Hemlock Grove: Season 3 Review

By Jesse Schedeen

Note: this is a largely spoiler-free review of Hemlock Grove’s third and final season.Click here for a spoiler-filled review of the final episode of Hemlock Grove. 

Beneath all the gore and sex and general campy weirdness, Hemlock Grove is a show about people who look like monsters on the outside slowly becoming monsters on the inside. That’s very evident in the show’s third and final season, which debuted on Netflix last week. This is by far the darkest and most depressing season of the three. And maybe because of that added darkness, it’s also the best. As flawed as Hemlock Grove still is, at least it goes out on a high note.

Season 3 picks up pretty much where the previous one left off. Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgård) and Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron) are still reeling from their encounter with the deceptively pleasant Dr. Spivak (JC MacKenzie), who revealed his true form and kidnapped Miranda (Madeline Brewer) baby Nadia in the Season 2 finale. As the duo continue the hunt, Roman’s sister Shelley (Madeleine Martin) struggles to find her place in the world after being denied a peaceful death, while his mother Olivia (Famke Janssen) remains hellbent on clinging to life by any means necessary. Caught in the middle of these conflicts is Dr. Pryce (Joel de la Fuente), who is racing against the clock to unlock the secrets of “the Spivak creature” and crawl his way out from under Olivia’s thumb.

For whatever else this show has done wrong over the course of three seasons, Hemlock Grove can at least boast a talented cast. Skarsgård and Liboiron are as good as ever, bringing a great deal of intensity to their characters as Roman and Peter deal with some pretty dramatic problems over the curse of ten episodes. Contrary to the previous two seasons, the two start off as close friends and allies and slowly find themselves pulled apart over the course of the season. Liboiron in particular stands out as his character struggles to hold onto those few people in his life he truly cares for.

Roman and Peter on the same side… for now.

Dr. Pryce is easily the most entertaining character this season. He’s every bit the temperamental Type A personality he was before, but there’s a newfound sense of desperation to the character this season. Thanks to the huge pressure that comes with wrangling the Godfrey family and a steadily worsening drug habit, Pryce becomes a very manic, high-strung character here. At the same time, further insights into his past, his love life and his relationship with Shelley help better flesh out the character. As for Shelley, Martin has some of the most emotionally gut-wrenching moments of the season. She starts out the season at an incredibly low ebb – drowning in medication, a pariah to the whole town and stuck living with a mother who only values her for her trust fund. Shelley’s rise and fall over the course of the season hits harder than any other storyline.

As for Janssen’s Olivia, she’s the one relatively weak link in the main cast. Not unlike Jada Pinkett Smith in Gotham, Janssen often seems as if she’s acting in a different show from the rest of her cast mates. She’s a little more flamboyant and campy than the others. This season encourages Janssen to go all-out with her performance, particularly as her cancer escalates and she begins suffering from chronic hallucinations. Olivia can be a very entertaining character at times, but more often she’s a little too much. It becomes difficult to ever sympathize with a character who’s so relentlessly, remorselessly evil in every facet of her life.

Season 3 introduces only two major new characters into the mix. Camille De Pazzis plays Annie Archambeau, a mysterious upir woman with a connection to the Godfrey clan, and Alex Hernandez plays Isaac Ochoa, a private investigator hired to track down the wayward Dr. Spivak even as he spies on Roman and Peter for Olivia. De Pazzis doesn’t leave a very strong impression as Annie. Her thick accent is often a distraction, robbing some of the character’s more dramatic moments of their impact. But more than that, the show never does a very good job of exploring who Annie really is or why she makes the decisions she does. Honestly, I’m not surprised given that I felt the same way abut most of the characters in Season 1. Ochoa remains mostly an enigma as well, but that doesn’t matter as much. The real fun of this character comes in his alliance with Olivia. Particularly in the last few episodes, the two develop a strong rapport as Olivia’s grip on sanity begins to loosen.

In general, this season feels more confined and focused than its predecessors, and that’s a very good thing. Several major characters (including Dougray Scott’s Dr. Norman Godfrey and Lili Taylor’s Lynda Rumancek) are now out of the picture, allowing the show to hone in a bit more on Roman, Peter, Shelley and Olivia. There are certain subplots that come across as superfluous early on. The impending marriage between Destiny (Tiio Horn) and Andreas (Luke Camilleri) is the biggest of those. However, the show manages to tie all of these conflicts together by the final few episodes. Overall, this season feels better paced and more engaging than the often plodding approach of the first two season.

Shelley finally finds a kindred spirit.

That’s not to say there aren’t some fairly significant problems with the execution. The show ‘s mythology grows more complicated as it explores the nature of Spivak’s reptilian race and how it fits into the upir/werewolf dynamic. That mythology is further complicated by the addition of a new breed of disease-ridden, almost zombie-like upir with a a hunger for their standard upir cousins. This season never really explains all of this in a satisfying way. Spivak himself is absent for all but a couple episodes. When he does finally emerge from his hidey hole, the character is dealt with in a disappointingly brief and matter-of-fact fashion.

One of the fundamental problems of Hemlock Grove is that it never seems entirely sure of what sort of show it wants to be. On paper, it’s basically a mashup of Twin Peaks and True Blood, but it’s never been quite as amazing as that combination sounds. The show always feels tonally off-kilter. It has elements of horror, camp, scientific conspiracy and good, old fashioned supernatural sexy time, but it never really commits to any of these. To be fair, this season does makes some improvements in this area. The show feels more cohesive than it has in the past. Even so, there are too many cases where the show awkwardly transitions from dark drama to moments of silliness.

There’s also the issue of the lackluster visual effects. The show looks great until any CGI becomes necessary, at which point it pretty much falls apart. Whether it’s Roman’s gaping upir jaws, Peter’s werewolf form, Spivak’s transformation or even something as simple as a tree branch breaking, the CG effects are always poorly rendered and unconvincing.

Despite these problems, this season ultimately satisfies when it comes to wrapping up the various ongoing character arcs. These ten episodes weave a very dark tale for almost everyone involved. There’s a lot of death and a lot of suffering (physical and emotional). But it’s safe to say that most characters receive precisely the fate they deserve. The core trinity of Roman, Peter and Shelley undergo compelling character arcs with strong payoffs in the final episode. If you enjoyed Hemlock Grove enough to follow it through the first two seasons, these final ten episodes likely won’t leave you disappointed.