'Demons' S01E03: 'Saving Grace'

The dismal third episode of Demons fails to capitalise on last week's promising adventure, relying on tedious scenarios such as characters being trapped by rising water levels and that age-old yawnfest of deciding which wire to cut to diffuse a bomb.

The action sequences are generally poor, with a particularly woeful sequence featuring Ruby under attack by some demons early on in the episode. The use of slow-mo in conjunction with some high-flying enemies only serves to slow down the action, and the demons seem more concerned with showing off their acrobatic moves than capturing or hurting the gun-toting and increasingly annoying damsel in distress. The shoehorning of the embarrassingly bad romantic intrigue between Luke and Ruby also reeks of a misguided attempt to tick the right boxes in the genre.

As the villain of the week Tibbs, Kevin McNally does his best to inject charisma and a maniacal nature into the part. Sadly, the material he is given hardly allows him to flex many thespian muscles beyond that of a wild-eyed caricature lacking in any believable menace.

It's time to forget Philip Glenister's American accent as Rupert Galvin. Instead, can we send out the search parties to find the smiter's personality? There is very little in the way of heightened emotion and tension as he sets off to avenge the murder of his wife, as he stumbles into the unimaginatively visualised lair of Mr Tibbs. Surely the half-rat's experiment-laden laboratory could have been more impressive and not look like something out of an early 1980s New Romantic music video?

Galvin's later foray into an aquatic rat trap with Luke also misses the mark and is full of leaden, uninvolving backstory. Ruby's whole cutting the wire malarkey is also a sodden cliché of the highest order that makes us wonder how bad future episodes can be if the writers are already resorting to these stale plots. There is certainly an over reliance on Mina's flashbacks to engineer some kind of shock value.

The problem with Demons is that it lacks any dynamic edge, wastes good acting talent (especially Zoe Tapper - so good in Survivors), and is poorly written and directed. It also fails to make enough use of the outdoor London locations that look so creepy at night. Apart from those minor quibbles, all is fine!


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