In Review: The Librarians And Santa’s Midnight Run

Synopsis: When the Serpent Brotherhood wants to kill Santa, the Librarians must rescue him and help him accomplish the secret purpose of Christmas.

Review: If there is one thing that I love more than anything else. It is a Christmas episode of any given television series. If anything at this time of year when all our regular television shows have taken a break. I often find myself going through my collection of Christmas episodes from years gone by, which includes the ‘Alf’ Christmas episode and many more. I just love it. And ‘The Librarians And Santa’s Midnight Run’ is one that I will be adding to my collection.

What we have here is a seriously funny adventure, which does not take itself so seriously, but still managed to add to the shows ongoing mythology by including the ‘Serpent Brotherhood,’ who were featured in the very first Librarian movie way back in 2004.

First off having Bruce Campbell guest star as Santa is pure genius. I loved how the writers decided to have Santa talk about himself in the third person, which obviously would get annoying after a time, but having Eve Baird be so grumpy about Christmas and having her be the main protector of Santa throughout the latter half of the episode was so much fun. Her deadpan juxtaposed with Bruce Campbell’s general silliness, which is in character as Santa was just so much fun and generated some fantastic dialogue between the two characters.

Matt Frewer and the gorgeous Lesley-Ann Brandt return as the main villains of ‘The Serpent Brotherhood’ was so much fun and I loved how Campbell’s Santa was able to expose a little bit of vulnerability from Brandt’s hard as nails character of Lamia. 

What was also lovely about this was the explanation of what Santa’s gift of goodwill actually was and how much of a burden it was to him to have so much of it bottled up inside.

The most fun this episode had was with John Kim’s thief Ezekiel Jones wearing Santa’s cap and in so doing was literally as light as a feather and spreading good cheer and good will to all, which is a direct contradiction to his character, which is perhaps the most shifty and cunning of the group.

One thing that was a little grating for me though was Christian Kane’s really, really bad Dick Van Dyke impersonation when trying to talk in cockney rhyming slang near the beginning of episode. I was a little confused as to whether I was supposed to be laughing or cringing, but thankfully it wasn’t something that we had to put up with for the whole episode.

Lindy Booth also provided some great moments with Cassandra’s infectious enthusiasm for the season of goodwill, which completely sold you on the premise of the episode from the start.

For me this was a lighthearted episode, which pretty much summed up what any given Christmas episode should be. It be great if the show gets a second season and they are able to do a follow up of sorts to this in much the same way as Warehouse 13, Leverage and Eureka did while they were on the air.

Pretty much every character had a little to do in this, which was wonderful to watch.

The episode is purely and simply a romp that you can just sit back and let wash over you, which isn’t a bad thing. I simply loved it and really enjoyed the onscreen interplay between Bruce Campbell and Rebecka Romjin. Every time Eve cut Santa off from saying ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’ was just damn hilarious.