Blade wraps up a great first season

Tonight Spike TV‘s Blade the Series concludes it’s first season. There’s been no confirmation of whether or not the show is being renewed. When asked about the possibility of having a second season the show’s star Kirk “Sticky” Jones was quoted to say in an interview with MediaBlvd Magazine that “I’ve been told, unofficially, that it will. I’ve got the inside scoop.”. The show did quite well with it’s pilot episode with ground breaking ratings for Spike TV. Though ratings dropped for the rest of the season the show still had a good deal of success.

This season really didn’t pull any punches. With some pretty graphic violent scenes and sexual content it’s nice to see something like this on TV where in the past you’d be hard pressed to find it in theatres.

I think the show so far has been excellent. The story has been quite gripping and I find the characters to be very well fleshed out with tons of personality. One problem as I see it is they’re spending so much time giving the vampire vilains great personality that in contrast the hero Blade and his gimp sidekick seem boring. Though one shouldn’t fault the writters and actors for outshinning them. It’s just that the concept of having a very solitary broody character like Blade makes it difficult to give him much depth. Going against this wouldn’t really be good for the series. Still I find they do a great job of compensating for this with the other characters. You can’t really have a series who’s heroes are villains so Blade just sort of needs to be there.

The cast has done a great job. Kirk “Sticky” Jones is great as the stoic bad ass Blade. He’s not Wesley Snipes but he fills his shoes and brings more than just emulating. The stylish and cool Marcus, protrayed by Neil Jackson plays both a very civilised and clean cut business man and viscious and capable adversary to Blade. Jessica Gower who plays Chase plays a wonderfull bitch. Whether that’s her natural demeaner or not doesn’t affect the fact that she delivers a sweet performance who’s hotness is superceeded only by the smokin’ hot Jill Wagner as Krista, Blade’s mole/love interest/antagonist/whatever! The character of Shen by Nelson Lee hasn’t had an excessive amount of screen time. He’s no Whistler but then it would be pretty lame if his character was just like him. My favourite performance of the season by far had to be Emily Hirst as the incredibly creepy Charlotte, the young pure blood vampire who verbally chastises otherwise intimidating characters and shows a disturbing preference for the blood of newborn babies. I wouldn’t have thought that a child could give such a performance as to make me believe that she was really a few hundred years old but here we are. I was starting to worry about how they’d deal with a vampire character who’s actress was so young that she would in time show clear signs of aging. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem with her…

Hats off to a great season filled with action packed excitement and a slew of powerfull scenes that made me cringe and look away more than once. In a time with a lot of crap on TV here’s hoping we get a lot more of this great show.

Links:
Spike TV’s official site
Official forum
Blade: The Series Myspace page
Series page at IMDB
Blade: The Series on Wikipedia
A popular fan site
Original powet.tv post about Blade: The Series premiere