2 out of 5

Created by: Glen Dolman

Okay, let’s say you’re going in to Bloom completely blind – excepting maybe seeing the promotional still for the show from your streaming service offerings, which enticed for whatever reason and then you clicked on – but you’re an experienced movie and TV viewer.  As the show starts up, some names click by – Bryan Brown, cool – and then a show-within-a-show of an old soap opera, starring Phoebe Tonkin – who’s also in the main credits – is being watched by a kid, while Jackie Weaver, only getting a ‘featuring’ in the credits, putters about in the background.

The kid confirms that the soap he’s watching features a young Gwen – Tonkin – with the present day, version – Weaver – exhibiting TV shorthand signs for Alzheimers, and/or old person diseases.

It’s easy enough to string together that young Gwen will be coming to the present day somehow, and when Brown, playing Ray, Gwen’s modern day husband, witnesses his dying dog munching on a strange plant in the yard, transforming into a puppy, bingo bango, we’ve got our plot device.

While this was a bit more Forever Young than I was expecting, there’s an appreciative sense of gloom hanging over Bloom – after that opening sequence, a huge flood overtakes the town, leaving a sense of wreckage even a year afterwards, to which our story jumps – which made me curious to see where this was going.  And that does persist: yes, Gwen munches on the plant as well, and then so do other people.  But the effects are not lasting, and resources are limited, so it’s not just a joyous return…

We also have a wandering, troublemaking stranger, Sam (Ryan Corr); a young kid still searching for his mom, lost in the flood (Thomas Fisher); a bumbling cop who maybe discovers – and wants to expose – the plant’s abilities (Daniel Henshall);  a bored housewife (Nicki Sheils); an emotionally abused woman in a retirement home (Usha Cornish); the next door neighbor who was always in love with Gwen (John Stanton)…  Bloom certainly has character subplots to spare, and more besides the above, and yet even at only six episodes, it is miraculously empty.

A structural decision that I appreciate, even though it works against the series, is that creator Glen Dolman (writing 4 out of the 6 episodes) doesn’t take any kind of stand on what the plant is doing – this isn’t a celebration of youth, or an appreciation of life; he just puts the plant into action and then follows its effects.  But because of this, there doesn’t end up being enough to dig in to, and so faux roadblocks and sidesteps of logic are put in to place.  Characters become cartoon villains later on; early suggestions of a Species-like need for the plant’s users to propagate is solely used to trigger a single plot development; the ‘rules’ and ‘timing’ of the plant’s effects vary as needed.  These inconsistencies and jumps, combined with the general lack of any clear intention behind the story make for a very muddled, rather boring sci-fi touched small town tale.  Some good actors and good story ‘seeds’ (ugh) have to wait in line behind the story’s hook of the plant – which, as mentioned, isn’t all that developed – meaning neither side gets much due.