Sanctuary – Season 1

Posted May 25, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Dr. Will Zimmerman is a profiler who’s peculiar insights and logic have got him thrown out of the FBI and made him paria amongst the cops he has to work with. While investigating the death of an immigrant and two cops, he meets Dr. Helen Magnus who runs “The Sanctuary”, a privately held research facility that – as Will finds out – gives refuge to all kinds of weird and strange creatures, referred to as “Abnormals”.

Will signs up and as part of the Sanctuary team, he goes out looking for Abnormals to help and protect them for the outside world, as well as protect humanity from dangerous Abnormals. Not everyone who knows about the existence of Abnormals is friendly, though. The Cabal, a super secret and well-funded organisation is also after them but with less good intentions in mind…

Sound and Vision:
The show is created almost entirely in front of green screen with digital backgrounds added later. Unfortunately this isn’t always as convincing and some scenes suffer from aliasing. Also skin tones are a bit off at times and the image isn’t always as sharp as it could be. Still, for the rest the image quality is pretty decent for DVD and things might have been better if the show would have been released on Blu-ray as well.

The sound isn’t bad but it’s disappointing that there isn’t a 5.1 track present.

Extras:
– Sanctuary: The Original Webisodes
– Bloopers
– Behind the Scenes Gallery
– Sneak Peak Season 2

The original webisodes that resulted in the creation of the full series have been included and that’s a major positive note!

Conclusion:
Sanctuary starts off as a run-of-the-mill sci-fi TV series with a group of good guys searching the world for “abnormals”. Just like most shows, there’s a newcomer who has to fit in and as such we get introduced to the show and before you know it there’s a routine that’s followed. Luckily the routine quickly gets thrown out when the Cabal is introduced, a rather dark organisation that has nothing good in mind. Add to that also some side characters like a vampiric Nicolas Tesla and the original Jack The Ripper and things do start to get interesting.

The CGI-overload regularly makes the series look overly artificial, but if you like steampunk, or series like Buffy and Dark Angel, then you should certainly check out Sanctuary.

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