Shadowhunters "Moo Shu To Go" Review: Who's Up For a Game of Werewolf?

When you meet your girlfriend's mom and she's kind of an asshole

Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, Shadowhunters has now become a serious show. It now is just intense drama, heartbreaking conversations, and dead main characters at every turn. The campiness of the show was fun while it lasted. It is time for us to put our angst hats on. What's that? There's a Chinese restaurant with 85 cent cocktails and a doggy door for werewolf police officers to enter through? Oh, thank God! I didn't know how I was going to cope with Shadowhunters taking itself too seriously. Guys, "Moo Shu To Go" was a fun episode (wow, what a surprise). We got some character dynamics that we haven't seen much of yet (in the show or the books), some progression in the storylines, and a few mysteries introduced. In true Shadowhunters form, this was a jam-packed hour filled with lots of goodies and weirdness.

The good:

• Up until now, Alec has been off to the side, making grumpy remarks and being a pain in the ass, but in this episode, we finally start to see why he acts the way he does. From his "no homo but very homo" heart-to-heart with a clueless af Jace, to his interactions with his mother, to his job as babysitter of Clary, this was an Alec-centric episode. Alec is not my favorite character from the novels, but a lot of readers love him. Shadowhunters, again, has made me love something that I didn't in the books. Alec's motivations are shown as "first he wants to please his mother, then he wants to protect everyone, then he doesn't like Clary." This is a smart thing for the show to do because it helps the audience understand him better as a character, doesn't put his jealousy of Clary above everything else, and makes him likable enough that the audience doesn't hate him. We see that he's a shadowhunter first and his emotions come second to whatever he does. He may dislike Clary and the trouble she's accidentally causing but he still saves her ass when she needs it. This version of Alec Lightwood is still consistent enough with his book counterpart to keep readers happy but is different enough that those who don't like the book version of him can actually enjoy the way this Alec is written and how well Matthew Daddario is portraying him.

"I can't believe I got stuck babysitting your ass"

• Jace is put on the back burner for Alec to get the spotlight for a little while, and though I love Jace with all my heart, I think it's nice that the show knows that too much of a good thing can be bad. Jace (and the Clace romance) are benched for the majority of the episode so it's nice to know that we can expect breaks from them every now and then. I hate having to compare a YA property to Twilight but I'm gonna break my morals and do it anyway. A problem many people have with the Twilight Saga is that the Bella/Edward romance is 99% of the story, and the interesting side characters and subplots get overlooked in favor of the romance. The Mortal Instruments novels are about 30% Clace and 70% everything and everyone else and it's still too much Clace (especially given that their relationship in the novels was... lacking). But Shadowhunters, while still giving us 2-3 Clace moments per episode, remembers to give us other relationships, other friendships, and, y'know, the entire quest to find the Cup and stop Valentine. It's nice that we can have a teen supernatural show, even one with a bunch of love triangles, that still remembers that romance is not the point of the story and other characters need to breathe.

• I wasn't sure how the show was going to do the werewolves. I've never been a fan of putting makeup on actors and having them be hairy humans rather than actual wolves, but I hadn't heard anything about real live wolves being used on set of the show, so I had accepted my fate: that I would be seeing poorly made up werewolves on my screen for hopefully several seasons of this show. I'm not sure why it never crossed my mind that the show could have CGI wolves, much like the film did, but when I first saw a sneak peek of the wolves a few days before the episode aired, I was convinced the wolves were real and that they just hadn't let fans know the wolves had been on set. When I realized they were CGI, I was impressed. They looked fantastic! These wolves looked so good that I'll forgive the complete nonsense of werewolves being entirely clothed after shifting back to human.

Guys, you're Lightwoods, not Fightwoods

• Probably my favorite part of the episode was Clary putting the rune on the door and it catching fire! Don't you just hate when that happens? I thought that Clary had attempted putting an opening rune on the door and that the rune was too strong and for some reason it caught fire. Clary's face made her look as though she was in a trance or something, which I interpreted as maybe some sort of assistance from up above helping her create a strong rune to escape danger. I thought that a major revelation about Clary from City of Ashes was going to make its way onto the first season of Shadowhunters. Unfortunately, this was actually just a case of Clary mixing up her runes and creating an explosion rune on accident. Oops. I thought this was actually funny because as a Shadowhunter, more so for a newbie for Clary, it'd make sense to get your runes mixed up.

• I like these subtle hints that the show is dropping about what exactly the Circle ideology is, and how some Shadowhunters think of the Downworlders. Maryse's comments about them needing to stay separate and Meliorn pointing out that Shadowhunters don't protect Downworlders like they protect everyone else are good at hinting at what the Circle really is but not telling the viewers what's really happening. I'm loving that the writers are showing the viewers that this Shadowhunters vs Downworlders conflict is a metaphor for race relations and the show is doing it so well without throwing it at the audience's face or making it seem out of place. I can't wait to see how far they're going to go to in showing the audience how awful Shadowhunters can be.

• Simon is showing signs of being a vampire and he thinks he is catching a cold.

The bad:

• I don't like that the show will wait multiple episodes to explain the smallest of things. If Clary saw Dot in episode two and Jocelyn in the pilot, why wouldn't she tell the Lightwoods that the necklace lets her see them? They could have told her a long time ago that the necklace was part Portal. It doesn't change the plot that these answers are coming late but it's irritating. After spending several books not getting answers for plot holes or non-explained happenings in the novels, I'd thought the show would be different. And while I don't have to wait as long for answers, I'm still having to wait. At least we found out what the deal is with Alec's arrows, though.

Shouldn't we call the cops? The real ones?

The Leftovers:

• I'm not sure if it's intentional but every time Alec and Jace parabatai track, it just looks extremely gay. They literally gaze into each other's eyes and start leaning in like they're going to kiss. It's equally funny and sad because Alec will likely never get to kiss Jace.

• Clary thinks Jace is straight. After Jace told Simon his comments about demons in New York is " the first correct thing [he's] said all day" just minutes after Simon said he wasn't Jace's type. I'm not saying Jace is bisexual but Jace is bisexual.

• Seriously what the fuck is Valentine doing? I do like the detail about him speaking Russian to the newborn Forsaken so we know that even if he is just killing mundane New Yorkers, he's at least smart enough not to do all his crimes in the same spot. But really though what is going on? He's creating an army to fight the Clave with, that much we know, but he's collecting different types of blood and creating Forsaken? Are the Forsaken going to be his army? Is he putting Seelie blood and warlock blood in them? Why was he taking blood of people who have the Sight? Is he giving that blood plus the Downworlder blood to the new Forsaken? Will we ever reinstate Pluto as a planet? These are important questions and I demand answers ASAP Rocky.

In the end, "Moo Shu To Go" was wonderful, allowed the show to stretch its wings a bit, gave us a lot of new stuff to analyze and theorize about, and had A+ CGI werewolves walking through a doggy door of a Chinese restaurant. Shadowhunters may not be everyone's 85 cent cocktail, but it's one hell of a fun show. Television is meant to be entertainment and in an age where almost anything vaguely supernatural or science fiction must be full of darkness and gloom, it's refreshing to see a series that knows when to be Batman and when to be Guardians of the Galaxy. "Moo Shu To Go" gets a 9/10 from me.