All I’m saying is, if I were being chased, I would not try and escape into a tall tower where the only other way out is a long fall down. That is just plain common sense. Everything about the cold open irritated me —point-of-view shots running through the woods, characters we’ve only met in the series promos put in danger, and especially the in medias res cold opening front-loading the series with character-agnostic action. The Nine Lives of Chloe King is lazy, it’s part young-adult cheeseball lazy, part “Who the hell cares, we’re on ABC Family” lazy, and a lot just plain lazy. The generic bad guy chasing Chloe catches up to her at the top of this tower and throws her over the edge. As you do. Chloe hits the ground with an ABC Family-friendly lack of thud and splatter. Well, title character dead — series over, I suppose.
There’s an opening credits blurb for the naive among us to mourn. This week, Game of Thrones killed off a major, major character — the sort of fictional death that completely subverts the narrative momentum and suddenly broadens the entire story’s canvas: if Thrones‘s protagonist is expendable and sets up the mere prologue, then the story’s real focus must be epic. Some shows will risk immolating themselves to rise from the ashes — Mad Men jettisoning Sterling-Cooper, or Breaking Bad killing off the Cousins with six episodes left in the season. It could be the torpid opening, the teen drama genre, or just the prosaic dumbass-friendly commercialism of the ABC Family brand, but I wouldn’t believe for a millisecond that Chloe King would bury its main character in the pilot.
Two days earlier…
Chloe is like Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That, one of those cute girls who insists she’s a weirdo because, well, she insists that she’s a weirdo. Chloe has a single mom who will no doubt become cannon fodder at some point in the season and a social circle with some Asian nerd guy and a best friend who wears funky hats. It’s her sixteenth birthday — happy birthday, Chloe! — and she’s stuck in a mid-life crisis, complaining the standard harlequin romance novel complaints about her life being boring and needing more adventure and, bitch, you’re sixteen — no one does anything exciting at sixteen. Unless destiny chose you to be some kind of superhero, and wouldn’t that be ironic cause you were just saying…
The pilot teases out Chloe’s maturing into puberty and her alter-ego, “the Uniter,” for a good two acts, blurt out random acts of superpowers like it’s ten years old and can’t wait to try something new. You know how Spider-Man theoretically has all the powers of a spider, and then you’re like, what the hell does a spider even do? Okay, a spider can spin a web, but it’s not like they fight crime or anything. Well, Chloe has cat powers, whatever that’s supposed to mean. At least we’ve graduated to mammals. Chloe discovers she can do effortless parkour. Chloe listens to conversations across the room. Chloe’s making three-point shots on the basketball court. Chloe’s suddenly picking up three different guys in the space of a day, because cats totally hit on guys all the time. Chloe grows retractable claws. Finally, there’s this scene where Chloe’s walking home at night, alone…
Do I even need to say any more? The “once-mousey heroine who just discovered her superpowers fights off a rapist” scene is just the pinnacle of lazy, gratuitous, insensitive, obnoxious, hackneyed writing tripe. Apparently the producers of Chloe King didn’t find the exact same scene nearly as offensive as I did when it was in Heroes or No Ordinary Family or The Bionic Woman remake. I want to stab the producers repeatedly with a mechanical pencil, yelling, “No! We don’t exploit the misplaced urban fears of child rape to convince a TV character to discover self-empowerment.” My voice will be quite hoarse after yelling at the producers of The Killing for their little stunt a few weeks back.
Chloe cries in her room.
The Nine Lives of Chloe King — with its metaphors of growing up, its misfit protagonist and her friends and her single mom, dying in the pilot — is obviously trying to fill the void left by another blonde high-school superheroine show. But Buffy had Joss — can I call him just Joss? I feel like I could call him Joss — his distinct voice and awareness of what an incredibly silly premise he was working with. Chloe King is too self-serious to take its premise and run with it, and its few moments of putting ironic distance between the characters and the plot, or between the characters and the Buffy fanboy audience, are utterly misplaced. There’s the obligatory exposition of the mechanics and origin of Chloe’s powers — suffice it to say that it’s far too stupid to go into here — but Chloe’s some kind of demi-goddess thing, like The Secrets of Isis, and now she’s forbidden from kissing any boys, except this one who’s also some kind of demi-god thing and is also a dream complete fucking tool. Chloe kissing a human will kill him — cut to Chloe realizing she just killed the guy she kissed at the club last night.
While Buffy‘s dialogue dealt with the absurdity of her world by being blunt and quippy, Chloe King sounds clipped, either characters talking about themselves, over each other, or else like the writers are Martians extrapolating humanoid interactions from sitcoms. Everywhere Chloe King feels perfunctory, especially compared to something as imaginative as Buffy: its action is sluggish, the metaphor doesn’t really work, and which pseudo-mythic figure would you rather by, the Slayer or the Uniter? The Uniter is probably making high-minded speeches at third-world peace conferences while the Slayer’s having all sorts of awesome vampire sex.
Chloe hits the ground with an ABC Family-friendly lack of thud and splatter, and opens her eyes. The genre demands that now’s the time for an Idiot Plot, where Chloe needs to keep her new superpowers secret from her friends or… actually, Chloe King barrels its plot right through that trap, and the pilot’s final ten minutes, while full of groan-worthy conventions, are better than utterly insufferable. Chloe’s Asian Xander becomes the show’s first, and certainly not last, damsel in distress, getting himself kidnapped (groan). Chloe and her weird-hatted friend drive to the abandoned warehouse (groan) where he’s being held. Chloe tells her friend to stay in the car (groan). There’s an ill-lit, poorly edited fight between Chloe and the generic bad guy from the tower. Asian Xander somehow frees himself, hits the generic bad guy with a two-by-four, and the generic bad guy doesn’t even notice (groan). Then Weird-Hatted Willow hits the generic bad guy with some electrically charged wire or something and he goes down!
Little things like that make me happy. I mean, think back to Buffy and how many seasons went by before Willow ever did anything useful. Four? Five? Was Xander ever useful? I don’t think so. Didn’t he even make a heartfelt speech to Dawn in the last season about how utterly fucking useless he was? On the other hand, it’s not like Asian Xander is funny or anything, so I guess Joss is still in the lead, like that’s a huge surprise.