Hemlock Grove. (Da fuq did I just watch?)

Do not read this if you haven't watched the entire thing. Or really I'd be doing you a favour if you did, but I've noticed that people prefer to find stuff out on their own rather than have me shove it down their throats.

I wanted to like this show. I really wanted to. Even in spite of those continuous comparisons to Twin Peaks (don't push your luck, know what I'm sayin'). I liked that they cast Bill Skarsgård, as a Scandinavian it's always lovely when one of our own lands a big part away from home.

I watched every single episode, and held my tongue through it all, but after the last episode I thought I was going to explode.

I won't talk about the terrible dialogue or Famkes ridiculous character, mainly because I feel it's been mocked to death already.

But have serious issues with everything that leaves you with tons of loose ends. Sure, it's based on a book, and as I haven't read that I don't know how it's done there. But one of the main issues for me was how they end one episode on a dramatic note and then the next episode doesn't start up exactly where the previous left off. That's important enough when you get a week between each episode, but one might think that when it comes to a Netflix-series where people can (and most of the time will) watch everything at once it might be an idea to put the episodes together better.

It's pretty clear that (author) have a plan to write the next big thing in teen-supernatral-literature (like we didn't have enough already), and therefore stuffs tons of stuff in the first book to be resolved later in the book series. Fine. My problem is that the Netflix series does the same, even though it's not yet been resolved if it will get a second season or not.

It's an art to introduce storylines that doesn't really have anything to do with the main plot, but the problem in Hemlock Grove is that they make the subplot way more interesting than the main plot.

They also seemed to think that mysterious is the same as not having a clue what it going on, and keep giving us drips and drops of interesting information here and there, only to follow up with boring teen-drama to draw our attention away from the fact that Destiny or anyone else for that matter probably don't have a clue.

This is basically just a series about a murderous werewolf (or vargulf if you will, nothing says badass mystery like random European words) with a Twilight-love-triangle thrown in.

Sure, maybe it was a fun twist that a shy teen girl turned into a viscious killer, but not entirely original is it. Another thing that's gotten oodles of praise is that werewolf transformation.

Why, is another question. Are we really so starved for variation in this field that anything slightly out of the ordinary is worth being called «impressive», «epic» and «mind blowing» (real quotes from ass-licking tweeters, this).

Sure, I'm all for fresh ideas. But they better be thought through before they're put on screen.

The only part I liked was that I assumed the wolf ate all the human bits to recycle them (much like spiders do with their webs), but this is only good if it works both ways, and we never got to see a wolf to human-transition. Oh wait, we did. When Christina died, she magically changed back to human with no gore at all. Nothing «mind blowing» about this.

Thing is, I forgot about the main plotline at once. Whenever they talked about the vargulf or the murdered girls all I could think was 'yeah yeah, get to the fun stuff!'

The fun stuff being the one part of this show that was slightly different from every other teen show out there: A dashingly handsome Frankenstein and his teenage monster.

Shelley was the only character I cared about and the connection between her and dr. Pryce gave infinitely much more than anything Roman/Letha/Peter got up to.

(It must be said that I do have a soft spot for anything that even vaguely recembles a mad doctor/scientist, and here he even had a massive facility with creepy experiments, and terrifying sights that drive people mad, so how could a girl like me possibly resist?)

To me this was way more exciting, and it didn't help that it was clearly linked to several characters in the story, as the only characters the series chose to focus on was the Twilight-kids.

Either the project Ouroboros-plot should have been the main one, or the should just have saved it for season two. The worst part is that they'd probably have time to put everything in there, as some episodes were super boring and seemed to spend way too much time on the Peter/Roman/Letha-love triangle. The last episode left a lot to be desired, even though it was one of the few episodes to include all the characters (which they should have done all the way).

The whole thing almost comes down to 13 hours. That's a lot of time.

They didn't save on the ouroboros-symbolism either, it's in the logo, on Lethas hand, on Romans shirt and mentioned a million times. And sure, it means rebirth and yada yada yada, but that's not good enough. When they named Pryce's project after the thing, you naturally expect that to be the reason for the heavy symbolism. Which of course it wasn't. I suspect they wanted us all just to accept Peters werewolfism or Romans transformation in the last episode to be good enough. Hell no.

This was another point that disappointed me. I closed my ears from the first time they mentioned upir. I hoped and hoped that they wouldn't go the whole Twilight-way, but creativity must have died early, as this thing seemed to follow a recipe from scene one, only with some gore and sex thrown in to throw us off the scent. Didn't work, did it.

I really wanted to believe Bill scored the a big part for being an exciting actor, but sure does feel like he only got it because his brother is already famous for being the hottest vampire on tv. So sad.

All in all this was a poorly executed idea, with good actors thrown it to give the illusion of quality.

I'm sure I could find several things in every single episode that is poorly written, badly thought through or just plain bad, but the thought of watching this thing again is less tempting than giving birth to a wolf through my face.

But someone please tell me, WTF is up with «I have seen the dragon»?!