Who you
gonna call? 8/10
Synopsis: The corpses of two men found dead in an alleyway
have unusual post mortem abnormalities. Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate
their deaths which lead them to Lauren Kyte, a secretary who appears to be
protected by a poltergeist like force.
One thing I
love about season one is this cluster of MOW shows from JERSEY DEVIL to SPACE. Granted
there not all brilliant yet they are all (except one, can you guess which?) enjoyable
to watch and there are some real gems pitched in there. This is one such gem of
an episode the first MOW to feature the afterlife as its paranormal prerequisite.
I do have a fondness for a good ghost story and for me this one dose not
disappoint.
We start the
episode with Mulder wilfully participating in a campaign of miss information
with a couple of G-Men from some unidentified government agency. Mulder using
his cunning, manages to obtain the finger prints of a dead man in the morgue whose
identity is undisclosed to the agents and the story is underway. With these finger
prints the pair ascertains the identities of the two corpses and where they
died. Mulder is shown at his devious best here.
Fast forward
a couple of scenes and we find Mulder and Scully searching through CCTV footage
from an ATM machine near to where the two victims’ bodies were discovered. They
spot what may be our antagonist, a shadowy figure but they cannot get a good
look at whom or what it is because in 1993 ‘the resolution was to poor and it wouldn’t
help much to enhance it’ Simply put the technology wasn’t about at the time so
why the catastrophe that was the following episode GHOST IN THE MACHINE? (Have
you figured out which episode it is I do not find enjoyable?)
Meanwhile timid
secretary Lauren Kyte is threatened by her boss only for him to be attacked by
some invisible force. Yes! Gotta be a ghost!
The CCTV video
leads the Mulder and Scully to Lauren, the last person to have seen the two men
alive. I cannot help but wonder where it is that I have seen this woman before.
I typed her name ‘Lisa Waltz’ into goggle and the best answer I’ve come with is
that I’ve seen her in Pet Cemetery 2, however I am not convinced by this. Can
anybody out there name something more substantial she has been in, that I may remember
her from? Things like this really bug me and I won’t be happy until my
curiosity is cured. Anyway the agents ask Lauren if she had ‘seen this person
before’ and hand her a picture of the ghostly apparition taken from the CCTV footage
that looks more like The Flash. This made me giggle.
This spectre
that is by now unmistakably guarding Lauren then sends Fox and Dana hurtling
backwards in their vehicle and straight into a collision with another motorist
at high speed. All involved, including the other driver are miraculously unharmed.
In what can only be viewed as homage to a regular A-Team in-joke.
Can I just
point out Scullys reference to the film Poltergeist in the following seen ‘They’re
here’ said in a chilling voice, an genuine homage to one of my favourite films
from my youth. Sometimes it seems the show was wrote, directed and shot just
for me and that’s why I love it.
Back to the
show and our agent begin surveillance on Lauren. They watch her in the car park
preventing her ex-boss, Howard Graves name from being replaced on a parking
space sign with that of Tom Braidwood, the guy who plays Melvin Frohike by the
way. Anyways Mulder soon discovered that Howard Graves, whom committed an
apparent suicide, is the poltergeist that has been protecting her. Although
Scully is convince that Lauren has an accomplice in the murder of the two men
at the ATM and the sabotage of the agent’s car causing it to crash.
Lauren is
awoken that night by the macabre voice of Howard Graves pleading for his life
and the sound of water dripping. She follows the noises to the bathroom armed
with a baseball bat. Scared she cautiously walks in and flicks on the light. A
curtain surrounds the bath, she reaches out pulls it back and reveals a bath
slowly filling with blood that then drains away. From this we find out that
Howard was murdered. A frightening scene that if you ask me, would have looked at home in any slasher film.
I’m going to fast forward past the
Scully/Mulder theory exchange to the inevitable conclusion that Mulder is
correct. With just a quick reference to an Elvis joke…:
Mulder: Do you know how difficult it
is to fake your own death? Only one man has pulled it off...Elvis.
We’ll see how many Elvis in-jokes we
can count through this season.
Suspecting she may be the target of a
hit for figuring out the killer of Howard Graves, Lauren calls Mulder and asks
him to come to her house ASAP. Mulder’s presence however turns out to be redundant
as the two hitmen are killed by the poltergeist. He arrives just as the last
hitman is being choked to death whilst being suspended in mid-air. Fox stops visibly
stunned by what he was seeing. Scully comes in just after and characteristically
manages to miss the paranormal phenomena. Not the first time Dana has missed
the critical visual proof of the paranormal. Even if she had seen I still doubt
she would believe.
Lauren sits in an interrogation room,
Mulder one ups the G-Men from the beginning of the episode a second time and coax’s
Lauren into talking about Graves Partner and how he was involved in illegal supplies
to a terrorist group. The agents pair up with the G-Men to raid the office of
Graves’ business partner. Where, with the help of Graves’ spirit none the less
they find a floppy disk containing the sordid details necessary to put Graves’ business
partner behind bars. Yippee!
I enjoyed that I could clearly see
the inspiration taken from the film Poltergeist. I also like the reminders that
this was made in 93’ a year that for me was a much simpler time when I was just
a young boy. Now I come to think of it maybe I remember Lisa Waltz from
watching this episode as an eight year old boy, curiosity cured?
Ah the nostalgia, lovely 8/10 from
me.
Wow I hope you have had as much fun
reading as I have had writing. Now bring on ‘GHOST IN THE MACHINE’ which promises
to be a much shorter post (grumble, grumble).
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