Cade joins the Mafia when underworld bosses start to get eliminated by the Gua.

Underworld never really grabs the attention. Maybe the idea is to steal some of the audience from The Sopranos, but firstly there’s hardly any noticeable difference here between the Mafia and any other crook and secondly there doesn’t seem to be much characterization or character development through the episode. It smacks of season one’s more simplistic formula, although Cade does seem to have a more proactive approach to getting the aliens wiped out than before.

Not only does the Mafia head have a stupid nickname (surely someone could have done better than ‘The Horse’?), but he despite being caught in a situation out of his experience, he really doesn’t seem to care about anything much and so the viewer finds it hard to care about him. Introducing his wife into the mix and showing her being offered an affair doesn’t elicit any sympathy either, and it makes it difficult to get involved in what little story there is. There are plenty of people pointing and shooting guns at each other, but there’s no more than the bare minimum of plotting. The Gua who can disappear through drains isn’t caught and killed, in fact she vanishes totally after the teaser, and quite why the Gua switch from trying to kill Sonny the Horse to making a deal with him, I’m not sure.

This episode is the first directorial outing for Rob LaBelle, who does a great turn onscreen as a Mafia geek and makes the best of what he’s got, giving the episode a pretty dark feel and using some techniques not normally found in First Wave. He does seem to have an unhealthy fixation with buttock shots though. The trouble is, he’s fighting an uphill battle and Underworld just never really rates much more than a passing glance.

**

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