Review: Tru Calling
Our post-mortem on the season finale.
Sky's screening of Two Weddings and a Funeral last night brought the first season of Eliza Dushku's time-hopping fantasy series to a close.
For those of you not up to speed, our favourite ex-vampire slayer plays Tru Davies, a mortuary attentant with the power to relieve days - but only if the bodies on her slab ask her to save them.
Normally Tru spends her time saving relative strangers, but the finale saw the stakes raised when wayward brother Harrison was shot dead.
This kind of problem wouldn't usually faze our heroine, but matters have recently been complicated by the addition of Jack (Jason Priestley). Brought in to boost flagging US ratings, Jack is the anti-Tru - a supposedly dark force who feels that her meddling is upetting the order of the Universe and will stop at nothing to undo her 'good' deeds.
Interestingly, we've yet to learn whether or not he's actually in the right or not, an interesting ambiguity in an otherwise straightforward show.
Naturally, Tru saves Harrison, but there was no happy ending as Jack ensured that Tru's on-off love interest copped it instead. A shame, but a brave move nonetheless.
Less successful was the choice of music - slow motion flouncing to rock chick cover versions of Phil Collins hits isn't very cool. And as for some of the fashion statements - Eliza Dushku in leather is never a bad thing, but putting her geeky boss Davis into the kind of bolero jacket that David Schwimmer might sport in a Friends Eighties flashback was a mistake.
Tru Calling has yet to become must-see-TV, but it's getting there. The addition of Jane Espenson to the production team next year can only increase its chances of become an A-list fantasy show.
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