How’s Your Salami?

I managed to catch the second airing of the second episode of the SciFi Channel’s new show The Dresden Files tonight. In many ways, it was an improvement over the pilot, and it’ll be interesting to see how things have changed when the show returns in two weeks’ time.

You can, if you so choose, give the writers credit for getting away from the laborously overdone post-Judaic cabalism school of magic for this episode’s plot device. It might not be terribly true to the books, whose White Council might well have felt at home at a meeting of the Ordo Templi Orientis, but how exciting would the show be if Bob’s answer to every magickal crisis was “perform the Greater Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, Harry”? (This sort of thing is why neopagans, ritual magicians, and other people who know what the word “widdershins” means rarely read fantasy novels, or watch shows like Charmed; we know too many of the answers, and spot too many problems.)

On the other hand, if I had a dollar for every magical Egyptian artefact used by baddies in books, on TV, or in the movies… I’d be rich enough to lobby Congress to pass a law that those things should come with warning labels. Any why are they always real? I mean, the snooty rich guy bought the thing from overseas, online! In a just world, the recently-released baddie would have performed his little invocation to Anubis, broken the fake tablet, and then offed himself - and that would have been that.

There’s the real magic of tonight’s episode - buying an antique relic online, and getting the real McCoy.

As others have pointed out, the banter between Harry and Murphy just isn’t there. Yet. I remain optimistic that things will improve, though. Go watch the first couple episodes of The X-Files, and try to spot any good-humored interaction between Mulder and Scully. (Then again, Harry and Murphy are supposed to have a pre-existing relationship when The Dresden Files begins, which wasn’t the case, as I recall, with Fox and Dana.)

I complained somewhat in my review of the pilot that, for a wizard, Harry didn’t perform much in the way of actual magic in that episode. That complaint could hold equally true for the second episode, where Harry’s shield bracelet saves him from a couple of bullets (but not flying glass, interestingly) and he constructs a voodoo doll with Murphy’s conveniently-spilled blood, but otherwise doesn’t do much in the way of magic. After thinking about it, though, I’ve decided it’s actually a good move to not have him slinging balls of hellfire around like a demon from Charmed. Magic in our world isn’t a realm of flashy visuals designed to make the boys at Industrial Light and Magic jealous, but something far more subtle. It’s a matter of wisdom, and intelligence, resourcefulness and creativity. Nine times out of ten, it, as Harry suggested in this episode, “might be all in your head”.

One of the first things pretty much any priest, priestess, or other instructor in the magical arts teaches the n00b is the importance of self-restraint. Sure, you could go around putting the bad juju on your boss. It’ll come back to bite you in the buttcheeks, of course, but maybe you could live with that. What you might not be able to live with is the temptation to do it again, or slip to doing something worse.

It’s hinted at in the show; Bob warns Harry that making a voudoun doll of Murphy is black magic, and says something about how it could open the door to Harry’s “dark desires” or something like that. It’s true, and the same applies to flashy displays of power. Once you decide that blowing things apart with your blasting rod isn’t such a bad thing that it’s your option of last resort, it’s funny how many problems you start to run into whose perfect solutions are shots to the torso with the blasting rod. When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. When your only tool is ostentatious displays of gee-whiz wizardry, even the pettiest problems start to look like they call for two fireballs, maybe three. So, yay to the producers for keeping the flashy eye-candy to a minimum, thus far.

Just as in the books, Harry taints his soul ever so slightly by dealing with the Black Arts. Then again, it seems like every magically-gifted character in competently-written contemporary fantastic fiction (how’s that for a label?) does so. Hey, it’s an easy way to instill a sense of crisis; the Gods know Rachel Morgan wouldn’t be Rachel Morgan if she weren’t constantly worrying about the state of her blotchy soul. The marks bad juju leaves behind on your aura? Honey, not even bleach will get those out.

Anyway, to wrap this up, the show seems to be progressing interestingly. It might not be everything (James Marsters! James Marsters!) it could have been, but it’s still good. I don’t plan to review future episodes, since (as you might just have noticed) media criticism isn’t really my “thang”. In parting, to those concerned about it’s imminent demise, I have but four words for you: TekWar lasted three seasons.

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