Time of her lives

Sometimes a story starts out with exactly the right energy.

We meet Chloe King, newly turned 16, running madly through a forest toward an art museum in a tower. She dashes frantically up the stairs to the top, looks around to catch her breath and is set upon by her pursuer, a black man with a deep cat-scratch scar across his face.

With a mighty shove he sends her flying out the open window, plummeting to her almost certain death.

But Chloe is not dead.

In “The Nine Lives of Chloe King” – a show that seems like it would translate perfectly to an 8-bit side-scrolling video game – Chloe, played by Skyler Samuels, is discovering abilities on the eve of her 16th birthday. Her friends are amazed that she’s able to hear music playing through earbuds that are not in her ears and keep her balance along the top of a park bench without really thinking about it.

When she leaps on top of a car to avoid a truck and discovers she has retractable claws – she discovered this new trick when a homeless man attacked her and she took a swipe at him – she is suddenly much more interested in learning more about her murky origins.

Story

Chloe has lived her life as the only adopted daughter of a single mom. What she knows of her father is he adopted her from an orphanage in the Ukraine before leaving his family some 10 years before.

At 16 Chloe – who is cute, smart, funny, and sort of athletic even before she became overtly cat-like and started doing junkyard parquor – really isn’t very popular. She has shied away from attention and calls people out when they’re being jerks. She’s become all the more noticeable now, however, and has drawn the attention not only of the strange man who attacked her in the museum, but also a couple of kindred spirits. A basketball-playing sophomore named Alek and a tough girl named Jasmine approach Chloe to protect her from the weird guy and tell her more about some of these things she’s discovering about herself. They tell her she is a member of the Mai, an order of the worshippers of Set, an ancient cat deity.

I suppose there’s some reason we’ve never heard of these cat people who, among other things, can’t kiss humans because they might paralyze or kill them.

Chloe had just gotten her first kiss the night before – well, her first real kiss, she said, because her friend Paul when they were 7 didn’t count. A boy named Xavier at a club she and her friends snuck into. When the camera cut to him later, he was looking both paralyzed and dead, so ... it’s probably a good idea they told her about that.

Paul and her other best friend, Amy, also hooked up officially at the club they all snuck into, and Amy had a bit of breakup drama when Paul didn’t show up for their first actual date. Of course, Paul had been abducted by the weird attacker guy who we learn from Alek and Jasmine is a member of the Order. So it wasn’t really Paul’s fault and Amy forgave him, but first they had to rescue him from where he was being held in a warehouse.

This was the first full-on fight scene we witnessed between one member of the Order and three members of the Mai – where it seems like any of them could’ve attacked him with a kiss and it would’ve put an end to it, but he was quite a strong fighter. It was pretty dark, it was hard to get a sense of what was going on and hopefully if they do a lot more of these they’ll bring in a stronger fight coordinator, because you can’t just whip lights and cameras around and hope it looks right.

Plot twist

But as for the story itself, well, the weird attacker guy is seen reporting to some businessman, who orders him to kill Chloe, who is apparently some kind of Chosen One who has nine lives – all the other Mai just have one, we learn, just like everyone else. And then we learn that the businessman is father to Brian, a cute older boy who was hitting on Chloe when she was at her after-school job.

So now we have to wonder if Brian is interested in Chloe, or if he is pursuing her as part of that “family business” he said he was back in town for.

Either way, this story is off to a great start. Samuels presents her character with the perfect blend of coolness, confusion and toughness where it’s called for, and I think it’s safe to begin the inevitable comparisons to Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Chloe seems perfectly drawn personality-wise to lead the Mai against the Order in a fight of good versus evil. In order for the story to carry that kind of weight the mythology will have to be solidified and soon, but we didn’t learn everything we needed to know about the Buffyverse from the pilot episode, and as the story unfolds we’re likely to learn more.

New episodes of “The Nine Lives of Chloe King” premiere Tuesdays at 9/8c on ABC Family.