Star-Crossed episode 5 review: Dreamers Often Lie

After four uneven episodes, Star-Crossed has finally come together for our reviewer this week...

This review contains spoilers.

1.5 Dreamers Often Lie

Despite some major flaws still inherent to what Star-Crossed has been trying to do with its first season, I was mildly impressed with the way the show tackled the high school elements in episode four. In episode five, Dreamers Often Lie, however, I was impressed with some of the adult subject matter it chose to deal with, and the willingness to give us answers is very pleasing for fans of this kind of show. It would have been entirely plausible for Star-Crossed to wait until the final moments of the season to show us that mysterious Atrian Disneyland – Eljida – was a real place, but now we know for sure that it is.

Whether it is the paradise that the Earth-bound Atrians are imagining is another question entirely, and Gloria’s decision to send her son there to protect him was a rash, but entirely understandable, move for her to make. Watching her young half-Atrian son being dragged away from his mother might have been the moment Star-Crossed finally came together for me and, with that little matter set up for a later date, we can look forward to seeing where exactly he’s been taken. With Roman also looking for it after finding a (forged) note directing him to its location, it’s safe to say we’ll definitely be seeing more before the season is over.

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Sadly, this still means that what Emery’s up to is still infinitely less exciting than the rest of the story, with her proximity to the Red Hawks really the only thing currently going on with the human side of the show’s main rivalry. Unfortunately, because the series need to make Greyson into a likeable love interest for Emery and future love rival for Roman, we learn this week that his parents, the leaders of the Red Hawks, don’t actually believe in harming anybody. The Trags, meanwhile, are pretty extremist, and this turns what could have been a nicely ambiguous debate into something a lot more black and white.

The supporting characters are starting to come together at least, with Drake and Lukas both serving Roman’s overall story in very different ways. Lukas, the obligatory tech genius, works much better as a friend for Roman than he did for Emery, for example, and it’s actually nice to see a show like this indulge in some male friendship completely divorced from whatever love stories are going on. It’s sounds obvious, with various female friendships existing on teen dramas, but it’s rarer than it should be the other way around. Then there’s Drake, who represents the Trags for the teen demographic, and chances are he’ll clash with either Roman or Greyson before long.

The mixing of Atrians and humans across the different groups is an interesting thing that seems to be forming, and paves the way for the more serious themes of the show to come to the fore before the end of the first season. The most intriguing thing right now is the existence of a half-human/half-Atrian child and its potential impact on our central characters. Drake is your typical kid in-over-his-head figure, while Greyson seems right now to be the equivalent mirror image, but maybe Emery’s link to both Greyson and Roman will mean that she’s the special snowflake set to bring the two groups together? It would be a plausible, if entirely predictable, way for things to go.

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, And Left No Friendly Drop, here.

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