Lobo

I don’t watch a lot of television. The shows I do watch, I usually scour online so I can see them unobstructed by commercials that usually run longer than the actual programs. My collection of TV Series eating up two hard drives and almost all of my (and Jae’s) PC’s memory are Alias, Lost, Heroes (season 1, I deleted season 2 because it sucked), Ally McBeal, Charmed, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Battlestar Galactica, all seasons of 24, Gossip Girl and for the local shows, My Girl (local adaptation of a Korean Telenovela of the same title that we watched off YouTube) and finally Lobo.

Given that I am running out of hard drive space for these shows and we don’t have a working DVD burner at the moment, I usually watch a few episodes of a show and decide whether it is worth following or not.

Lobo captured my interest after seeing the pilot. At the onset, it is a story of a young woman, Nessa, who discovers that she turns into a werewolf days after her 21st birthday. Her painful self discovery led to the death of her mother, which gained the ire of her half sister, and drove her to leave the man that she loves to live secluded from everyone she knows.

Years later, Nessa goes back to the place where she grew up in to escape a murderous mob that killed the father of her child. Here she gets reunited with her former lover who never gave up hope of seeing her again. This is where Lyka, Nessa’s daughter and Noah, the son of her ex-lover first meet.

We then follow the principal pair of the story through their separation as friends, their individual hardships while growing up and eventually their reunion as lovers.

The against all odds love story serves as a backdrop for a much bigger content in Lobo which traverses love of family, friendship and most importantly, acceptance of one’s self. It is also a parade of able talents and powerful performances from Piolo Pascual, Agot Isidro, Shaina Magdayao, Dimples Romana, Eric Fructuso as well as cinema veterans Irma Adlawan, Dante Rivero and Ms. Pilar Pilapil. The controversial Angel Locsin surprisingly gave a credible performance as the female lead, far from her previous dead-in-the-eye acting from her other telenovelas and movies.

Even with its share of mediocre special effects, the often spastic acting of one of the main antagonists Spanky Manican (Gen. Silva) and Timmy Cruz (Ylvana) who never talks in the entire series but yells all of her lines out to the point where it looks like all the nerves in her head are about to pop, the series has had a very respectable run. Of course quality does not always translate to bankability as reflected by weak ratings especially in the General Manila area but still, this is one of the smarter/better telenovelas that graced Philippine television in a while.