Series / Siren (2018)

Siren is a sci-fi drama series from the Freeform network, which premiered at the end of March 2018. Set in the quiet West Coast town of Bristol Cove, the story follows Ben Pownall (Alex Roe) and his girlfriend Madden "Maddie" Bishop (Fola Evans-Akingbola) as they—along with several of their friends and family—attempt to unravel the peculiar events taking place in the town, including the disappearance of a local fisherman and simultaneous arrival of a strange, mysterious girl (Eline Powell). Behind the scenes, a shadowy government conspiracy is determined to proceed with its sinister agenda while keeping the public ignorant...by any means necessary.

The series was canceled after three seasons, and it concluded at the end of May 2020.

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Siren contains examples of:

• Action Girl: All the mermaids are fierce, aggressive warriors both in or out of water. They can easily kill humans using just their bare hands (or teeth, when in the water). Their females if anything really are even more warlike than males, who simply obey orders from them.
• Affectionate Nickname: Maddie is usually called Mads by her loved ones, like her boyfriend Ben and her stepdad Dale.
• All Just a Dream: The second season finale has Ben saving a reporter from drowning. The man ends up exposing video proving the existence of mermaids. Months later, Ben, Ryn, and Maddie are on the run with mermaids being hunted for everything from their bodies to a rich guy using one as a party favor. It culminates in Maddie getting shot and dying in Ben's arms after his dad betrays him... and then it turns to Ben outside the reporter's car as this is all what he imagines can happen if he saves the guy and thus decides to let him drown.
• All There in the Manual: The other two merfolk who come ashore in Episode 8 are officially named "Katrina" and "Levi," but their names are never stated onscreen in the first season — and in fact they aren't even given them until midway through the second season.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent: Maddie, Ryn, Donna and Cami's fathers are all unmentioned in the series, but clearly aren't a part of their lives.
• Anti-Villain: Decker, the scientist leading the government conspiracy, becomes deeply conflicted about what he's doing after he learns that mermaids are sapient creatures.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Mermaids apparently have a matriarchal society, and when Ryn defeats "Katrina" in one-on-one combat, she assumes leadership of the pod and orders the rest of them away.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Katrina decides to slit her own throat, when defeated by Ryn. Interestingly, Ryn even offered her to rejoin the tribe, but Katrina's decision is final, meaning this also overlaps with Spiteful Suicide.
• Big Bad: Tia, who seeks to commit mass genocide of humanity out of merfolk supremacy.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Admiral Harrison, David Kyle and Bryan, who all tried to exploit the mermaids for their own self interests.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The US Navy turns out to have hidden cameras in Ben, Maddie and Ryn's bedroom, spying on them using these during Season 2. Ben learns and disables them however.
• Big Damn Heroes: Done twice in quick succession in the season 3 finale. Ryn's tribe arrives just in time to help her and provide her with a weapon. When it becomes clear they are hopelessly outnumbered, Yura and his tribe arrive evening out the odds.
• Bittersweet Ending: The season 3 finale. Tia is dead, Hope is saved, the cure worked and Ryn is the accepted alpha of three tribes, but Dale Bishop died, possibly alongside others who did not get the cure in time, Ben is nowhere to be found, and Maddie leaves with Robb for Tokyo to get some distance from the events.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The merfolk, being apex-predators with a strong warrior culture, naturally don't share humans scruples when it comes to killing people they perceive as a threat. They learn and adapt to the cultural differences on land, mostly; though they are leaning more towards violence when feeling threatened, and are in general a great deal more touchy-feely, which adds to the Homoerotic Subtext of the show.
• Brutal Honesty: Merpeople like Ren don't generally understand human inhibitions, so they frankly bring up topics which humans would be more circumspect about pretty often.
• Cassandra Truth: Ben naturally doesn't believe it at first after Xander tells him that a mermaid came up in their catch, before seeing one for himself. The same goes for Maddie and other people later.
• Challenging the Chief: Tia takes over her tribe by challenging and beating its leader in a fight.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The homeless man that the main characters walk past in Episode 2 returns in Episode 6, where he inadvertently helps the police find and arrest Ryn.
• Clothesline Stealing: Ryn steals clothes (twice from the same person) to cover up the first couple times she comes to land.
• Colorblind Casting: Ryn and her sister Donna are played by actresses of different ethnicities, and the other two members of her "family" that come ashore to find her are also ethnically different from both Ryn and each other. It may be that mermaids have a different conception of familial relationships than humans do, but that remains to be seen.
• Color-Coded Eyes: The merfolk have different eye colors depending what tribe they belong to.
  • Ryn's tribe has intense blue eyes.
  • Tia and her tribe have purple eyes. Incidentally, Tia happens to be the new and as of yet most powerful villain of the series.
  • Robb's tribe sports Icy Blue Eyes. Fittingly his tribe lives at the coast of Alaska.
• Creepy Good: Ryn is a loyal, loving person but due to having very different mannerisms to average humans she can come off as quite unsettling among them from her facial expressions and tone.
• Death by Childbirth: Ryn's surrogate Meredith dies from a heart attack after giving birth to her daughter, since the strain was too much.
• Deceptive Legacy: Ben, like all the family, assumed Charles was just a crazy guy who made up the romance of a mermaid to cover an affair. When he finds they exist, he learns from Helen how Charles basically tried to wipe them out over a broken heart and is horrified at his ancestor's actions.
  Helen: Genocide. That is your legacy.
• Disappeared Dad: Xander's dad Sean is stabbed to death by a merman who attacks them. He struggles with his loss for a long time afterward.
• Domestic Abuse: Susan was involved with Glen, her dealer, after she'd gotten back to using drugs. He soon began to hit her before she left him.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Helen's parents turn out to have had a Maligned Mixed Marriage. It's due to him being human and her part mermaid. However, in the photo he is clearly white while she has brown skin (Helen was played by actress Rena Owen, who's mixed race, with European and Maori ancestry), making it parallel real racism as well (perhaps deliberately).
• Downer Ending:
  • "Aftermath": Donna dies despite everyone's efforts to save her, and Decker commits suicide. Suffering from the effects of the Siren Song, Ben almost drowns himself, causing both Maddie and Ryn to leave him until he gets his head back together. Maddie's father is under investigation by the Town Council for his attempts to cover up all the weirdness happening in town. And Maddie's troubled and absent mother appears poised to come back into their lives.
  • Season 2 mid-finale "Leverage": Cami attacks Zander for his role in her mother's death, which sets his boat on fire with him and Calvin still on it. Zander least sends out a SOS text to Ben. In the water the merfolks destroy the drill. However Frank dies which makes them visibly distressed as they grab hold on to his body and begin to swim away with it. Also, due to the drill being destroyed the rig above begins to topple down all of while being live streamed to an horrified public.
• Do You Want to Copulate?: Ryn, in her usual frank way, says she'd like to make love with Maddie and Ben when they air their feelings for each other. Both are accepting of this, and later take up her offer.
• Dreamville: In the series finale, Ryn has a fantasy about having a white-picket-fence life in the suburbs with her boyfriend Ben and her daughter Hope. This is in sharp contrast to her actual situation at that point,where Ben is missing and presumed dead, while she and her daughter (being mermaids) have to consider whether to stay on land and wait for Ben, which would imperil their health, or return to the sea and risk losing the ability to return to the land.
• Dress Hits Floor: Maddie is wearing a towel wrapped around her body in Season 2 when she first makes out with Robb, dropping it during this, with the two having sex offscreen.
• Driven to Suicide: The Siren Song really messed Decker up. When Donna dies, he just walks into the ocean. The same almost happens to Ben.
• Eccentric Mentor: Helen Hawkins, crazy old lady and proprietor of the local tchotchke shop, who knows an awful lot about town history and mermaids. Because she's a descendant of a mermaid who came ashore and started a family.
• Eco-Terrorist: Maddie, Ben, Xander, Calvin, Helen and Ryn's tribe sabotage the oil rig's drilling that will destroy the merpeople's habitat otherwise through a coordinated effort.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: The sea lions freak out whenever Ryn gets close to them, and for very good reason: her kind are vicious predators even more dangerous than sharks. Though it's less that they detect evil in her, so much as they recognize Ryn as a siren. When they realize she's not a threat to them, they mellow out to her.
• Fantastic Drug: Mermaids' songs affect humans this way. They cause an addictive desire to hear them again, with Ben even going to a support group for drug addiction over this. He's shown to listen while her recorded song plays repeatedly, exactly like an addict using.
• Fantastic Racism: Donna's experiences at the lab lead her to quickly develop a hatred of all humans, which brings her into conflict with Ryn. A conversation in Episode 6 reveals that even before her capture, Donna had a low opinion of humans. Later episodes reveal that the merfolk actually have a deeply-engrained distrust of humans, due to an incident in the past.
• Fiery Cover-Up: After Donna and Chris escaped, the military torched their facility where both had been imprisoned to cover it up.
• Final Battle: The Season 3 finale, which ended up concluding the series, has a huge underwater battle between the rival merpeople factions. Ryn's side ultimately wins it after she kills Tia.
• Final Solution: In Season 3 Tia, a new leader of many merpeople, plans to kill all humans as she thinks there's a life or death battle between them.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Ben giving himself injections of merpeople's stem cells gives him several natural abilities they have, enhancing his senses, stamina, strength and finally water breathing before he almost transforms into one.
• Genre Blind: Chris appears to believe that he is escaping the weird government facility he was kept in with a human nurse who for some reason decided to run away with him, despite minor hints something is off like her wearing blood-stained scrubs, not knowing which car was hers, hissing at him when he got too close, clearly not understanding English, her decision to turn off a car stereo by stabbing it, and generally her complete unfamiliarity with...human stuff. Admittedly he's badly injured at the time, and his judgment is likely further impaired by lingering drugs in his system.
  • Related to Chris and crosses over to Villain Ball, but it's a little baffling for the Military (who are trying to cover mermaids up up) to just abduct him and leave everyone else on the North Star alive without explanation. Of course, the first thing his friends do is try to find out what happened to him and his parents predictably call the cops; who then start calling every military base from Washington to Alaska. Did they assume everyone would just forget about Chris. If they had sunk the North Star everyone would have written off his disappearance as an accident, or just released Chris and then no one would have cared. Instead they spend the rest of season one proving a stitch in time saves nine.
• Godiva Hair: The mermaids, while naked in human form, are shown at times with their long hair down over their breasts.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Tia, as by killing Charles Pownell centuries ago, she is responsible for enforcing the Fantastic Racism between humans and merfolk and the events of the first two seasons prior to her debut.
• Green Aesop: The series increasingly pushes the wrongness of the oceans' pollution, as it's destroying the merpeople's homes along with endangering real sea life, which not only threatens them but also breeds conflict with humans. In Season 3, one merman who took human form is now an environmental scientists directly involved with efforts to clean up the oceans by removing floating plastic.
• Hand Signals: Merpeople communicate with sign language while underwater.
• Happily Adopted: Maddie is actually Dale's stepdaughter — but you could easily miss that given how happy and comfortable they are together.
• Hate Sink: Bryan, a thuggish merfolk hybrid supremacist with a hypocritical goal of having a merfolk grandchild of his own.
• Healing Factor: Merpeople can heal much quicker, from worse injuries, than humans. Within a few days they can go from close to death and come back. While in the water, the merpeople heal particularly quick. It gets weaker the longer they stay in human form however.
• Healing Potion: Mermaid stem cells turn out to have incredible healing effects on humans, including curing paralysis. Ben's mom, who's paralyzed initially, uses them to partly recover.
• The Heavy: Katrina, the reoccurring mermaid antagonist, who also becomes The Dragon for the Big Bad Tia.
• He Knows Too Much: In the Season 2B finale, Ian, the relentless Intrepid Reporter who tried to abduct Ryn for his story, ends up going over a cliff into the ocean, is left to die by Ben of all people because of his discovery of the merfolk.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Sarge places himself in the way of a loose cable, whose hook cuts his throat, to save the mermaids with him from harm.
• Honey Trap: Nicole Martinez is actually a military officer undercover who starts a relationship with Xander to spy on him and gain intelligence about mermaids.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Complicated example. The merfolk certainly believe that, and the government conspiracy led by Decker doesn't exactly dissuade them from that opinion. Decker's men were perfectly willing to ruin the local ocean ecology simply to lure more test subjects to the surface where they could be caught, after all. But the incident that led them to hate and distrust humans in the first place turns out to have been a simple misunderstanding. Charles Pownall seemed to have genuinely loved his mermaid lover and their child; he just didn't know how to care for them.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Tia's eventual fate. By her own and Ryn's spear no less.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: Ryn just doesn't get why walking around naked makes such a fuss.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Ryn, a mermaid, becomes human Ben and Maddie's lover (all at the same time).
  • Helen is also descended from a female mermaid and a human man, while her relatives in the Marzdan family are as well.
• Intimate Marks: Maddie has a large feather tattoo on her chest. This partly covers her breasts, and Ryn gets quite fascinated by seeing it when Maddie is wearing a low-cut dress, which provides some Ship Tease (the two later become lovers).
• It's All My Fault: In Episode 4, Helen deduces that Ryn blames herself for Donna getting caught because it was Ryn's idea to come so close to the surface.
• Junkie Parent: Maddie's mother Susan it turns out is a drug addict. This is why she left, but claims she's gotten clean after coming home to Bristol Cove. She wants to mend things with Maddie, though it's soon revealed she's using again, then stops. Maddie alternates between worry at her drug use, annoyance over her mom's continued irresponsibility and trying to help her.
• Kill All Humans: Tia wants to wipe out humanity, viewing us as a deadly threat for not only her species the merpeople, but the environment generally. She tries to provoke a world war that would do this.
• Knight Templar: Tia, who has been captured and experimented on by the Russian military intends to return the favour by wiping out all of humanity. She also aims to unite all the divided merfolk-tribes around the world, but will kill those she believes will stand in her way. Predictably, this puts her in conflict with Ryn.
• Last of Her Kind: Helen Hawkins is the last descendant of Charles Pownall and his mermaid lover.
• Let's You and Him Fight: After her sonic attacks kill thousands of Americans, Tia sends out videos across the world implicating different global powers, attempting to provoke a major war that will kill far more than she ever could.
• Lightning Bruiser: The merfolk in general are this compared to humans. They have superior reflexes, accelerated senses, are faster, stronger, more durable, and have an easier time recovering from grave injuries (they are just as vulnerable to bullets as anyone else though).
• Line-of-Sight Name: Ryn takes her name from a cartoon seahorse. This also applies to her human surname Fisher that Ben picked out for her in season 2.
• Little Miss Badass: Ryn's daughter Hope, who looks around four, maybe five in human form but is really even younger, was taught how to fight and hunt quite well by her father, along with Levi, killing a huge eel using just a spear by herself as they watch.
• Love Confession: Maddie tells Ryn how she and Ben love her in "Leverage" before the three have sex together.
• Magic Music: The Siren Song is apparently a defense mechanism: it's sung to distract or enthrall humans. It leads to lingering effects that Ben equates to an addiction; both he and Decker continue to crave the song long after they hear it for the first time. In Season 2 Decker's autopsy reveals that the Song actually caused him some brain damage, and everyone is now worried about Ben. The Big Bad of season 3 takes this one step further by weaponizing the song and launch a mass-scale attack against humanity. The echo chamber underwater has sounds which can heal the damage of the siren song too.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Calvin and Janine are shown at the end of having sex in the bathroom once.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Helen's father was human, while her mother had some merpeople ancestry. Their marriage was vehemently opposed by her mother's family because they didn't trust an outsider to keep the secret.
• The Masquerade:
  • The merpeople have kept themselves from humans, as many were massacred in the past by human fishermen who had learned about them.
  • A group of people near Bristol Cove have merpeople ancestry, and have kept it hidden for years in fear of being persecuted if it's ever exposed.
• Minority Police Officer:
  • Dale Bishop is the Sheriff of Bristol Cove, and a member of the indigenous Haida people in the area.
  • Xander McClure, who's mixed race (black father, white mother) becomes a police officer in Season 3. A fellow cadet whom he befriends is Annie, a black woman (who's also a lesbian).
• Motive Misidentification: When he learns the truth of Charles, Ben assumes that the family created the legend of his "romance" to cover up how they were a party to genocide. He challenges his dad on "the truth" only to find Charles' family thought he was just an eccentric drunk who made up the mermaid thing over his affair. They then created the legend just to increase tourism, not knowing what they were truly covering up.
• Ms. Fanservice: There's no denying that Ryn's terrestrial form is very pleasing to look at, though her strange behavior and eerie, inhuman eyes subvert it a bit.
• Mugging the Monster: A lowlife tries to rape Ryn in his car, and she rips his throat out before smashing him through the windshield, since he didn't realize she's a mermaid with sharp teeth (plus much greater strength than a human).
• Naked on Arrival: The mermaids when they first come on land, since they don't wear clothes in their natural habitats.
• Naturalized Name: Tia, the Russian mermaid, has a mermaid name, but adopts the name "Tia" for dealing with humans. It's short for "Tiamat", the legendary sea monster.
• The Needs of the Many: Ben lets Ian die as he realized that his releasing the truth of the merpeople to the world could potentially doom them all, weighing one life against thousands.
• The Neidermeyer: Admiral Harrison and David Kyle, who both seeks to exploit the merfolks' abilities to increase the military might, while not caring for how unethical and torturous the experiments they commit are.
• Non-Action Guy: Robb is by no means idle, but unlike the rest of his species, he's not a warrior. Possibly because he's unable to transform back anymore, but he never displays any level of aggression that his people are prone to, and is in general shown to be fairly cheerful.
• Non-Idle Rich: The wealthy Ben devotes his time to oceanic research and conservation.
• Non-Mammalian Hair: All merpeople have hair even while in their natural forms, despite being acquatic creatures which have no discernible need for it.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Mermaids have visible breasts even when not in human form, despite it being established that they feed their babies through regurgitating food, not lactation.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Between episode seven and eight of the third season, Robb's tribe went into battle against Tia's tribe, who ventured there trying to secure followers, and defeated them. They really are as fierce as Ryn claimed.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Maddie and Ben both get subtle yet epic ones when Ryn is knocked into the pool in Episode 3. Subverted when the non-ocean water fails to trigger her transformation.
  • Ryn and Donna both get one when Donna brings two other merfolk to bring her back to the water and they both realize that they're actually there to kill her. Apparently they didn't tell Donna this either, so they both become fugitives.
  • Robb gets a subtle one, just before his cover is blown by Ryn. When introduced to her, sociable Robb, recognizing her as well, stops dead in his tracks and his smile slowly starts to slip.
• Older Than They Look: Merfolk are apparently very long-lived. Donna's daughter Cami doesn't look much younger than her mother. When Ben questions Ryn about her age, she is unable to give him a straight answer, as Merfolk reckon time differently. They tell time by counting annual whale migrations, and Ryn only says that she's seen "many."
• One Head Taller: Ryn is fairly short, while Ben and Maddie, who become her lovers, are both taller. Whenever they kiss, Ryn's head is craned up for it.
• One-Word Title: As a reference to mermaids.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Mermaids here are an aquatic humanoid race who are capable of transitioning into a form with legs when they have to come on land, but the transition (from land to sea, at least) is neither quick nor clean. Those who do step out of water have to eventually return to the ocean (and subject themselves to a Painful Transformation), or their bodies literally break down and they can't change back. They have much denser bones and far greater strength than humans as a result of living in the ocean's crushing depths. Their eyes are larger than human eyes, but their pupils are smaller to compensate for the different way light behaves when traveling through water (as opposed to air). Also, only ocean water triggers the transformation, meaning Ryn can be in a bath or pool and still be in human form. Some mermaid tribes are also born all female, but can change to male later for reproduction. They are apex predators organized in matriarchal tribes; their eye color marking which tribe they belong to. They have their own language and culture, but can quickly learn to adopt human ways. Their song, if used defensively, can cause severe brain damage and even drive people to commit suicide. Otherwise, it can enrapture them. When entering mating season, their faces and throats glow with bioluminiscence to signal fertility.
• Outliving One's Offspring: It turns out that a major part of why Tia loathes all humans is because, when captured by them, she'd been pregnant, before miscarrying due to her mistreatment. She describes it as the worst thing any person can experience.
• Painful Transformation: A mermaid's transition from terrestrial form to aquatic is neither smooth nor painless; see Transformation Horror below. The transition from sea to land appears to be very painful as well. Apparently, the longer they stay on land, the slower and more painful their transformation becomes, to the point where it is possible for them to stop transforming entirely.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Maddie's mother left her and her father about nine months before the series began. It's shown the departure was not a cordial one, and resulted from her drug abuse. She later returns to mend things with Maddie, though it's difficult. Her birth father is not mentioned at all, on the other hand. Her stepfather Dale, who's become her father essentially (he usually is called that too) later dies from Tia's attack.
  • In Episode 6, Ryn reveals to Maddie and Ben that her and Donna's mother died when they were young. Their father (or fathers) are not mentioned. Cami, Donna's daughter, is introduced when she's dead. As with her mother and aunt, her father is not mentioned.
  • Helen's parents both died when she was little.
• Perpetual Frowner: The merfolk aren't big on smiling in general and will usually wear a stoic expression. Ryn is extremely confused when she sees Ben laughing and asks him if he's okay. Tellingly, her own first attempt at laughing didn't go too well.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Ryn is 5'4" and rather scrawny, but is fully capable of snapping a much larger man's neck, smashing that man through a car windshield, and throwing a metal rod with enough force to pierce through a wooden post. In this case, it's somewhat realistic and justified. Ben and Maddie's tests reveal that she weighs almost 200 pounds, probably because her body tissues (bones and muscles especially) are much denser and stronger than humans' as an adaptation against the higher pressures in the deep ocean.
• Polyamory: Maddie is involved with Ben when the series starts. However, both soon grow attracted to mermaid Ryn, and she reciprocates. Both of them kiss her before having a threesome in Season 2, where they settle on all being together since both like Ben as well. Maddie and Ben don't tell their friends or relatives, who find out on their own, expressing surprise though acceptance of this. However, at dinner with Ben's family Maddie (influenced by Ryn) openly declares it and kisses both of them.
• Professor Guinea Pig: Ben experiments on himself in Season 3 through injections of merpeople DNA. It results in him gaining some of the merpeople's natural abilities, like enhanced healing and senses. He was hoping to prove they were safe for treating his mother's paraplegia, but found much more.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Tia, Katrina and Bryan, who view their mermaid bloodlines as top of the food chain while looking down at humanity.
• Queer Establishing Moment: It's teased before, but in "Oil and Water" at last Maddie and Ryn make out together (along with Ben) confirming their mutual attraction and being into other women. Maddie is also very amenable after Ryn says she wants to have sex with them both, which they later do, and become a trio together.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Xander, after deciding to join the police force in the third season; and previously Dale Bishop.
• Revenge:
  • Xander is dead set on killing the merman who killed his father. He can't do it however after cornering the killer.
  • Cami similarly at first seeks to kill Xander for having killer her mother, but she's thwarted.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Happens to Hunter in the third season. After recovering from a nearly fatal wound she joins Tia while being held at spear-point. Realizing Hunter would say anything to save her life Tia is naturally wary of her, though Hunter does everything that is asked of her, even when she had the opportunity to rejoin her former tribe. This is being rewarded by being left behind as a decoy for the military and Ryn to find; the latter being understandably pissed. It is unclear what becomes of Hunter afterwards.
• Rose-Tinted Narrative: In-universe example. Bristol Cove's famed local legend is a cutesy story about town founder Charles Pownall falling in love with a mermaid. It's even the subject of a cheesy kids' pageant in the pilot episode. The true story is more complicated than that: Charles Pownall did fall in love with a mermaid, but they conceived some kind of mutant baby that Charles gave away to the local Haida tribe because he had no idea how to care for her. The merfolk believe that he killed the child, and have been hostile to the humans of Bristol Cove ever since. In actuality the child survived, was healed by the Haida, and had descendants, of which Helen Hawkins is the last. And to further complicate things, because Charles was already married at the time, the modern Pownall family think that this was just an extramarital affair that's been conflated by legend, and consider it to be the old family scandal they'd just as soon forget about. Ted Pownall is apparently paying Helen off to keep quiet about it.
• R-Rated Opening: "Til Death Do Us Part" in Season 3 opens on Ryn having passionate sex with Ben, as both enjoy his newfound merpeople stamina (though it's not explicit).
• Scary Black Man: The African-looking merfolk are this when they are aggressive, specifically Donna, her daughter Cami and Levi.
• Scenery Censor: When the mermaids are Naked on Arrival, the series makes liberal use of plants to hide their naughty bits. It almost becomes a Running Gag.
• Sex Shifter: Everyone in Robb's tribe is born female, but by means of a pool they are able to transition to male in order to reproduce.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Robb lost his ability to transform back into his aquatic form, after being on land for too long.
• The Sheriff: Dale Bishop is the Sheriff of Bristol Cove starting out, a good and competent law enforcement officer but gets fired in Season 2 by the town council over being unable to solve recent cases (as he covered up mermaid activity). They later rehire him though.
• Ship Tease: Ryn gets some very blatant teasing with both Ben and Maddie. It's quickly approaching Threesome Subtext levels.
  • In the pilot, she uses her siren song on Ben.
  • In "The Lure", she gets very handsy with Maddie, yanking her by the hair and touching her breasts (specifically the feather tattoo on her right breast, but still).
  • In "Interview With a Mermaid", when Ben is measuring her dimensions, she starts feeling his muscles and they Almost Kiss, but he pulls away at the last moment. Later, after getting knocked into a pool, Maddie tries to dry her off and Ryn, sensing that Maddie is afraid of her, attempts to assuage her fears by laying her head on her chest. Finally, when it comes time to go to sleep, Ryn climbs into bed with Ben and Maddie, though only to sleep.
  • There's not much in "On the Road" due to Ryn's worsening condition, though there is still a Held Gaze or two in the early parts.
  • In "Curse of the Starving Class", Ryn compliments Maddie's dress and they have an emotionally intimate conversation about family and love. Ryn tells Maddie "You are love" and "I miss you", and then they share a lingering kiss—full on the lips.
  • In "Showdown", after seeing Maddie give Ben a kiss and tell him "I love you", Ryn does that too. Not on the cheek, mind you, but full on the lips. Ben and Maddie seem unsure of how to react, though Maddie does mention the kiss from previous episode. Then, when Donna accuses Ryn of "liking human", the former doesn't specify which human and the latter doesn't deny it.
  • As of "Natural Order", it's officially no longer a tease, as Ryn and Maddie kiss at length passionately in a way that simply can't be chalked up to confusion or imitation. Following this, she, Maddie and Ben frankly discuss things, soon becoming lovers a few episodes later.
• Shoulders-Up Nudity: Ryn is filmed from the collarbone up while walking around naked early on.
• Shout-Out: Ryn uses a picture of Frozen's Anna and Elsa to communicate that she's looking for her sister.
• Shower of Love: Ben and Maddie start getting frisky in the shower before they get interrupted by Ryn early during "On the Road".
• Sirens Are Mermaids: A subset of the mermaids have a captivating song, which can have extreme or even deadly effects on humans.
• Siren Song: The Siren Song is apparently a defense mechanism for the merpeople: it's sung to distract or enthrall humans. Ben equates its lingering effects to an addiction; both he and Decker continue to crave the song long after they hear it for the first time. Decker's autopsy reveals that the Song actually caused him some brain damage. Ben attempts suicide after hearing the song. The Big Bad of season 3 takes this one step further by weaponizing the song and launching a mass-scale attack against humanity.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Merman Levi is the one who killed Xander's father, but in Season 2 became remorseful and guilty for the killing and even apologized to Xander for it, telling him he was Just Following Orders.
• Their First Time: Ryn, Maddie and Ryn have sex together finally in "Leverage". Before this happened they had accepted Ryn's offer of making love with them, but hadn't gotten around to it.
• They Would Cut You Up: Donna, Ryn's older sister (a mermaid like her), gets captured and experimented on by the military until she breaks free of them, escaping along with Chris. Mermaids had been cruelly slaughtered by humans who encountered them in the past too, which is why they largely stayed hidden until that point.
• Third-Person Person: Ryn often refers to herself this way, though it lessens throughout the seasons.
• Threesome Subtext: Ben and Maddie are dating as the series starts. Both have increasing hinted attraction to Ryn, who gives signs of the same, during season one. By season two, it's no longer subtext as the three become lovers.
• Threeway Sex: Ben, Maddie and Ryn have sex together in "Leverage" before going on the sabotage mission later.
• Throwing Off the Disability: Downplayed. Merpeople stem cells can heal paralysis, it turns out. Ben's mom Elaine was paralyzed after being injured due to a boating accident, but gradually recovers somewhat using them and even gains some merpeople abilities like breathing underwater as a result. However, she's still mostly paralyzed so it isn't a complete cure.
• Toplessness from the Back: Often done with freshly transformed mermaids for propriety reasons.
• Tracking Device:
  • Maddie gives Ryn a pendant with one inside so they can know her location during "On the Road".
  • Ian puts a tracking app on Ryn's phone when they meet (due to her ignorance, she didn't notice) and as a result finds her with Beth's people at the ranch undergoing the fertility ritual and half-transforming back into a mermaid as he films it.
• Tragic Bigot: Merfolk are this towards the humanity, especially Donna for the torture she was subjected to, while Xander is this towards the merfolk for his father's death in retaliation for Donna's torture.
• Transformation Horror: Ryn's transformation back into her aquatic form. First, her teeth grow into shark-like points and her fingernails lengthen into razor-tipped claws. Then her dorsal fin bursts painfully out of her back. But the worst is yet to come, as her legs bloodily and graphically fuse into her tail accompanied by the delightful sounds of tearing flesh, ripping muscles, and snapping bones. And all the while, she's shedding her human skin, but it's not like that of a fish, oh no. Instead, her skin sloughs off her body, falling off like a leper. And even before the transformation, prolonged periods away from seawater turn her eyes yellow and bloodshot, while her skin becomes scabby, flakey, and blistered like dried-out mud. Contact with even small amounts of seawater can trigger the transformation, though it is fortunately reversible in that scenario. When they go from sea to land, it appears that a merfolk's tail literally splits underneath the scaly tail, leaving it behind. It's only been seen once on-screen, and not in great detail, but the merfolk's reaction clearly indicates that it's also painful.
• Uncanny Valley: invoked Justified and done deliberately with the mermaids. Ryn's eyes are larger than a human's, while her pupils are noticeably smaller than would be expected, causing her irises to appear more striking than normal. Her behavior and mannerisms are completely alien, and even after she's spent some time adjusting to land, her movements and walking are still not quite the same as that of good ol' Homo sapiens.
• Uncertain Doom: As of the season 3 finale, it's unknown whether Ben died or not after saving Hope. Ryn firmly believes he will return to her, while everyone else isn't too confident about it.
• Uneven Hybrid: Helen Hawkins is the descendant of Charles Pownall and his mermaid lover. She says she's about one-eighth merfolk. She doesn't have any mermaid powers, but she knows a lot of lore about them - and she has a weird skin condition that may or may not be related. Also she and the other hybrids are immune to the damaging effects of the siren song.
• Ungrateful Bitch:
  • Donna really takes the cake. She thinks all humans are evil as a result of the admittedly inhumane treatment she was subjected to at the lab. However, she conveniently forgets that if it hadn't been for Chris, she would very likely have never been reunited with Ryn.
  • Katrina, even more so than Donna. She was taken in by Ryn's tribe when she was young and lost and was a never-ending source of trouble for Ryn, betraying her multiple times and still always offered a chance for redemption by the former. She ultimately ends it with a Spiteful Suicide.
• Verbal Tic: Ryn says "Okay, yes." when she voices agreement to something.
• We Have the Keys: In season 2 the military are working on a plan to capture a mermaid for study. This will obviously require some serious force, given what happened the last time they tried this... except then Lieutenant Martinez realises that Ryn is friendly towards (some) humans, so she just walks up to her and asks for her help.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Xander gives Ben this treatment for not telling him about the existence of merfolk after his father is killed by them.
  • Maddie calls him out on both hiding a decaying mermaid-body, and finding out he has been injecting himself with said mermaid's stem-cells.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Many of the main cast are Fake American, and they make valiant attempts at a generic American accent with varying degrees of success (Alex Roe has the most slippage among them). Rena Owen stands out in this regard, speaking in some kind of amalgam of her native New Zealand and an American accent that actually ends up sounding like Maritime Canadian.
  • In-Universe: Maddie claims to her mom that Ryn is a Finnish Native when Susan asks Ryn where she's from.
• White Sheep: Downplayed example. The Pownall family isn't exactly evil, just snooty and avaricious. Ben is the son who left the family business to do environmentalist work, and his parents still get passive-aggressive with him whenever he decides to show up for family functions.
• With Us or Against Us: This basically sums up Tia's way of thinking. Join her or die. There is no middle ground.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Spoken verbatim by Helen when a pack of half-drunken teens from a "mermaid party" converge to swim at the very lake the renegade mermaids are using to refresh in.
• You No Take Candle: Ryn speaks this way since she not only hasn't any experience speaking English, she has no experience with any human languages whatsoever. She learns quickly throughout the seasons and thus gradually grows out of it.

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