Syfy, July 15, 22 (US)

Audrey Parker confronts her doppelganger (or is it the other way around), while new sheriff Nathan confronts the plagues of Exodus and the people of Haven hallucinating their worst fears.

Season one of Haven ended on a weird and unexpected cliffhanger, as another Audrey Parker turns up in town, making us wonder who we’ve been watching for an entire season. The mystery remains at the end of these two opening episodes of the second season, which are otherwise business as usual stories as a recently widowed man inadvertently spreads the plagues of Exodus (right up to death of the firstborn, something that concerns Nathan) and a man who can steal people’s ‘afflictions’, causing the spread of fear across town as folk hallucinate their worst fears.

There’s too much of The X-Files (or, going further back, even Friday the 13th: The Series) in this show, with the ‘trouble’ of the week putting the main characters through the usual process of trying to discover and contain the cause. Threaded throughout is the mystery of just who ‘our’ Audrey really is, and what is her connection to the woman in the archive photo (and the one hallucinated by one of the newspaper journalists). This looks likely to be a season-long, slow-burn mystery, so viewers better be prepared to stick with it, if they can stand the increasingly tedious supernatural mystery of the week stuff.

Verdict: There’s a repetitious element to Haven that might become off-putting before we get answers to the character mysteries posed.

Episode 1 ‘A Tale of Two Audreys’: 5/10

Episode 2 ‘Fear & Loathing’: 6/10

Brian J. Robb

Leave a comment