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Fear Itself: New Year’s Day

By fred | July 18, 2008

(S01E06) Last week there was none, and now we have a new episode of NBC anthology, Fear Itself. And that might just be the best thing about this this : it is an anthology, and as such you’re allowed to keep thinking and hoping that just because the last episode sucked, this one might just be completely different, in every possible way, and turn out to be one of the greatest thing you’ve seen in years, in this past week.

I’m pretty sure that’s how I approach it, before I started watching I was hoping that despite everything that happened so far, and how each episode has been a disappointment, this one would be different, this one would finally be good, enjoyable, that the curse would stop there. Sadly though, as one could have suspected, that wasn’t the case. But!

But I might be pretty good at this, because right when the episode ended, at first I felt like this had actually been a pretty nice one. Not good, still plenty of things hat were wrong, and I’ll come to that later, but I was telling myself that, at last, this hadn’t been a complete failure, that this might have been the best episode so far. But I was fooling myself, I was trying to force myself to believe it, convince myself hoping that it would make it true, somehow.

The fact and the matter is, this wasn’t a good episode, far from it. Yet I still can’t help myself to think that might have been, if not the best one so far, one of the better episodes this anthology offered us. And the main reason for that might just come from the way it was directed, so kudos to director Darren Lynn Bousman, who knows his shit as he’s the man behind Saw II, III, and IV.

The tone and atmosphere of the episode was really well done, it all happens at night and the episode was filled with visual effects and play with lights that did their job very nicely, though at times it was a bit too much, so much that it was even laughable on occasion. But mostly it worked, special effects were well handled I thought and that whole thing turned out great.

But the problem is that it was all way too predictable. Way, way, way too much. For starter, with their stupid idea that every single episode must end with a “final twist” that will put a new light on the episode or something, instead of focusing on writing a good episode that just works, they’re pretty much ruining the whole thing. I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned I had that final twist down from the start. When you start to see what’s going on, a hot chick wakes up in a world where zombies are walking around eating people, and you know there will be a final twist, you got a pretty high probability of asking yourself something along the line of “so what will it be, that she was a zombie all along?”

From that point on, as the episode goes on many indications and details seems to be hinted at that : other zombies don’t jump on her to eat her up, phone calls don’t make no sense, non-zombies treat her as a threat, or even blame her later on, and there’s also some visual indications in her behavior, like when the cop eats one kid that went to him for help, we have two different visions of Helen standing there: one where she’s got her hands on her mouth, looking scared; the other where she’s standing there just watching, like it’s nothing, almost amused. The duality of her character is quite obvious at that point, so by the time she’s knocking on James’ door just the same way that first zombie at the beginning of the episode knocked on her door, you know she’s one of them.

Posted in Reviews
Shows: Fear Itself