freeing Tesla the group discovers an old Cabal lab that once housed the source blood.  Tesla wants it to return him to his former vampiric state but it was moved from the lab long ago.  They decide to lure the bugs into the room and blow it up but upon their escape the bugs try to follow them and Nikola is forced to stay behind.  Thankfully his magnetic powers manage to save him until he is found by the others.  Back at the Sanctuary, Bigfoot hears of the passing of the priest who instructed him to seek the Sanctuary.  He and Kate investigate the murder on their own tracing it to one of the cops whose family was being held hostage by another man.

When we last saw Nikola Tesla he was not at all happy after accidentally being de-vamped by his own machine.  He did show signs of a new talent for magnetism though.  It seems that since he’s been gone this hasn’t been enough to satisfy Nikola.  He’s been searching for the source blood in old Cabal outposts in an attempt to restore himself to his former vampiric glory.  Tesla always manages to play whichever side benefits him best at any given time making him the ultimate bad guy and good guy for the show.  There’s really no telling whether he’ll be a hero or villain come the end of the episode.   Jonathon Young brings just the right amount of charisma to the character preventing him from becoming an over the top annoyance.

It’s interesting to watch the character interactions with Tesla this week as each of our main characters so clearly has a different opinion of him.  Helen treats Nikola like an obnoxious child.  She yells at him when necessary but is willing to do just about anything to save him.  Will tries very hard to point out just how much trouble Tesla has been for them in the past.  He always has ulterior motives and things never seem to go as planned when he’s around.  Henry on the other hand looks at him with a degree of reverence, not at all surprising from a fellow scientist considering the calibre of Tesla’s inventions.  He believes almost all of Nikola’s ridiculous stories about how he contacted them almost entirely because he hopes that these things could be accomplished.  It leads to an interesting dynamic between all four of the characters as they try to escape bug infested caves.

For a group that’s been all but gone since the beginning of the second season it seems surprising that the Cabal just keep coming up.  I can’t decide whether the show plans on allowing the movement to return through whatever small number of members managed to survive or whether it’s just a convenient backstory for the episodes.

In the B-story line Kate and Bigfoot search out a murderer of a priest who helped turn abnormals to the Sanctuary.  These two don’t often get to work together and “Trail of Blood” shows just how good they can be at it.  When Bigfoot disappears Kate has no trouble finding him above the crime scene and together they manage to keep any bias he may have out of it.  Though they never discover the person really behind the murder, the audience does and it looks like “Sanctuary” has a new villain on its hands.  It will be interesting just to see how this other priest plans to use his influence to destroy abnormals in the future and just how long it will take for the “Sanctuary” team to figure him out.  He certainly did a good job of sucking up to Bigfoot.

With returning guest stars and a strong focus on each of the main characters, “Trail of Blood” is likely the strongest episode of the season so far.  I do hope Tesla can stick around for more.

Andrea

~ by Andrea on November 6, 2010.