“Haven” has come to that oft-desired point where the episodic elements blend naturally with the serialized elements, with both sides of the narrative coin bolstering each other in organic ways. It’s that sort of “happy medium” approach that a lot of Syfy genre shows try to utilize and struggle to achieve. I suspect this is part of the reason for the surprising success of “Haven” since its rough inception.
Let me first say that it’s always funny when a character has my last name, because it’s not all that common. In fact, it’s more common as a first name these days, which never ceases to confuse me. (When did “Keegan” become a logical unisex first name?) But the thought that the Keegans are one of the richest and long-standing pillars of the Haven community was a real hoot!
The “curses” have been treated as somewhat genetic and generational since the beginning, so this is really just a twist on that concept. The idea that two families would be two sides of the same Trouble continues to raise questions about the true source of all this weirdness. The cyclic nature of the story is still very much at the heart of the revelations thus far, and keeps pointing to something that happened when the town was originally founded.
It made a fairly standard “curse of the week” story a lot more interesting, because the “curse” was driven by hate and mitigated by love. So it came down to the Keegans and the Novellis getting over their feud. It also seemed to confirm that Duke and Evi are getting a lot closer, and that Chris and Audrey are definitely on the way down the romantic road.
The end of the episode, of course, plays on those expectations. Duke may be falling for Evi again, but her motivations are a lot less clear-cut. She seems to be playing him to discover the real reason why he returned to Haven, and how it connects to the deeper mysteries. My prediction is that Evi was talking with our Audrey’s version of Agent Howard.
As far as the Chris/Audrey relationship goes, I completely understand why he would be drawn to Audrey. She’s the only person in town immune to his “curse”, and she’s pretty damn attractive when all is said and done. But I’m not sure I understand why Audrey would be attracted to Chris, unless it is entirely due to Nathan’s hesitation to act on their previous attraction. It seems more designed to replace the first season Audrey/Nathan/Duke triangle, now that the Duke/Evi relationship has been established.
The only thing that threw me off in this episode was the intrusive Twitter battle between Vince and Dave. I had heard about how this episode was going to integrate Twitter into the story via a real-time, in-character Twitter feed during the airing of the episode, but I just didn’t get the point of it all. Was this an attempt at creative product placement? If so, I think they needed to think a bit more about how to integrate it into the series/story more. It just didn’t gel with the excellent relationship exploration that was happening in the main portion of the story. (That said, I’m not going to weigh that against the writing, since it felt more like something imposed.)
Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 2/4
Final Rating: 8/10
