Review: Psi Cops “Faith Healer” ; “Chupacabra”

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Chelsea Gamble

The latest pair of episodes from Adult Swim Canada’s nightmare buddy comedy Psi Cops puts the show only one third of the way through its first season, and has thus far burned through an impressive array of zany yet unsettling adventures in a very short time period.

The consistently whacked out exploits and relentless banter of close knit Canadian paranormal investigators Kydd and Felixx is frequently funny and occassionally surprising, with a tasty handful of truly disturbing moments tossed into the mix. With only two original shows under their belt, nobody would call Adult Swim Canada a particularity prolific producer of original animation but in the barren wastelands of CanCon Cartoonland, quantity is irrelevant when you’re holding a quality piece of Canadian made content in your (metaphorical) hand.

This week the show broke from its established stand-alone format for the first time to take a stab at serialized storytelling with a pair of episodes sharing a narrative thread that carries Canada’s worst boys on a paranoia-fuelled odyssey of self discovery.

“Shape Shifter”

The first half of this two part tale is Shape Shifter, a semi–cautionary tale of demonic doppelgängers that kicks off with a cool zoom shot that travels through the peephole of an apartment door only to come face to face with the muzzle of a gun.

Inside that same peephole apartment, Kydd and Felixx are investigating the gun-toting woman’s claim that her husband has been replaced by a shape shifting demon – something that looks just like her husband but with a radically different personality. When she warns them that demons can look identical to your loved ones, it sparks a slow burning madness in both men’s minds as they begin worrying about all the possible shape shifter scenarios that could cause harm to their loved ones, if they had any, which they definitely do not.

A few leaps in logic and a lot of lapses in judgement later, Kydd and Felixx are going all in on a murderous agency-wide witch-hunt, using a fake report about a chupacabra sighting to gain access to every department so they can identify demons disguised as humans using a simple test – any person whose personality had radically changed was probably a demon and would be shot immediately.

This paranoid vigilante project would almost certainly have ended with the senseless slaughter of an innocent person at the hands of our intrepid heroes, had they not realized almost immediately that you need a basic understanding of somebody’s personality as a baseline to be able to tell if their personality has changed, and caring at all about anybody else has never been Kydd or Felixx’s strong suit. And just like that, the murder-fest becomes an info-quest, albeit with the objective of the quest being to learn just enough info to figure out who to kill. Meanwhile, the fake chupacabra story hasn’t gone away, and is in fact growing in popularity with a lot of Psi Cops employees, even gaining traction with Chief Beef.

But in a rare moment of restraint for the show, nobody kills anybody. Kydd and Felixx realize they have a genuine interestin the things they learn, are truly impressed by each staff member, their role within the organization, and the agency as a whole. For the first time they are able to see beyond each other, and finally seeing the value of their teammates, start showering them with earnest praise and unflagging support. It is one of the only truly heartwarming moment of the show thus far.

Of course, the happiness is short-lived.

This radical change in their personalities makes Kydd and Felixx’s newly respected colleagues fear that the demon hunters have themselves been replaced by demonic copies, and begin planning to kill them.

Sunrise, sunset.

“Chupacabra”

For the 8th episode of Psi Cops, the team has big plans to finally get to the bottom of a rumour that’s been swirling around the agency since way back in the 7th episode – the endlessly tantalizing possibility that Psi Cops has received some kind of report corroborating an encounter of the existence of the legendary chupacabra – a small mythological beast rumoured to suck goat blood.

Agency leader and perennial believer Beef has total confidence in the abilities of her top paranormal investigators Kydd and Felixx to go out into the for bring home some tangible proof of the creature’s existence to corroborate the report’s findings.

Beef’s confidence in her team is so unflappable that she isn’t a bit bothered by the knowledge that Kydd and Felixx are the authors of the original report, every word of which is a lie, and that their only purpose in doing so was to the investigators as part of a recent plan to actually murder one of her own employees. Augmenting the original false report are a few new rumours from unverified sources, which is enough evidence for her to send the investigators out to the woods with instructions to not return without proof of the beast’s existence.

Perennial wet blanket Eric makes it known that he has a problem with the conflict of interest caused by the team trying to track down proof of a corporeal beast based on their own false information, which makes spitefully proving him wrong their prime motivation in catching the creature.

Anti-Eric sentiments abound in the deep woods as the boys try to figure out how one catch a chupacabra. In classic Psi Cops style, they immediately encounter a werewolf on its way to a woodland rave, and the name of the game from that point on is convincing Chief Beef and Eric that the giant wolf monster is actually the much smaller chupacabra. They are lucky to have encountered an unusually chill werewolf willing to help with their plans, even ripping apart a goat stolen from a local pervert on camera to help the cause. Events escalate until Kydd shooting Felixx with a silver bullet becomes the most logical option.

Convoluted plots abound in this classic monster of the week episode, even if sometimes the monster you want that week isn’t the monster you get. As long as Kydd and Felixx are having fun on the hunt, it’s worth coming back again week after week.