As much as I took issue with last week's episode, at least we got some bona fide monster action. This week's guest-starring abnormals were of the humanoid variety, which made for less of that sometimes lovely Sanctuary weirdness. In trying to get a hold of a rare fire elemental, the Sanctuary team is pit against a crew of Chicago gangsters led by a type of human-looking abnormal called a Dyukon named Duke. Apparently, the Dyukon's key racial features are bouts of uncontrollable rage and they emit a radiation from their hands that makes contact with them very...unpleasant.

Seriously? Rage and radiation hands? Does the Sanctuary universe have a lot of radiation deaths whose victims have handprints burned into their bodies? It seems like it would be a widespread problem. Anyway, this particular Dyukon managed to become a mob boss thanks to a pair of shiny rage-suppressors worn on his temples. When the mob boss's rage levels get too high, his lieutenant presses a remote that relieves the rage with a vaguely animalistic groan. The effect makes our mob boss resemble a low-rent Frankenstein.

But most of the action focuses on our second abnormal, Jimmy, played by Amanda Tapping's Stargate SG-1 co-star Michael Shanks. Jimmy, a former hoodlum turned Sanctuary courier. Jimmy has a sort of lopsided kangaroo's pouch, but instead of using it to hold babies, he smuggles abnormals inside it. Jimmy spends most of the episode nursing a wounded Kate Freelander. By the way, is Kate an abnormal? She gets shot an awful lot and never seems in much danger of bleeding to death, nor does she have much trouble standing or raising a gun afterward. In one of those improbable television coincidences, it turns out that Jimmy killed Kate's father many, many years ago (and wore a really odd hat while doing it). And the guilt from meeting his victim's daughter is potent enough to make him sacrifice his life.

It seems like there was something missing from this plot, or perhaps I'm missing something. Henry mentions that, just a few months ago, Duke the Dyukon was a pit fighter and now suddenly he's a high-ranking mob boss. The problem is, this guy's not exactly the brightest bulb on the strand. How did he manage to become a mob boss? Since he died at the end of the episode, we won't hear it from him. The optimist in me hopes that someone else is pulling the strings, and that we'll find out in a later episode that someone is setting up easily manipulated abnormals in positions of power to thwart the Sanctuary Network. If so, could the next abnormal gangster please have tentacles or something?

Updated with squid-fighting action.

Admittedly, I was prepared to dislike this episode on principle. "Next Tuesday" (without the words "See You" in front of it) has always been teased as Magnus and Will getting stranded somewhere and having a potentially fatal encounter with an abnormal. Sound familiar? It should if you've seen the first season episodes "Kush" (in which Magnus and Will crash in the Himalayas and have to survive a killer abnormal) and "Requiem" (wherein Magnus and Will are stuck in a submarine while Magnus suffers a deadly parasitic infection). Does Sanctuary not pay their other actors enough?

Anyhow, while on a conservation mission to capture the rare vampire squid from the Gulf of Mexico, Magnus and and Will's helicopter crashes inside a decommissioned oil rig, causing the vampire squid to escape. However, we're quickly assured that the vampire squid isn't nearly as exciting as it sounds. Apparently, the descriptor "vampire" refers to it's intellect rather than a penchant for sucking blood (Why? Because Nikola Tesla is a vampire?), and the squid is quite docile. Immediately, I smelled another Big Bertha bait and switch.

"Next Tuesday" is also plagued by incredible crimes against logic, too many to fully enumerate here. Hatches on the helicopter that were open in one shot are mysteriously closed in the next. An acetylene torch similarly appears and disappears. At one point, the helicopter sinks rapidly, but fails to pull any people or objects down with it. And despite claims that the helicopter is soaked in fuel, it only explodes when it's convenient. For such a claustrophobic episode, there is remarkably little attention to detail.

But there was one redeeming factor. We actually got to see some abnormal-on-abnormal violence. It turns out that when the team lifted off, they were carrying an unexpected stowaway: a clever and vicious sea scorpion. And, as a bonus, the normally docile vampire squid becomes quite violent when faced with a turf war with the sea scorpion. After last week, it was refreshing to see a little monster action.

So who wins in the battle between scorpion and squid? As it turns out, no one. The squid bites it, the scorpion bites it, the helicopter bites it, and Magnus and Will are left treading water inside the oil rig (presumably, they'll eventually be rescued). So much for monster conservation.

Last night's episode began with what was supposed to be the ultimate Sanctuary shocker: Bigfoot turns up dead in the Sanctuary's morgue. I can't imagine that we're supposed to believe for a moment that the Big Guy is actually dead; he already almost died once this season, and it's unlikely he'd get such an ignominious demise without some sort of build-up. But then there's the kicker: Declan Macrae (a character I constantly forget is on this show) believes that Helen Magnus murdered the Big Guy. Macrae, who's more than ready to hop in as head of the Old City Sanctuary, claims that Bigfoot discovered that Magnus was suffering from a degenerative mental disorder and that Magnus decided to silence him, permanently. Of course, Will is having none of this and, after shedding a few requisite tears for the Big Guy, launches an investigation to prove Magnus' innocence. It doesn't help matters that Magnus is increasingly batshit insane and that there's a video of Magnus actually shooting Bigfoot. By the time the Triad, a group of psychic interrogators from the Sanctuary Network, show up, Will is completely at a loss.

As it turns out, though, Magnus really is crazy — crazy like a fox. She's out to expose the Triad members, who are after Big Bertha, an abnormal capable of leveling whole cities. And why might the Triad want to get their mitts on such a creature? I'll let the lovely Erica Cerra (who's really been making the rounds on Syfy shows this year) explain above.

I definitely perked up at the description of Big Bertha. Tectonic plate-shifting abnormal? Yes, please. We may have had our zombie apocalypse a few episodes back, but we've never seen a single abnormal on such a large scale. I was looking forward to seeing Big Bertha, even if it was just a little glimpse. But sadly, Big Bertha was just a cataclysmic tease, and when Cerra's Triad member opened the shipping container that allegedly held her, there was nothing inside, nada. Instead, we were treated to a breakdown of just how clever Magnus' plan to expose the Triad was. Shooting Bigfoot with a paralytic chemical? Ah yes, very clever. Placing an insanity-inducing beetle in her brain so she could hide her true thoughts from the Triad psychics? Uh-huh, brilliant. Coding a message to Kate so that the team could snare Erica Cerra in Magnus' trap? Yes, we get it, Magnus; you're a genius. But I'm still miffed we didn't get our big earthquake-maker.

I'm not sure what I could have hoped for from this classic monster match-up — certainly not a cage match, but maybe abnormals playing poker? Alas, Sanctuary has not time for such frivolities. Our rubber-suited movie monster is Jack, a creature called a Plesky who has been living in captivity with werewolf Henry's pal Rachel. Rachel has been socializing Jack and teaching him sign language; he's basically like Koko the gorilla if Koko occasionally shot out deadly spores. Yes, Jack has shot his deadly, deadly spores into Rachel, who will die if Magnus and her team can't find a cure. Meanwhile, everyone is trying to figure out why the supposedly tame abnormal poisoned its foster mom. While it's true that people who keep dangerous animals around often wind up tiger chow, the Sanctuary team isn't paying enough attention to Rachel's twitchy husband who obviously has it in for Henry and at one point grabs a gun to shoot up the Plesky's containment cell (nice security, folks). It turns out that Rachel's husband set in motion the events that led to the Plesky's poisonous eruption, and once again we learn that humans are the real monsters. This struck me as a particularly bland entry from Sanctuary, but at least we got to see Henry wolf out a bit, and it was nice to have an abnormal that wasn't computer generated.

Still, next time, I'd like to see abnormals playing poker — or at least a few rounds of Go Fish.

Sasquatch Hate Vampires: We've apparently abandoned the Lazarus virus plotline from last season. The villainous Cabal had created the Lazarus virus, which infects Abnormals with a sort of rabies, so that they go mad and attack normal humans before sputtering out and dying. As interesting as the monster apocalypse would have been, if the writers felt they couldn't do anything with it, it's just as well that they've ditched it. Nikola Tesla (who's been a vampire for the last 100+ years) managed to develop a cure, and has been trotting the globe to deliver it to infected Abnormals. The only critter who won't take it is Bigfoot, because apparently Sasquatch and vampires don't mix. This means that Bigfoot is sitting in quarantine, suffering and gradually going crazy. What fun.

Vampires Can't Get Drunk (as Much as They Might Want To): I'm so terribly glad that the writers had the good sense to keep Nikola Tesla around. He's just the right kind of obnoxious to lighten up the often drearily serious cast. He's taken to calling Will (still the show's least interesting character) "Huggy Bear," and he's managed to empty out Helen Magnus' wine cellar, even though alcohol doesn't affect him in the least.

There's Such a Thing as Perfect DNA: So the Cabal's latest nefarious plot involves kidnapping people who were once part of a government project to create children with "perfect" DNA. These kids had their genomes scrubbed of any mutations, making them perfectly normal in contrast to the genomes of those wacky Abnormals. Really? What on Earth was their baseline for that?

The Crazy Monster Maker Just Wants to be Your Mommy: Since the Cabal isn't going to be a huge part of season two, I guess we won't be seeing much of the Cabal's monster making scientist after the next episode. That's a real shame, because this lady is batshit crazy in the best way. She's gradually transforming Magnus' brainwashed and kidnapped daughter Ashley into some kind of superbeast, but it's okay because she kind of loves Ashley (in a maternal way) and doesn't want her to ever feel any pain. She stole the show with each creepy stroke of Ashley's hair.

Don't Feed the Sexy Mercenary: Since Ashley's gone AWOL, the Sanctuary needs a new hot girl to be its resident badass. Enter Kate Freelander, with the line, "Yes, that's my real name, even though it sounds made up." Oh, Sanctuary, how I wish you were always so self-aware. At the moment, though, Miss Freelander is working as a kidnapper for the Cabal, at least until she gets captured by Magnus and company. Henry is briefly left the guard her, but screws the pooch when he falls for her seductive brownie bar-eating ways:

Hanging Out with Jack the Ripper Makes You Violent: Who knew? Magnus has been spending an awful lot of time with John Druitt, her sometimes crazy husband who also happens to be Jack the Ripper, sometimes by moonlight. And when, in an inspired moment of violence, she shoots Kate Freelander in the foot, boring old Will is convinced that Druitt is rubbing off on her. Oh look, actual conflict between the characters that has nothing to do with mind control or insanity! There may be hope for them yet.

All Monsters Have Terrible Yellow Eyes: If it worked for Where the Wild Things Are, it must work for Sanctuary, too. Ashley's monstrous transformation is complete, signaled by her eyes turning a rather awful shade of mustard. Oh, and she's got retractable fingernails, giant incisors, and the ability to rapidly heal her wounds. Basically, she's Wolverine with more eyeshadow. And the Cabal's big plan is to overwrite the genetic code of the people with "perfect" DNA to make more monsters just like her.

Sanctuary is Still Kind of Ridiculous: I tend to knock Sanctuary for not owning its weird ideas enough (maybe I just want to see more aphrodisiac Tribbles) and giving its characters way too much down time. But last night's episode was surprisingly watchable, even if it opted to play things fairly straight rather than go for over-the-top weirdness. Still, the powers that be can't seem to decide if the show is serious or a bit B-movie campy, as evidenced by this final scene:

So, we open on a scene that is suspiciously similar to the opening of the pilot. In a small, dark apartment, a woman walks in on a dead body and a creepy kid. This time, the man has a rather impressive hole in his chest, likely from the rifle by his side. A teenager sits on the bed, staring at the body and sketching a detailed portrait of the dead fellow as a demon. But we know this kid is an abnormal because he moves his hand from top to bottom like a printer. And he’s super fast. And his eyes sparkle.

Will’s buddy from the police department asks for Will’s help in solving the case. The death appears to be a suicide, but the police have their doubts, and they feel the key might be the deceased’s autistic son, who draws incredible sketches of monstrous beings. And Will and Helen decide that the best thing for an autistic boy who has just suffered a terrible trauma is to take him out of his familiar setting and bring him into the freaky Sanctuary. And Will’s supposed to be psychiatrist.

The boy turns out to be some sort of human abnormal detector, with an added bonus: he’s got Superman’s heat vision. The episode avoids attributing the boy’s abilities to his autism, and solving the death hinges on realizing his powers are genetic (and discovering the home dungeon his late father built beneath the floorboards). But as with last episode, the primary plot is less about telling a story than it is about revealing something about one of the primary characters, in this case Will. Will apparently has super detective powers where he notices things that other people don’t, and there’s a little flash effect every time he does it. He’s like the guy from Psych without the charm.

The best thing about this episode: more Henry. Henry is wrestling with his burgeoning lycanthropy and we learn that Helen took Henry when he was a child, preventing him from being raised by his own werewolfy kind (It’s not clear why. Maybe she wanted a puppy). Anyway, after resolving to get his werewolf bits cut out of him, his canine nose saves the day, and he decides to roll with his transformation. I’m happy for anything that advances Henry’s story, although I’m less pleased with his CG counterpart.

And while the episode was lacking in conflict, it does end on a nice note of intrigue. Will’s cop buddy tells him that the murder case has been pulled and that some shadowy figures in a van made off with the body. Is this the cabal? A rival research group? The government? Nikola Tesla? Perhaps the Sanctuary world is about to get a little deeper.

After last week’s Nubbin invasion, this episode proved a welcome break from the CGI-overload. We open with Helen Magnus in Rome, delivering a lecture on abnormals. Once she is finished, she’s ambushed by Nikola Tesla, who looks as young as Helen does and greets her with a kiss. Warning her that the Cabal (the rival abnormal trackers from the second episode) is on her tail, he drags her into the building’s (computer generated) catacombs, where she spends most of the episode running from the Cabal’s gunmen and enduring Tesla’s incessant chatter.

Meanwhile, John Druitt reappears to do what he does best: kidnapping Ashley. Despite handcuffing the blond monster hunter to a chair, Druitt appears rehabilitated, telling Ashley that her mother is in trouble and that he needs to know where Helen is so he can rescue her. Ashley, who was already fooled by Druitt once this season, isn’t having any of it, so Druitt tries to win her over, with surprisingly little urgency, by telling her about his past with Helen.

Between Tesla and Druitt, we learn that Helen, Druitt, and Tesla were all part of a scientific research group known as “The Five.” In a particularly mad scientist moment, Helen manages to distill a serum from the blood of vampires, a long-extinct race of abnormals, and the Five inject themselves with it. As a result, Helen became immortal, Druitt became a time-traveling, teleporting maniac, and Tesla became a bona fide vampire. And, as an added bonus, Tesla wants to revive that noble race and rule over all humanity.

The show’s B-plot focuses on Will, Bigfoot, and Henry, who have been left behind to hold down the fort. Naturally, some abnormal is loose in the Sanctuary and has started messing with the wiring and attacking the residents. Since every single clue points a big neon arrow at Henry, who has come down with some mysterious fever, Will suspects that the Sanctuary’s technician is the culprit. When the actual monster (some random lizard that inexplicably knew to avoid the cameras and disable the motion sensors) appears and attacks Will, Henry saves the day and reveals himself as some sort of werewolfish abnormal, although I think the biggest surprise about Henry is that the dude has a lot of body piercings.

There were little tidbits in this episode that I’d like to see more of throughout Sanctuary. Helen notes that the likes of Caesar and Alexander the Great were really vampires who held humanity beneath their thumbs, suggesting a whole alternate history of the world based around abnormals. We saw some of this earlier with the “Fata Morgana” episode, and I hope the writers are able to weave these strands into a rich and cohesive universe. Tesla’s ability to make vampires from dead bodies using his own blood and an electrical charge was also a nice and unexpected blending of science and myth, and helped reduce the randomness of making Tesla a vampire in the first place.

I had mixed feelings about Druitt’s return to sanity. Although it was weirdly plausible that Tesla’s electroshock torture would reboot Druitt’s brain, psychotic Druitt made for an interesting villain. Still, since he isn’t laying off the insanity-causing teleportation, I suspect we’ll see deadly Druitt again, and Helena and Ashley will likely face the dilemma of whether to destroy him or attempt to cure him again.

Tesla, with his amoral tendencies and his obnoxious attempts at charm, could also make a comeback as either ally or antagonist. Although I don’t believe the writers did enough with him this episode (I found myself wanting the episode to end with him in an awesome lab conducting horrible experiments on his vampire creations), he possessed a stronger personality than many of the show’s main characters (read: Will) and actually managed to elicit an emotional response from the normally cool Helen.

But Sanctuary continues to suffer from a lack of extras, and almost every scene has too much space and too few people to fill it. I got momentarily excited when Will suggested interviewing some of the abnormals, hoping for a stream of brief, funny, and weird interactions between Will and the Sanctuary’s residents, but those hopes were quickly dashed. Maybe now that the Sci Fi Channel has picked up Sanctuary for another season, they can hire a few actors and makeup artists to populate it.

This week’s episode, “Nubbins,” opens on our core team of cryptozoologists inside a cargo ship. The ship belongs to one of Dr. Helen Magnus’ monster hunters for hire who was supposed to deliver his latest find to the Sanctuary, but never checked in, so it comes as little shock when the team finds the entire crew has become monster chow. They quickly discover two culprits: some fuzzy little critters that look like a chinchilla swallowed a Furby, and a gigantic, snarling dog. Both animals have sharp teeth and the ability to become nearly invisible, but because the fuzzkins are so adorable and the dog leaps at them on sight, the blame falls on the pooch.

Naturally, there’s more to the furry creatures, nicknamed Tribbles Nubbins, than meets the eye. Once in the Sanctuary’s replicated habitat, they start breeding, quickly escape, and start clogging the Sanctuary’s tubes with semi-invisible fuzzballs. There’s also something in their biochemistry that makes people develop amorous feelings for one another. The main target of their super pheromones is Will Zimmerman. First, the young scientist shares a tense, fireside moment with eternally youthful Helen. Then, when visiting Helen’s daughter Ashley, Will gets squirted on by Ashley’s pet Nubbin, and the younger Miss Magnus starts wiping Will down as if Nubbin pee were Spanish Fly.

This episode exposes some of the key problems with Sanctuary. The Nubbin aphrodisiac provides a missed opportunity for some much-needed character development among the central cast. Leaving Will and the Magnus women uninhibited could have offered an insight into who they are, what they desire, and how they behave after realizing their normal boundaries have been crossed. Instead, they act generically lusty toward one another, breathing heavily and lingering too close. And, because the writers seem congenitally allergic to conflict among their major characters, highly rational Will and highly rational Helen realize that the Nubbins are to blame for their sudden bouts of “randiness” before any faux-pas can be made. The creature-induced lust doesn’t even distract the trio from hunting down the escaped Nubbins, suggesting that the only purpose the subplot served was to introduce an eventual love triangle between Helen, her daughter, and Will.

The show also keeps forgetting the other residents of the Sanctuary. In theory, dozens, if not hundreds of “abnormals” reside openly throughout the building, and I kept hoping the Nubbin love would create an all-out orgy of lizard men and fish people. Instead, the abnormal residents were largely ignored, trotted out only to impress a rare human visitor to the Sanctuary. Perhaps budgetary constraints prevented us from seeing the full effects of the Nubbins’ pheromones, but when your show operates almost entirely on green screens and CGI, you have to work that much harder to make your world seem real.

The episode also features a somewhat vestigial subplot about a young girl who has inherited her grandfather’s empathic ability. We’re meant to believe that her ability proves vitally useful to bringing down the obnoxious Nubbins, but she mostly just reinforces ideas the other characters already had. It’s meant to serve as a reminder that some abnormals are good and useful rather than dangerous and destructive. That may be a noble aim, but the fact is, dangerous and destructive make for better television.

Sanctuary's fascination with monsters can makes for good fun if you're watching in high definition, but this week, I wasn't, making me all the more thankful that this episode, titled "Folding Man," oriented around a mystery with an exciting, if predictable, finish instead of chasing a special effect in circles. For those that were watching in high definition, there was the occasional visual to get excited about. A flying druglord soared over the fictional Old City setting, and an inspired trip to Austin, Texas gave rise to CGI that felt more like the dystopia of Strange Days than the show's usual monster movie. And the new title sequence that debuted shined as well.

But those were garnishes on a meal with a noir-ish, The Usual Suspects feel. It's a promising direction for the show: Sanctuary's tiny cast is suited for noir, a gritty feel would counter the glitzy special effects nicely, and on a series like this not much can shift radically from episode to episode — another noir convention. That's why the abrupt ending of "Folding Man" was on the disappointing side. Without spoiling anything, we'd welcome a return cameo for the main villain here, the elusive criminal genius Nomad.

For the most part they stuck to the main cast in this ep, with little in the way of extraneous outside characters. Perhaps the biggest key to the show going forward is to dispense with the annoying skepticism of Robin Dunne's psychologist Dr. Will Zimmerman, and the show may have put that thread behind it for good in the last scene this week. He and the other three regulars are developing a charming chemistry. No one lacks appeal or is particularly hard on the eyes. Perhaps more importantly, one one seems ready to laugh at Amanda Tapping's Victorian accent. Inoffensive is a step up from actively bad...isn't it?

Last night's episode concerned a centuries-old cult and echoes of the bubonic plague - and the only efforts at the science part of "science fiction" was Amanda Tapping looking vaguely concerned at the prospect of a CGI corpse. I don't suppose these Stargate vets have read Connie Willis' masterful Doomsday Book, the best presentation of the Middle Ages ever done in the genre? Had they done some research, there was a fine episode here buried under layers of dead skeletons. Once you've got a bunch of people with skulls for heads being gunned down willy-nilly, is time travel really that much of a stretch?

It's not that Sanctuary is entirely bad, it's that even when it's good, it's having trouble rooting itself in any firm ground between humans and CGI monsters. At the premiere, exec producer Damian Kindler mentioned an episode that takes place entirely in one warehouse-like setting. It's high time they brought that convention of the cobwebs and bonded these people together in some meaningful way.

I still believe there's a hint of something promising here in this concept. On the Fringe podcast this week show executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci answered a question about the future of Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson's characters: basically, will there be intercourse?

The Fringe creators responded by saying that you don't want to plan everything out on a series. It's fun to watch things happen to the characters along with the audience instead of plotting everything to the hilt. With that said, explicit CGI-enhanced sex between psychologist (Robin Dunne) and Amanda Tapping's Hayden Panettiere-inspired daughter (Emilie Ullerup) should probably be pushed to episode 3, and fast.

Did you watch, and did you weep softly during each brutal murder?