Fear Itself: Spooked
By fred | June 13, 2008
(S01E02) I’m not sure why, but usually anthologies don’t do so well in ratings. Which is kinda odd, because at least it’s not serialized even one bit, so you cannot say you fear of investing into a show only to see it being canceled before you get any answers. Here, every episode stands on its own and has nothing to do with the others, really.
Of course, it also means you never know what to expect from such series : just because one episode was terrible, or on the contrary absolutely brilliant, doesn’t mean the next one(s) will be the same. But that’s part of the fun, tuning in each week to venture into a total mystery, in about every possible ways there is. Last week for its series premiere, we had a pretty weak episode, which seems like another stupid decision from NBC (along with putting this show on their schedule exactly on the same day & time the other new series of the summer is on), because clearly starting with a strong episode would have helped things.
I sure hope people won’t have been discouraged or turned down by last week’s episode, because it seems things are going better.
Sadly though, this is about all you can say about this episode. I wish I could say it was a good episode, but it wasn’t. It was not bad, but it wasn’t good either, it was simply better - or, less bad - then last week’s was. But in all fairness, this episode suffered from about the same main flaws, which is we were given yet another very common story - this time the “haunted house” - and it wasn’t done with any new approach, with anything to make it different somehow, and there were no twists of any kind.
The episode opens with a backstory about the main characters, Harry Siegel (Eric Roberts), a cop who’s not afraid of “doing a wrong to make things right“. Now of course when you only have about 42 minutes to tell the entire story, things might have to be rushed a little, and while it did serve its purpose very well, this whole thing felt quite hollow to me. I mean, we’re in some kind of public shelter or something, and we have this cop interrogating a suspect.
He goes as far as to cutting his throat, and so instead of having nothing to loose really at this point and telling him to screw himself, the guy tells where the boy is - which happens to conveniently be in a room upstairs. And that was it, we got the senator’s kid back! But again, it made its point : Siegel is the bad guy, not afraid of crossing the line, doing wrongs when he feels he has to, and also he has an aversion for guns.
This also came up years later, when Siegel is now a PI tracking cheating husbands for their wives, and extorting his clients while he can, too. And that is why you could tell this would play an important role in the/his story, you knew his aversion for guns would be linked to his dark secret that made him who he is now, and also was likely to show up by the end as well, just the way it did. To make sure you knew it would happen, they also showed the gun a few more times, which also gave a reason to show Siegel’s partner a couple more minutes, cause otherwise he hadn’t much to do or say.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Fear Itself
