I mean. Brains, plots, common sense, character development… Oh, wait, they probably don’t mean what the writers left behind, do they? Ah, well, can’t blame a girl for getting confused. Let’s get started!
A little kid in bed, ominous music, a door left cracked instead of safely closed against the monsters – although, does that work? Like, close the closet door, obviously, because then the monster from there can’t get into the room, but if you close your main door, doesn’t that simply lock you in, in the dark, with the monster? I always left my bedroom door open, to get the light from the hall, and so the monsters would hear my parents moving around and know that I had protection. I didn’t want to be locked inside my room with them!
Anyway. Kid in bed, weird noises now from somewhere in the room. And then human arms reach down from the ceiling and snatch him.
Beth meets New Josh at work and he buys her a coffee. She’s been baking a lot since she’s unemployed, but New Josh has a case for her: the kid who was abducted. She worked two similar cases for Buzzwire, and New Josh wants her to take a look because she “already did the legwork on the other two abductions”.
Twenty-seven quick cuts later, Josef and Mick are coming back from a “night on the town” that Josef apparently misrepresented as fun, but was actually window shopping for couches. Obviously they turn on the TV and there’s Beth, with the kid’s dad, pleading for his safe return. This kid has the worst fucking haircut, I can’t even tell you, it looks like he tried the 90s floppy skater-do and then his sister took safety scissors to it. That’s your headshot, kid? That?! No wonder I don’t recognize you, unlike your dad, who is officially one of Those Guys.
Anyway, Mick shows up in the neighborhood in, like, seconds, because Beth is standing on the porch on television, and then comes down off it when Mick shows up to tell her he grew up in this neighborhood, and it’s time for a flashback. Like, I cannot explain how bizarrely this show is structured, how weirdly the scenes are set up, shot, and edited. It’s some sort of amped-up hyperreality buttressed by time fuckery: everything is vividly colored and almost painfully bright, and then you have shit like this, where Mick seems to walk into the television instead of actually having to travel to the location and find Beth. I haven’t tried psychedelics yet, because this show has been occupying that space.
Oh, good, more memories about THE WAR. I’m ready to build a time machine to go back and kill Baby Hitler SPECIFICALLY so I won’t have to hear about WWII anymore, especially since no one learned a got-damned thing and we have Nazis running all over again. Just feels masturbatory at this point (and yes, I’m looking at you, too, Britain).
Turns out the dad is the kid of Mick’s friends, and he had a ten-year-old in 2007? Ok, Boomer. That math feels a little like, “We have to make Mick know this guy!” “Yeah, but, like, it was older Xers having kids in 1997? Even the youngest GenX kid was a legal adult in 1997. Why would a boomer just be having a kid then?” “Who cares! Make it happen! AND GIVE ME MORE CUTS! I NEED MORE CUTS!”
The detective in charge is about to kick Mick out when New Josh tells her to stuff it, they need all the help they can get, but you’re not her boss, New Josh? You don’t get to tell the PD how to investigate, do you? Anyway, Mick interrupts the interview with the parents, which Beth and New Josh are watching for some reason, but the detective tells him he can look through the house when the PD is done. Beth follows him out of the house and asks why he’s acting all weird, and he won’t just fucking tell her his friends used to live here and now their kid does, but whatever. She tells him the case is just like the others: kid gone, no forced entry, no evidence to go on, really. Could only be done by the boogeyman – “or a vampire,” Mick says, and is off to find the fangy connections.
Oh, goody, more flashbacks of THE WAR. I’m not gonna watch. Mick set it up that his friends never mentioned him to the kid for good reason, and I’mma just go with Mick’s an asshole, he was probably an asshole to this guy while they were at war,
New Josh yells at Beth about Mick showing up, but she says she didn’t call him. She does point out that the kid – Jacob – had his toys arranged as a defensive line around his bed: all the noisy ones. New Josh asks if she did that after she was abducted, and she asks how he knows that, and he’s all, “Didn’t you Google me when we met?” but, like – is that really a thing? I was 30 in 2007. I still don’t Google people I meet. That seems weird to me, like paying for a background check on everyone you’ve ever shaken hands with or something. Maybe I just don’t care enough about people, or I know I can trust my evaluation of their character – but I don’t actually know anyone who Googles people, either.
So back to Mick, who has to give us more abysmally stupid lore about kids’ blood tasting better because there’s – my god, I wish I was kidding – “less free radicals”. He goes to see some vamp who hangs around playgrounds? Is this a pedophilia metaphor?
Vamp doesn’t know anything. Something something Beth asking the kid’s dad about his parents, there’s a pic of Mick in the house, and uh-oh, maybe the kid’s dad is Mick’s kid?
Oh, so I guess Dad’s dad wasn’t Mick’s friend, because that guy died in THE WAR, maybe? I told you, I’m not watching the flashbacks, I do not give a shit. Oh, no, the friend DID survive, but Mick abandoned him, came home, fucked his wife, and then took the fuck off. Seems typical.
Beth tells Mick it’s all okay if he loved the lady, and he says yes, of course, it must have been love, and I. Am. Barfing. But sure, just keep justifying everyone’s intensely shitty behavior for no good reason. That’ll make the world a much better place.
Back at the kid’s house, Mick can’t smell any vampire in the room, so he doesn’t think a vamp got him. There is some weird powdered metal, and then they go into the attic and find a trapdoor through which Jacob was taken. Why the cops were unable to find this, or why we have to follow Mick investigating this without them, I do not know. Narrative convenience, is my guess. Anyway, the kidnapper had a whole vent system or something to move around in the walls of the house, and that’s how he got the kid out, I guess.
Oh, no, the cops knew nothing of this, because now they’re all in the house, asking for renovation records and names of people who might have worked there, the usual. These writers deserve to have bad things happen to them. Not, like, horrible things – no death or sickness or anything major – but, like, I hope their Starbucks is never quite right. I hope a baby someday pees in their face. I hope their tires are never quite filled, and they waste gas just enough to cost them.
New Josh offers Beth a job. Mick tries to get a DNA test. Every scene leads to the next with a flash of bright, white light. Every line of dialogue is insipid. There have been quite a few terrible episodes of this show, but this might be one of the worst hours of television I have ever seen in my life.
It’s finally a new day, because Beth changed her shirt. Mick goes to badger Dad about suspects. Oh, Jacob was a change-of-life baby? Dad calls him “our little miracle” after saying they had him late in life (obviously), and there’s some more hinting that Dad’s dad is Mick, but I’m almost certain that will turn out not to be true, because this show loves telegraphing the wrong fucking shit.
30 minutes into a 41-minute episode, we have a suspect. As soon as they have a name, he calls and says that Jacob’s fine, they need to back off, or maybe he’ll just take Beth? who’s looking through house plans for the case, I guess. A light goes off, Beth turns it back on, then they all go out and she just…gets a flashlight? Why doesn’t the switch work anymore? Are you going to even try it?
No, of course not, and Mick has already shown up wherever she is – again, like he just managed to step out of the house and into the next scene. They scare off the perp, and then Beth tells Mick she’s found where he’s keeping the kid. Mick starts to leave, but she says to wait for the warrant, and Mick – rightly! – points out that she never wants to go by the book, and he’s not fucking starting now.
The cops are at the wrong house, somehow? I’d say I missed something, because Mick is in a basement without a house under the freeway, and the cops are at an actual house, but my guess is that this is never explained. Especially since Beth is with the cops? But Mick told her where he was going?
Jacob’s in a wall, like the world’s most wriggly cask of amontillado, but of course Mick finds him. Of course.
DNA test comes back: the kid isn’t Mick’s, just like I said. Blah blah, Mick can’t have a family, what a fuckin tragedy. Like you could raise a child, my man, come the fuck on. You’re awful! Beth’s awful! EVERYONE ON THIS SHOW IS FUCKING AWFUL. Y’all shouldn’t be around kids, if you ask me.
And that’s the end! Thank god! We only have ONE MORE EPISODE, Y’ALL! And then it’s on to something – anything – better. With likeable characters and moderately more sane plots. I don’t want complete sanity – I’m not watching gritty dramas over here, not looking to recap Mad Men or some shit – but dear sweet Jesus, if I can just feel like a person watching TV instead of someone having an hallucinatory episode, it would be great. Real great.
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