ASTRID AND LILLY SAVE THE WORLD – Episode 1 – Tontoom – SPOILERS ⁓
Astrid and Lilly
Astrid (Jana Morrison) and Lilly (Samantha Aucoin) are high school students whose unusual hobby is spying on their classmates after school. Their hero is Olivia Benson, Mariska Hargitay’s character on LAW & ORDER:SVU, and their investigations seem to be an attempt to discover and imitate what makes other kids popular. Lilly’s younger sister Piper (Maddie Hemeon) tells her about a party and Astrid and Lilly decide to crash it. After being picked on by the invited guests for a while they tell Tate (Kolton Stewart) he’s a monster, and he suggests they look in a mirror. After leaving the party, Lilly begins to question whether or not she actually is a monster. In a fit of despair/outrage at their situation, Astrid and Lilly accidentally cast a spell. They don’t realize what they’ve done, but when Tate turns up missing the next day they go hunting for clues as to what happened to him.
Pine Academy High School Principal Mr. Varshidi (Marvin Ishmael) and Vice-Principal (?) Michelle Knight (Megan Hutchings).
A man named Brutus (Oliver Renaud) finds them at the site of Tate’s disappearance, and tells them the spell they cast opened a portal to another dimension. They respond “what spell?” and he reminds them that on the previous night they howled their intense pain at the moon. “And you really should have known better,” he explains, “than to do it on the third Sunday of the ninth month during a Pink Moon.” Brutus extends a horn from his forehead to underline the reality of the situation. In order to close the rift (he tells them) they will need to collect ten body parts from monsters (creatures from the other side), and failure to do this will result in dire consequences for humanity. The monster that kidnapped Tate is a Tearjerker, and Brutus instructs them on how to kill it.
Astrid asks why they should trust him. “Because I’m from the dimension you opened,” he says. “I’m your guide, your Brutus — your “Giles”, in terms you humans might understand.” If we’re doing Buffy parallels, and Astrid and Lilly are Buffy/Willow equivalents, then there must be the makings of a Scooby Gang somewhere. Sparrow (Spencer Macpherson) might become (a much cooler version of) Xander, and Candace Powell (Julia Doyle) could easily develop into something Cordelia-like.]
Spencer Macpherson as Sparrow, the broody, James Dean-like dude Astrid has a crush on, shown here signing up for Michelle’s Soccer Formal committee.
An unnamed woman (Amelia Manuel) said something interesting about the Tearjerker who was holding her captive. “I know this monster thing is disgusting,” she told fellow prisoner Tate. “But is he also kind of sexy? Like a sexy daddy who deals party drugs?” Speaking of drugs, one of the ingredients in the stuff that Brutus says will kill the beast is elephant tranquilizer, aka carfentanyl, which Astrid is (somehow) able to obtain quite easily. (Earlier, she demonstrated some medical knowledge when she speculated that the horn sprouting from Brutus’ forehead might be a pilar cyst (an idea she quickly rejected). Astrid and Lilly quickly dispose of the Tearjerker, successfully extracting its tongue in a scene that is only slightly gory.
Candace
Candace was once Lilly’s best friend, but when Lilly gained weight and Candace got popular, the two drifted apart. Then Astrid moved to Coppers Cove and became Lilly’s new BFF. Candace wants to be an actor, much to the displeasure of her mother Christine (Geri Hall), a puritanical christian who teaches an after-school bible class at the Lady of the Lake church. (The church’s name might be an Arthurian reference.) Christine has the episode’s best lines. “What would you rather have inside of you, the Lord’s light, or the devil’s penis?” followed closely by “I’ll be right back. Just going to powder my holy nose.”
Christine’s anguished prayer asking God to help her get rid of a teacher named Jonas (who she fears may be corrupting her daughter) has a result similar to that of Astrid and Lilly’s earlier howlings at the moon. We do not get to see what appears to her in the church late at night, but it convinces her that her prayers have been answered.
Possibly extraneous facts
Megan Hutchings as Michelle Knight. — Hutchings also stars as Leah Price in the Virginia Abramovich romantic comedy LOVE’S MATCH.
The Pink Moon is the first full moon of spring, so named because that is when phlox blooms. (Its flowers are often pink.) The Pink Moon never happens in the ninth month. (Even in the southern hemisphere, it comes in October, not September.) On the third Sunday of the ninth month Astrid and Lilly would have been howling at the Harvest Moon.
The show began life as a mystery. Co-creators Noelle Stehman and Betsy Van Stone told Summer Brooks of the Slice of SciFi podcast that “the show was originally sort of a dark comedy high school murder mystery, but when we teamed up with SyFy they liked the pilot, but asked us if we could science fiction it up or horror it up.”
