You’re Next!
By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan Haven (Season 4)
At this point in Haven’s mysterious television life, I don’t even know why I bother, except some perverse fascination keeps me coming back for more. In my perplexed discussion of Season 3, I compared this SyFy Channel original show to a train wreck, and so it goes on. I can’t stand Haven any more, yet like a train wreck I can’t stand any more, I keep staring. That’s because this particular train wreck involved trains full of human-eyed horseshoe crabs and God knows what else that might, at any moment, peek from under the wreckage.
I don’t know how I can even continue including the show in “King of the Movies” because it has been a good long time since this seemed to have anything to do with anything King ever wrote. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that the show has much to do with anything that anybody ever wrote, as I believe they are just ad-libbing crap. I used to be involved in speech tournaments when I was in high school, and there was an event for improv. Duos would draw subjects out of a hat and then improv a six- minute sketch based on that idea, and as with all improv, the idea is to think fast on your feet. Fun! And this is how I believe Haven is being filmed these days.
The amusing thing about my belief is that I think ad-libbing this batshit insanity is something of an improvement over the direction Haven was headed back in Season 2 (you remember – when they killed all the fun in the show and turned it into a gloomy class war in which everybody made their point by jamming guns in each others’ faces). Now the show has become so bizarre and schizophrenic, so heavily laden with ridiculous prophecies and assumptions and ponderous magical talismans, batted back and forth between characters who seem every bit as lost as we are, that observing it is like watching your alcoholic Uncle go through withdrawal hallucinations.
I’m going to try to describe the season’s story arc to you, and there may be spoilers. I will probably not get this exactly right.
Audrey is trapped in an interdimensional plane called the Barn (because on the outside, it looks like a barn). She thinks she’s a bartender named Lexie, because the interdimensional plane called the Barn has a honky-tonk bar for some reason. Back on Earth while searching for Audrey, Duke meets a young woman named Jennifer whose trouble is that she can hear voices in the Barn. So thanks to her, they know where Audrey is.
The Guard thinks that Audrey needs to kill Nathan in order to end the troubles. Nathan agrees that this is a swell idea. So they go get Audrey out of the Barn just at the same time as a guy named William (the actor was the sheriff on Eureka-a show I liked) is telling Audrey-Lexie to get out of the Barn because it is collapsing and so she runs out of the Barn and is picked up by the Guard and she pretends she doesn’t know she’s Audrey so she won’t have to kill Nathan but then everybody finds out she’s still Audrey, she and Nathan finally do the nasty, and then Nathan says “Kill me,” and Audrey thinks that’s a stupid idea but finally agrees to kill Nathan except, just at the last moment, the Guard decides that killing Nathan is absolutely the opposite of what she should do because a prophecy about the troubles says that it’s Opposite-Day! So nothing that worked before is going to work now. But WHY? Is it because the troubles are being mutated into EVEN WORSER TROUBLES or is there SOMETHING in Haven that is causing MORE TROUBLES and SHARING TROUBLES? YES! It is William who turns out to be a colossal dickhead because Audrey used to be Mara and Mara was his girlfriend and together they created the troubles (Dun dun DUN!) and got in trouble (the different kind of trouble) but now he wants her back but Audrey loves Nathan now except sometimes she remembers being Mara oh my!
Duke and Jennifer are a couple now because they are the only young single people left in town. Jordan, who was the last other single person in town, turns evil and then turns good and then is murdered by Duke’s brother who is troubled like Duke, only evil-style. Duke kills his brother and isn’t arrested or convicted or anything because Nathan says “Oh whatever”.
Audrey learns that William has a magic box of magic balls that can do anything the show requires, from allowing her to transfer a trouble, to exerting mind control, to joining together to form monsters that are afraid of magic books. Jennifer finds a magic book that says she is the Child of Sorrow who can see a magic door that will send William back to his own dimension (?) but they need to put four people who were born in other universes on a portal chamber in the lighthouse basement which Jennifer found via the magic door. There are also human-eyed horseshoe crabs that are omens of a great evil; they appear in one episode, blink at Jennifer, and are never mentioned again.
Duke lost his trouble when he killed his brother but now Audrey can give him back his trouble with her magic balls and she does and then accidentally gives him ALL the troubles so his blood pressure is kind of high, but she had to do it so he could kill the young father of a troubled baby because that’s the best option they could come up with in the five minutes they spent trying to think of something. At the season finale, Audrey shoves William through the portal and then she turns into Mara and wishes that she hadn’t “You fill me with inertia.” shoved William through the portal, and Jennifer might have died from boredom or maybe not.
And as exciting (?) as that all sounds, the season as a whole is quite dull, with Duke being the only character remaining who seems to understand how preposterous their world has become. All the other actors have to say things like, “What happens if I give a person a second trouble?” with a straight face without anybody replying, “That would be double trouble!” and act like this isn’t the joke that everyone wants to tell. Duke and Jennifer make a relatively sweet couple because Nathan and Audrey have had all their chemistry stomped to death. It’s not because they had sex, which I know can kill some TV relationships. Oh no no, their relationship was tanking long before they finally got around to bumping uglies. Poor Nathan has been transformed into an awful, awful character: sullen, depressed, lethargic, disinterested. He rarely speaks above a mumble. In episode one, he was letting people punch him in the face for $20.00. I think this is the most interesting thing he’s done in a while, and he should have continued. You could make a lot of money in an hour and have the rest of the day off.
Oh kids, I’ve long since stopped hating Haven. Hating Haven was so Season 2. Season 3 perplexed me and Season 4 has got me agog with wonder. What demon did they sign on with to keep this show going for Season 5 (which is currently airing and, based on the synopses, sounds every bit as nuts as Season 4)? What opinion am I trying to express here? Hell if I know. I am talking about Haven still because I don’t know how to stop talking about it. My movie buddy and I keep watching it because we’re keen to see what the hell will happen next and . . .
Oh my god. Oh my god! We’re part of the problem! The Haven demon has taken us all!