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The Innocentsis a show about teens in love.
But at the bottom of it all, all that matters is that the teens are in love.
Harry is understandably alarmed, and from there, none of their escape plans go the way theyd imagined.
Honestly, its all par for the course when youre a teen runaway in a YA supernatural drama.
But its not likeThe Innocentsneeds to break new ground, anyway.
The show is at its best when it does very sincere, persuasively performed versions of familiar genre themes.
Together, the two performances are unquestionably the best things aboutThe Innocents.
Junes joy feels palpable, as does her fear and her lust.
They love each other!
Itd be hard not to root for them.
When theThe Innocentsdoes falter, its in ways thatseem inevitable in the current era of Netflix dramatic storytelling.
More broadly, it suffers from storytelling that sloshes around aimlessly rather than getting to the point.
The show would be better if it juggled its plots more deftly.
Its characters are also unevenly drawn.
Faced with extraordinary circumstances, June and Harry have coherent ideas about who they are and what they want.
Still,The Innocentshas so many things going for it that none of this feels too troubling.
Its specific mythology of shape-shifting has the right balance of novelty, stable mechanics, and unexplained mystery.
And then theres Sanctum, the cryptic, remote compound that Halvorson runs somewhere on a fjord in Norway.
Even after watching the whole season, some things about Sanctum stillmake no sense to me.
(Many, many things are outlawed in Sanctum, but nothing seems as verboten as synthetic fibers.)
Given the fact that all supernatural teen romances ache to franchise themselves, that swerve is unsurprising.
If nothing else,The Innocentsmade me care about these two ill-fated teens and their grand romance.
