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08/18/2002: not quite current with the US airdates
I just watched last week's Witchblade, Parabolic, and liked it much better than Veritas. Brief somewhat spoilerish thoughts...
BTW, if anyone knows of a good and at least somewhat active Witchblade list, I'd be glad to hear about it. The only one I'm on (on squidge.org) has almost no traffic, and the most active ones on Yahoogroups don't really appeal that much to me. I mean one is 'sponsored' (?!) by an online science fiction magazine (why exactly a group on a free service would need 'sponsoring' escapes me, but well, when people join it's probably a good way for them to get their ads to the right market segment), and the other seems to be rather merchandise and production news oriented, at least judging from their public archive.
It certainly helped that there was no JFK assassination conspiracy theory and I always like the more classical supernatural stories a bit better. I also still like the dynamics between Sara, Gabriel and Danny. I don't know why they use Ian just to pop up every now and then to make some more or less cryptical comments about evil, and Jake faded somewhat from his first season importance too. But while I miss those characters I think that the second season, which after all is a "reset" in a fashion (close to the computer game sense, because on some level the main character retained experience even though starting anew), just focuses on different characters, because the dynamics changed in the altered timeline. Even though I miss much of what I liked about them in the first season, I don't think their characters have to be equally important in the second. I've seen a couple of people saying that there should be more focus on a story arc, like there was in first season, that this was neglected. And I think in a way that is true, but then not every series needs to have a strong focus on arcs either. It is after all a serial, and I like episodes where Sara is just fighting supernatural (or other) evil with the help of the Witchblade just fine, even if those evils aren't all part of some master plan. I think Witchblade can work fine without a lot of emphasis on some underlying progress that connects and resolves everything. I never expected the second season to be a closed narration like the first just in some alternative version, so maybe that's why I'm not generally disappointed with how the season turned out so far, despite some quibbles I have.
