The Librarians

• The Librarian: Quest for the Spear. 2004
• The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines. 2006
• The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice. 2008

1. TV season 1. 2014
2. TV season 2. 2015
3. TV season 3. 2016
4. TV season 4. 2016

Flynn Carsen [Noah Wylie] is The Librarian, charged with care of The Library and all its magical artefacts – sort of a more book-oriented Warehouse 13. (Apparently this follows on from where the Librarian films leave off, but I haven’t seen them.) While tracking down a magical artefact, Flynn runs across Colonel Eve Baird [Rebecca Romijn] on a counter-terrorism operation. She later receives a mysterious invitation to become The Guardian. They discover previous Librarian candidates are being killed off, so go to rescue the last remaining three: Jacob Stone (an Art History geek pretending to be a redneck), Cassandra Cillian (a maths genius with a brain tumour), and Ezekiel Jones (a thief). The villain Dulaque [Matt Frewer, channelling Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom] is behind the deaths, and at the end of the pilot, the Library is lost, Flynn goes off the find it, and Eve and the three Librarians-now-in-Training are left holding the fort (or rather, the Annex) with grumpy factotum Jenkins [John Larroquette], pursuing the Artefact-of-the-Week.

This is mild fun, and definitely improves after Flynn goes off on his own quest: Wylie galumphingly overacts, and the way he frantically pulls books off shelves … shudder.

The episodes strengthen as the various characters bed in, and stop being simply stereotypes. There is actually a season arc, and some of the seemingly-disparate episodic adventures come together in the season finale. But it doesn’t quite gel: it can’t make up its mind if it is slapstick humour or mystical thriller, and falls rather uncomfortably between the two. So I’m not sure if I’ll be venturing into season 2.

Rating: 4.5
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth watching | mind candy | waste of time | unfinishable ]

reviewed 5 January 2018