Several years after the cancellation of the HBO show
Dead Like Me, the creative team has brought us a continuation (or
perhaps a conclusion of) the story of George Lass. Fans either love or hate
it. I'm not sure where I stand.
Life was rather simple for George prior to her death. Get up, go to work
in a mundane office, argue with her mom as she leaves, and ignore her
younger sister Reggie completely. Then a toilet seat from a space station
fell out of the sky and landed on top of her with a boom. When the dust
cleared, George found that she had not passed into the great beyond but was
stuck on earth as a Reaper -- in a different, unrecognizable human form.
Each Reaper has an unspecified number of souls to escort into the afterlife
before they get their own bells and whistles and are allowed to leave this
mortal coil. George has just happened to get stuck with a ragtag gang of
Reapers down on their luck. There's Daisy, the bubbly blonde twit who
died on the set of Gone With the Wind, the hard-knocks Roxy who
was strangled with pantyhose, and Mason, who got high one day and took a
power drill to his forehead.
Up until now everything has been fine. George handles her ultra-boring job
at a temp agency while juggling her "un-dead" responsibilities on the side,
and gets her assignments each morning over breakfast from their supervisor,
Rube. Only today something is different. Rube has gone on to his eternal
reward and the waffle house has been burned to the ground. Their new
supervisor is a certifiable pain in the nether regions, all smiles and
general incompetence -- but George seems to be the only one who cares. When
one of her Reaps is messed up beyond repair due to his miscalculation on the
timing, it inadvertently places her back in her sister's life just in time
to discover that Reggie is going through her own trials -- and the potential
loss of someone she loves.
As far as continuing the franchise goes, the plot is not bad but something
seems out of whack. Maybe it is that the replacement for Daisy this time
around doesn't feel like Daisy. She's a little too bland to take the place
of ethereal Laura Harris. The audience also misses Rube -- how can you not?
Still, all the normal elements are here -- Deloras and her cat, the sarcasm
of all involved, and a ton of morbid humor that really should not crack us
up as much as it does. Contrary to the jadedness of the production are
actually some genuinely touching moments between Reggie and George as they
both come to eventual closure on their loss of one another. George affirms
that life is so short that you never know what moment may be your last, and
so you should never take anyone for granted. For awhile, the Reapers act up
and reap (ha ha) the consequences of their disobedience, but the backlash is
not as impacting as former seasons.
What is the most unfortunate with this film (and indeed, the entire series
as a whole) is the foul language and absolute lack of morals. The f-word is
liberally applied in just about any situation, from sexual escapades to
everyday conversation. One of George's favorite sayings is, "What the f---?"
There are a handful of abuses of GD and Jesus' name as well, along with mild
profanities and anatomical references. Crude terms are used to describe
sexual acts. George enters a room and finds their supervisor having sex with
Daisy. In flashbacks, we see Reggie making out with a boy in the locker room
and he encourages her to undress (we don't know if she did or not). People
die in various distressing ways; it's implied that the Reapers attempt to
kill an immortal in various creative ways (holding him underwater for half
an hour, shooting him in the forehead, and eventually resorting to hacking
him up in pieces -- the first two we see, the latter we don't).
I wish this franchise were cleaner because underneath the rampant immorality
and bad language is an original, unique idea with a surprising amount of
heart behind it. But the few moral lessons learned from the misadventure of
the Reapers are not enough to make up for the slew of f-words.
