10 Things About October Faction That Make Absolutely No Sense

Just how many holes can a thing have before it's basically a big empty space in the air?

The October Faction
Netflix

The recent debut of October Faction on Netflix continues the platform's interest in adapting niche but acclaimed horror comics into tentpole supernatural dramas, beginning with The Umbrella Academy and continuing with this month's Locke & Key, arguably the best of the three original properties.

Like The Umbrella Academy before it, October Faction expands and rewrites the original material, using it as a foundation for a different kind of story, even if some of the beats and many of the characters remain the same. Steve Niles and Damian Worm's The October Faction is a bloodthirsty, macabre horror comic; Damian Kindler's October Faction is a supernatural family drama. These are different stories, different narratives.

The problem is, October Faction isn't a very good story. A ten-episode initial season provides plenty of scope for a single, compelling narrative, but this show has more holes than a fishing net. Doubtless many of the gaps in the story are deliberate, an effort to tease story threads for season two and beyond - but in order to tease future storylines, you have to do the work to set them up, and October Faction doesn't appear interested in doing that.

Let's dive in - here are the things about October Faction that make absolutely no sense.

10. These Character Choices Make No Sense, Part 1

The October Faction
Netflix

Initially, Fred and Deloris Allen seem like a sweet couple with a sinister secret - they’re monster hunters, working for an ancient order called Presidio, created to protect humanity (and created by Kindler specifically for the show - they're not in the source material).

So far, so Buffy/Supernatural… except here, the monsters are shown to be more than just evil killers or savage monsters, and Fred and Deloris are shown to have willingly participated in wholesale murder and, in the case of the Harlow massacre, attempted genocide.

They keep claiming that there’s another side to the story - but we never actually see it. We see them, a childless couple, save warlock twins from the scene of the massacre to raise as their own, but two decades later, they're still protesting that they did the right thing.

Meanwhile, we see Alice Harlow kill a whole host of innocent people on her way to find her children - yet her episode-long backstory is supposed to absolve her of being a murdering psycho. The fact that it largely does is due to Maxim Roy’s haunted, haunting performance in the role, not the writing - she singlehandedly makes Alice Harlow, the antagonist for half the season, compelling as a protagonist in the back half of the season.

This could have been a fascinating flip of the expected narrative - the heroes are the villains! the villains are the heroes! - but October Faction wants to have its cake and eat it too. We're clearly supposed to be rooting for the happy couple trying to keep their family together. Except it's not their family, and the pair of them are lying mass murderers who stole their kids from the bloody ashes of a whole community.

Contributor
Contributor

Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.