TV Review: THE SECRET CIRCLE – Season 1 – “Wake”

By SEAN ELLIOTT / Contributing Writer

Posted: October 27th, 2011 / 03:51 PM

Stars: Britt Robertson, Thomas Dekker, Shelley Henning, Phoebe Tonkin, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Louis Hunter, Natasha Henstridge, Gale Harold, Ashley Crow
Writer: Andrea Newman, Based on the book by L.J. Smith
Director: Guy Bee
Network: The CW, airs Thursday nights
Original Telecast: October 20, 2011

After Nick’s (Louis Hunter) untimely demise last week on THE SECRET CIRCLE, I didn’t expect anything too terribly upbeat this week. There are some interesting additions to the interweaving plot that is building towards something big in the new episode “Wake” and of course another wave of new characters is introduced.

So let’s start off with the addition to the cast of Nick’s older brother Jake (Chris Zylka). Jake has abilities of his own and if I’m processing things correctly he is automatically bound into the circle through his bloodline. Or do they have to re-bind the circle with him present? He can do magic on his own, which is something the other teens can’t, so he’s either special of not actually fully bound to them yet.

Jake of course is a bad boy that broke Faye’s (Phoebe Tonkin) heart and started her down the road to being the charming bitch on wheels that she is today. He’s not tough on the eyes (to say the very least), but Zylka doesn’t seem completely comfortable with the more supernatural elements of his dialogue. There’s an incredibly awkward moment when he is confronting fellow witch hunter Simone (Luisa D’Oliveira), and the monologue that he has to spout at her comes across as cardboard and really badly phrased and acted. Hopefully, he’ll get more used to the dialogue if he stays on the show for any length of time.

So yeah, new plot twist and force to work against the circle, witch hunters. I guess this is the equivalent of vampire slayers ala BUFFY, but why does every single supernatural show have to have a group that hunts the people with abilities or powers? It really gets to be terribly cliché that if you have a person, or in this case a group, of individuals with supernatural talents – those people have to have a non-powered group in polar opposition that hunts their kind simply for what they are. I think I should just start calling these groups that pop up on pretty much every supernatural show “The Helsings”.

Anywho, back to the funeral at hand. The show missed a really good opportunity to connect with viewers on a deeper level with this episode. Instead of showing what a great loss Nick’s passing left with the main characters, the circle run around fighting with each other, couples break up, Cassie (Britt Robertson) gets attacked and subsequently has to fight witch hunters, but there really is no emotional core to the episode. Boo. The only emotion we really get is from Charles Meade (Gale Harold) who by the way was the person who killed Nick (to kill the demon inside him). Even poor Melissa (Jessica Parker Kennedy) only gets about 2 minutes of mourning time before she laughs with Faye and reverts back to her seemingly normal self.

This show is OK, but it’s not taking off the way that I hoped it would. The fact that one of the lead characters was already iced is fine, but at least deal with the emotions that would come with a group of kids that have grown up together suddenly losing one of their best friends. This episode was pretty much a miss for me, and served only to throw the audiences’ attention over to the firs appearance of Nick’s long lost hot brother.

So far most of the characters on this show seem very caught up in themselves, (with the exception of Cassie and her grandma) and they really just aren’t all that likeable. It’s important when establishing a new series that the audience loves the characters, and I am just not there six episodes in. We’ll see what the rest of this season brings, but it doesn’t feel as strong to me as The CW’s other L.J. Smith series THE VAMPIRE DIARIES.

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