By: Brandon Wolfe
All season long, I have been imploring ‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series’ to stake out its own claim and distance itself from the film that sired it. Apart from some tweaks here and there (Richie being controlled rather than insane, Sex Machine being a professor), the series has shown a frustrating reluctance to deviate from its source material in any substantial way. It never seemed to fully grasp that we’ve already seen the film and that a television series needs to establish a unique identity in order to thrive. Better movie-to-TV adaptations like ‘Hannibal’ and ‘Fargo’ understand this and give us stories evocative of the films that spawned them, yet wholly original on their own merits. ‘Dusk’ is content to merely gussy up the film that shares its name.
“Boxman” is the point where ‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series’ officially waves bye-bye to ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ the movie. And it turns out that when the series finally severs those ties in a decisive way, what it winds up becoming is ‘Inception’, of all things. For, you see, this week Santanico has trapped Seth and a newly vampiric Richie in an elaborate mystical construct called the Labyrinth of the Mind, a dreamlike pseudo-reality populated by echoes of people from the brothers’ past. This is a centuries-old ritual created by the mysterious Lords of the Night as a series of trials the subjects must endure. The brothers are told that if they want to be set free, they must complete each trial, the ultimate goal being freedom from servitude for Santanico from the tyranny of the Lords.
Honestly, ‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series’ was better off merely being ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’. At least then, the things it was ripping off before were fitting in context. Now the show is grabbing elements from movies at random. In the Labyrinth, the Geckos, clad in slick grey suits, are thrust into ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, as they are instructed to reenact a heist Seth once unspooled upon a shady bigwig named Big Jim Thompson (played by the great William Sadler). Richie, whose vampire skills are present within the Labyrinth, including the ability to shapeshift, runs interference with Thompson while Seth goes after the big score. And because the Labyrinth is a free-floating realm fueled by the minds of its participants, Seth encounters his deceased father, who tells him that the fire Richie once saved Seth from as a child was started by Richie himself.
Meanwhile, while the Geckos are channel-surfing from one blatant movie homage to another, the rest of the cast is still stuck in ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, making their way through the catacombs of the Titty Twister and looking for Scott. Ranger Gonzalez reconnects with the group and informs them that Scott has already been turned, but they continue looking for him anyway. And then Ranger Gonzalez decides to help them look, because no one on this show is altogether that bright. When Kate and Sex Machine are separated from Jacob and Gonzalez, we discover that Sex Machine is a turncoat who intends to sacrifice Kate. The Sex Machine reveal is pretty shrug-worthy, honestly. He isn’t a substantial enough character for the twist to have any real bite to it. It’s the kind of hoary thing lesser shows tend to do simply because it’s a thing to do.
The change to the dynamic this week is pretty surprising. Even though Seth and Richie’s dreamscape adventures aren’t terribly interesting and feel ill-fitting to this show, it’s pretty out-there, and not a move I expected the show to make. I was expecting a big vampire-hunting blowout like the one that closed out the film. I suppose we may still get that next week, but it feels like the show has its own agenda at this point. This is good, technically. It’s what I’ve wanted the show to do from the get-go. I just wish that when the show began coming up with new ideas, they weren’t merely new old ideas.
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