Episode Guide
Presidio No Country For Old Vamps The Horror Out of Time Soirees of Future Past Truth and Consequences Open Your Eyes Nadir Alice Bonds of Blood The October Faction October Faction is the perfect example of a good idea executed poorly. From contrived, stifled acting through to some clunky dialogue early on, October Faction leaves a poor first impression that takes a while to recover from. If you can get past the first few episodes and persevere however, the show does open up a bit with some intriguing ideas through this first season, with lots of twists and turns along the way to make for a pretty engaging story. Based on the comic book of the same name, October Faction’s premise sees a dysfunctional family return to their home-town for a wake where they set out trying to sell Fred’s late Father’s house. Only, it turns out the family hold a dark secret and they’re actually ex-monster hunters. The first episode introduces the family set-up and each of the quartet of players, with a light overarching narrative used to tie everything together. Parents Fred and Viv front the monster hunting duties while brother and sister Viv and Geoff make up the perfect-family archetype and soon learn they have powers of their own. However, things aren’t as clear cut as they first appear, with sprinklings of mistrust, big secrets and hellish monsters waiting around every corner. After a rocky opening episode that spends the first 35 minutes or so introducing the characters and their life, the show picks up on that CW/Supernatural vibe and spins it into a cheesy guilty pleasure that certainly improves during some of its later episodes. If you can stick it out past the early season woes and get to the good stuff, this show certainly rewards you for that but whether you’ll get that far or not remains to be seen. Episode 5 sees a change in fortune for the family too, and it’s here that the antagonistic threat of the season begins to take shape, as the truth finally starts to be revealed about the secrets in the family and more flashbacks come into play, fleshing out the show further. These are welcome segments too, and work well to add context and depth to some of the characters we’ve been following throughout the show. While the story does improve, the same can’t be said for the acting or script work. Conversations feel pretty clunky throughout and Fred in particular is a really bad culprit for some of the wooden acting plaguing this series, with little emotional resonance to a lot of his lines delivered through the season. On rare occasions this works well as dead-pan comedy relief, but other times it offsets the tone of the show completely. That aforementioned tone is strictly campy Supernatural territory and if you’re in the mood for something that taps into that same stream, cheesy dialogue and all, October Faction may just be your latest fantasy fix. However, this enthusiasm also highlights some of the issues with the series too, as the cast choices are questionable, failing to ignite the same levels of charisma one may expect from a show about a family unit consumed by secrets. Overall though October Faction is a series you really have to persevere with to get to the good stuff. There’s a lot of cheesy lines and the opening episode is particularly rough compared to some of the later segments that build up a much more consistent pacing and feel. It’s still not perfect though, and there’s some big flaws here with the scripts and acting that are hard to ignore. The cliffhanger ending and plenty of scope for a second season may be enough to iron out the kinks if this one’s renewed but for now, October Faction feels more miss than hit, doing enough to rise above feeling like a disappointment but not quite enough to shake off its poor first impression.
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