Helix Season 2 Footage Takes The Sickness To Sea

By David Wharton | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Syfy’s Helix was, for most of its first-season run, damned frustrating. The involvement of Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore set our bar of anticipation high, but even early on, we found ourselves wondering how the show would sustain itself. After all, the promos made it look very much like “John Carpenter’s The Thing: The Series,” and that description wasn’t far off from what we got. But towards the end of the season, Helix took a hard turn into unexpected territory that left us hoping that season two would rally and live up to its potential. It remains to be seen if that will prove to be the case, but thanks to the clip above, we’ve finally got our first look at Helix’s second season.

Warning: spoilers for Helix’s first season!

If you stuck with the show, you’ll recall that the mystery surrounding the disease at the show’s core expanded into unexpected territory late in the season, with the revelation that the powers pulling the strings of the ILARIA corporation were a race of immortals. This set the show up for both a departure from its arctic setting and its claustrophobic storyline, but it was still hard to know what to expect from season 2. From the look of things, we won’t be abandoning the show’s trappings of diseases and quarantine suits, but the snowy wastes will be traded in for an ill-fated boat and a more temperate climate. We can pick a few more clues from Syfy’s first official synopsis for the season, which teases, among other things, a “mysterious island.” The queue for mandatory Lost references forms to the left.

The second season of Helix finds the doctors of the Centers for Disease Control, still haunted by the Narvik outbreak and the events that took place in Arctic Biosystems, investigating a deadly outbreak of a new disease on a Windjammer cruise ship. Their investigation leads them to a mysterious island inhabited by a cult with the hope of creating a utopian society.

Helix is one of those shows I probably would have bailed on had I been watching it episodically, but instead I marathoned through it once the season was wrapped up. I imagine this helped make the show’s flaws slightly less glaring since I wasn’t having to justify coming back to it on a weekly basis. But while those flaws were impossible to ignore completely, I did find myself seriously intrigued by the direction Helix took in those last few episodes. Here’s hoping they don’t squander that little bit of goodwill they’ve earned.

Helix returns to Syfy in January 2015. Here’s executive producer Ron Moore providing a few more tidbits about what to expect, including that the show was always intended to change location each season, and to maintain the “one episode = one day” construct.