Bitten: Prodigal review

*Cue cheesy and stereotypical announcer voice*

On This week’s episode of Syfy‘s new series, Bitten, we pick up where episode one left off: Elena (Laura Vandervoort) standing at the gates to the Stonehaven homestead after being summoned home to help the family track down and deal with a Mutt. With a not so sneaky Clay (Greyston Holt) coming up to her from behind, the hostility between the two is already beyond obvious. A blind person could see the tension between the two! Upon arriving at the house, Elena is greeted by the head of the family, Jeremy (Greg Byrk), who (to my surprise) she is genuinely happy to see. Since not everyone has made it home yet, after a short reunion, everyone heads to bed. Elena has her room that Jeremy has, to his assurance, left untouched during her year long absence. Upon falling asleep, we are greeted by Elena’s naughty naughty dreams/memories of her and Clay from happier times. Anyone else notice the ring on the ring finger of Clay’s left hand? A hint? Or a mistake? 

The next day Elena wakes to yet another family member having arrived while she slept, and she didn’t even have to get out of bed to greet him, he’s apparently been spooning her while she slept. Here’s one of the first times you can really tell that this is a Canadian show; said family member, Nick (Steve Lund), mentions something about being able to bury a particular bone… Moving on! After being hinted at multiple times in the first episode, we are finally shown that Elena’s voracious appetite is not simply one of her many lovely traits (who doesn’t love a woman who can eat?), but a trait that all werewolves share. This is more than verified when we have a headlong shot of the table and see Antonio (Paulino Nunes) grab not one, but two fists full of bacon to go with his already prodigious breakfast. We get the first hint of the hierarchical structure of the family when everyone waits for Jeremy’s permission before digging into their own food. 

Somewhat unlike the first episode, this episode was packed with important moments. The things that I think are most important to mention are a few things that I hit on in last week’s review, but didn’t have the information to expand on. The first of these things; notice how I didn’t put Mutt or family in quotation marks this week as I did last week. The reason for this is that, through old writings that Elena is reading, we learn the difference. There are two types of werewolves: Mutts and those in the family. Those in the family follow a certain set of rules and long set doctrines, including respecting the hierarchy. Mutts are wolves that do not answer the family and thus do not follow the rules. With this being explained, it’s a lot easier for us as viewers to understand why this Mutt is such a threat, beyond his constant killing. Oh yeah, with the killing thing, I guess this kid feels like murder is like Pringles: you can’t have just one. Big surprise. Anyways, the other things that I think are really important to hit on are the fact that females can only be turned into werewolves by being bitten, and that the reason that Elena is the only known female werewolf is because she’s the only who to ever survive being bitten. I think all of these things are very crucial bits of knowledge that will help us greatly as the season progresses. 

Elena, Clay and Nick wait until after dark and then go track the Mutt by scent. Because of this guy, there are hunters looking to kill the wolf and collect the bounty that the local authorities are offering, as well as lawmen crawling all over the Danvers’ property (which is never good for this particularly “special” family), so they want to find him as soon as possible. They track him to a rundown little apartment type slum room. Having sensed the air, Elena looks under the bed and finds a “chunk of scalp”. Uh oh. As their leaving, two teenage boys see Elena come out of the building and assume that she’s the wolf with the bounty on its head. She scares them away and gets home, but being the teen boys that they are, they start spreading the word of their encounter as soon as possible. Anyone else have a feeling that in their version of events, they scared the wolf away instead of what really happened? 

I don’t want to give too much more away, which would be easy to do since it seems like this episode delivered a whole lot of story/background building info. What I will say is that it seems like this little family is weird in more than just the fuzzy way. Laura Vandervoort has definitely blossomed as an actress and I’m genuinely looking forward to where they take this. I’m not familiar most of the rest of the cast, but from what I can see, they are all fairly talented actors! So far, as many scenes that are sexual in nature, most of them are integral to the overall story, which I highly enjoy. Let’s hope that the onslaught of information that we got this week continues on into the next several episodes. I don’t know about y’all, but I really enjoy the kind of shows where there’s always a ton of balls in the air. As long as they do it well, that is.

Until next week, my geeks!

Den Of Geek Score: 4.5 Out Of 5 Stars