Siren: Northern Exposure

May 8, 2020 11:33 AM - Season 3, Episode 7

Ryn, Ben, and Maddie must recruit new allies in the fight against Tia; Helen seeks answers when she's haunted by Donna's spirit; Tia obtains dangerous weapons she plans to use in her fight.

DenOfGeek Season 3 Episode 7 Review: Northern Exposure - Siren expands its world from Bristol Cove and meets some new mermaids in the process.

posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice (2 comments total)

This episode has everything except Levi and Annie?

* Ryn gets to look wondrously at land animals / technology like a season 1 episode.
* New tribe!
* Worldbuilding gets done about merm superpowers,
* New small town!
* Trans mermen!
* Ben gets over the weird jealousysuspicion about Robb.
* Real science!
* Dodgy CGI?
* Ben is love. Ben swims. Ben uses 95% of the episode's CGI budget. Ben must learn MermSL now.
* Couples have coupletalks. Still missing our OT3, but at least Ben and Maddie aren't grumping at each other.
* Yet another coverup comes home to roost.
* Xander is concerned.
* Helen is investigating.
* Tia is violent.
* Ted is not on screen.

Overall probably the best episode I've seen, except for maybe "Leverage" where they destroyed the drilling ship. In less listy matters, I loved the contrast between Tia and Robb in their long-term careers on land - they've taken widely diverging paths not just in morals and goals, but also in the resources, skills, and connections they've built in order to achieve them.

Ryn was surprisingly OK with Ben doing stem cell injections. Where did she think he got them? He sure didn't mention that he dug up the grave of the half-transformed merm from season 2.

Tia has become a lot less interesting since she moved on from musing about human society and trying to Heathers Ryn into her murdercult, to just running the murdercult. I appreciated the conference-room discussion about what her plan was, though, since it was clear from episode 2 that even with the whole of merdom behind her conventional weapons wouldn't be enough for her plans.

Trans merms was what I was missing when I finished watching the previous season, and here they delivered two plus a whole lineage of offscreen ones. A very different culture around it, but with enough similarities to send as clear an affirmative message about T as the show already has about LGB. For me it's a bit iffy that the tribe decides who goes into the transition pool, but of the two trans merms we've seen, one spent 15 years on land and has enough money and connections to detransition pretty easily if he wanted, and the other as far as we know is the leader of the tribe, jumped in without hesitation, and apparently took his sea-scissors to give himself a mer-haircut to pass the time.

Also, the one-night transition pool. Anyone else want one of those in their bathroom? Possibly with a dial to adjust the hormone balance and a group of friends to fix it when it breaks? This is true cis allyship, folks.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:36 PM on May 8, 2020

Ryn was surprisingly OK with Ben doing stem cell injections. Where did she think he got them? He sure didn't mention that he dug up the grave of the half-transformed merm from season 2.

Yeah, that was a bit too handwavy -- especially if Donna is haunting Helen over the desecration of her body. Shouldn't the spirit of the body in Ben's cooler want to get in on the action?

I miss the Ben/Ryn/Maddie thruple, but the introduction of trans mermen is a pretty great addition to the show's mythology.
posted by oh yeah! at 3:44 PM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]