"Dreamster (Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil)", 10-29-2007

Summary: Creative, but wanting.

One of my friends told me that I needed to take a look at "Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil", one of the newer shows on Adult Swim. I never like to start watching a show after it's already started airing, but as it turned out:

a) they were only nine episodes deep,

b) each episode was only fifteen minutes long, and

c) most of these short episodes, sans commercials, were available on YouTube.

The premise alone is an amusing idea. Satan, Lord of Lies and Prince of Darkness has an adult daughter, Lucy, a college graduate who is sort of kicking around. (Lucy has red hair and two little horns.) Satan's plans for Lucy to become the Antichrist and rule the world were put on hold when Lucy started going out with DJ Jesus (pronounced hay-SOOS), who as it turns out is the second coming of Christ himself, now kicking it as a DJ. While Satan hopes that this Lucy/Jesus romance will break up -- and he's not adverse to attempting to kill the Messiah now and then -- he must resort to more pedestrian world-domination schemes, or pedestrian at least for the near-infinite King of Evil.

Satan's current idea is the mass production of a machine which plays soothing white noise to help you sleep. (Oh, and side effects might include being killed by your own dreams.) Whenever someone using the device falls asleep, Satan enters their dreams as a psychiatrist, asking his potential victims about their worst fears.

One of his potential victims is Special Father Guiseppe Cantalupi, a member of the Special Clergy squad to save the world from the Antichrist. It seems that Pope Benedict XVI sent him an e-mail with a video called "Cute Puppy" which turned out to be a video of larvae bursting from a man's skin. ("It was horrible. I sent it to all my friends." The name of the pope isn't actually mentioned, but I could imagine the ex-Cardinal Ratzinger sending someone a video like this.) Cantalupi falls under the spell of the noisemaker and begins to dream about larvae bursting out of his own skin.

Meanwhile, DJ Jesus has also ordered the device, figuring that he'll use it as a special effect from the DJ booth. This gives Satan a chance to get his hooks into the Messiah himself -- or that is, he could if Lucy didn't keep interrupting the Master of Murder with phone calls complaining about the "skanks" that DJ Jesus attracts as part of the mystique of being a DJ.

Will Satan destroy the Annointed One of God and rule over earth forever? Or will things fall apart, as usual?

"Lucy, Daughter of the Devil" might have made it on the air because it appears to be made very cheeply (which is worse than "cheaply"). I'm not talking about Clutch Cargo levels of cheap, but most of the characters look like the little pegs you are given to put in the car if you have ever played the boardgame LIFE: a round head and a perfectly cylindrical body. Jesus, Satan, and Lucy are given arms and other accessories, but they're not too far removed from the cylindrical bodytype. For other characters -- they don't even bother modifying the cylinder: little pegs move about that have hair and eyes, and that's about all.

There's no true "gag humor" in any of the shows. Most of the humor is entirely situational humor along the lines of say, "Dr. Katz". Satan tries to get things done and can't even get the moral support of his hell-spawned crew, Lucy interferes with Satan's schemes unwittingly, and DJ Jesus is clueless about all that is going on about him. Schemes don't so much explode as fizzle out.

The result is that the creators don't make complete use of the computer animation medium, the fault of so many shows. What's the point of having a million dollar machine to do animations if you're going to do five cent plots? Oh, of course there are murders and eviscerations galore, but with the peg characters you don't get the gross realism that you might get from an episode of "Metalocalypse". Furthermore, there isn't any emotional investment in any of the characters. The joke is that Lucy acts like any typical hot 22-year old unemployed chick, but all we see of Lucy's life is her complaints about her relationships. Even "The Simpsons" and "South Park" gave its characters hopes and dreams; "Lucy, Daughter of the Devil" doesn't do that and as a result, we aren't invested in their fates.

Furthermore, if you're disturbed by casual blasphemy, you might want to give "Lucy" a miss. The fact that there isn't a picket line going around the block at Cartoon Network leads me to believe that "Lucy" isn't ringing any bells, and sadly enough, Adult Swim might want to give someone else a chance. "Lucy, Daughter of the Devil" is undoubtedly better than a lot of crap like "Tim and Eric" or "Saul of the Molemen", but given the fact that those two latter shows are most likely bottom-of-the-barrel-approved-by-an-exec-at-a-doobie-session-abortions, the relative increase in quality and creativity of "Lucy" compared to Adult Swim's usual midnight crapfest isn't enough to keep me watching.