Cold Open: There’s an Old Man walking around who sees corpses of kids on the ground and in a tree and doesn’t seem to care.  Frankly, this is kind of how I felt about this episode.  It wasn’t great.  It had popping moments, but an overdose of sighs, pauses, and stares. I mean Twilight levels of stares.  The pilot and episode 2 were written by Don Mancini of Child’s Play and Halloween Wars Season 6.  I was really surprised that Don wrote episode 2.  The pilot was creepy and popped, but episode 2 fizzled.  This was a missed opportunity for a good show.  Here we go.

Katie is back home and watching Candle Cove on the tv and then stabs her brother with a hook.  Then, the show slows down to a crawl again.

Mike’s mom investigates the show and we get a lot of exposition about how the show was pirated onto RF signals and such.  Honestly, this was the nadir of the show, but it still has promise, if the writers decide to stop feeding the story shots of nyquil and turkey sandwiches with gravy.  

Hospital: Katie is under observation and their son Dane is in surgery.  This will be an awkward Hallmark Card! Jessica (Katie’s mom) asks Mike to come back and talk to Katie. The Cop kinda doesn’t like this, but doesn’t put up much of a fight either.  This is the theme of the whole episode…build up…fizzle…light random pop…fizzle.  Mike goes to talk to Katie and sees a crayon picture on the wall depicting Candle Cove. He shows Katie the drawing, which….doesn’t achieve much.  However, out of nowhere, Mike breaks the touch barrier with the kid, sending the dad into WTF-mode?!   The action happens through a screen: once Mike leaves- the tooth monster snuggles Katie.  This is creepy and gross, but not connected to the scene before it.  Therefore, the discourse between Mike and Katie didn’t need to happen and was a time waster!

Mike goes back home and shows his mom the drawing.  She believes it’s an “abandoned” cement plant.  Mike and Mike’s Mom (MM) go to cleanest and still seemingly operational cement plant- No graffiti, no beer bottles, no trash, nothing to indicate that the cement plant is not kept up and will be turned back on in 30 minutes.  In fact, it’s clinically clean. The art department really dropped the ball on this one.  Mike goes into the spooooooky cement factory and finds his brother’s corpse.  Then, Mike flashes back to stabbing his brother with a hook and burying him.

Mike goes to bed and sees the One-Character from Candle Cove who looks a lot like the lobster-thing from Futurama – upon research, it’s called Zoidberg and that’s what I’m calling this One-Eyed thing- Hi, Zoidberg.  Zoidberg causes Mike to flash again to his mom talking to her beat up son.  She says that when she told the bully’s parents, the bully’s mom laughed at her. This was not my upbringing.  My mother, a 12 Generation Tarheel, is perpetually armed. If someone laughed at her after they had just ganged up and beat me up,  I’d be visiting my badass Mom in Prison.  

Mike goes to the kitchen and tells his mom, ‘BTDubs, I killed my brother.’ [paraphrased] She tells him to leave, he won’t, she cuts him with a big knife. Then, Mike takes a nap. I’m starting to wonder if any of these writers grew up with human families.  The Cop shows up purportedly to arrest Mike, but not really.  It’s very vague as to what he plans on doing besides putting him in the backseat of his car.

They make a big deal out of this backseat thing; therefore, I will address the stupidity.  A cop needs to maintain control of a suspect for his safety and the safety of suspect.  The car did not have a partition, therefore, having Mike in the back is stupid and dangerous. Furthermore, Mike is not restrained in any way.  In this instance, the cop has a confessed murderer in custody and just has him in the back, with no cuffs, a clear shot taking out the cop, and relieving him of his service weapon!  This show really needs to think sometimes with a bit of commonsense.

Cop doesn’t take Mike to the station; instead, Cop just keeps driving … for some reason. It’s not spooky, it’s just kinda dumb.

The show ends with Mike’s former English teacher feeding the tooth monster teeth. GROSS!  Maybe, it’s Steve Martin under all of those teeth?!!  HA HA!

The episode has some good creepy parts, but it seems to lack a strong reality through story to contrast the weirdo elements of the story.  Channel Zero really needs to keep the real elements of the story real or this show will turn into a steaming pile very soon.  I have a lot of faith that this was just a bad second episode, which is not uncommon if your pilot had so much meat that second episode seemed like leftovers.  It would’ve benefitted from some sort of side-quest for Mike to accomplish.

Happy Halloween- it’s just around the corner!