Reviews
[TV Review] “The Returned” Episode 1.06: ‘Lucy’
For a show that moves along so slowly, a lot of things actually happen in every episode. This week’s episode of The Returned was no different, featuring plenty of happenings but little in the way of answers. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Lucy
Well it looks like Lucy is now a member of the returned! After being absent since the pilot, Lucy wakes up in the episode named after her. Although she only gets three scenes, they are revealing and inspire excitement for all of the potential storylines that may sprout from her new gift. In a brutal twist of irony, Lucy is now able to actually hear the dead. Not only that, but she uses her gift in the final scene to channel Jack’s father, who warns him that he is in danger.
This is definitely a shot of adrenaline the show could use, but it does raise more questions. If all of the returned came back at the same time, why is Lucy brought back later? Is she the only one? I doubt we will get a firm answer on this anytime soon, but her ability to communicate with the dead should come in handy once she begins to interact more with other returned. Needless to say, Leah Gibson did some great work in that last scene with Jack.
Helen
Helen is in police custody for leaving Victor at the diner last week, so Nikki thinks it would be a good idea for Julie to talk to her. Alright. Luckily, Julie was Helen’s husband’s nurse, so she immediately recognizes her and they have a discussion about life and death.
Julie is still a bit unrelatable, at least in comparison to the other characters, but this conversation she has with Helen lets us see more of the real Julie than we’ve ever seen before. When Julie admits to Nikki that she is unable to feel the life inside of her, it’s heartbreaking. She hasn’t felt the same ever since Adam nearly murdered her and suddenly her previous actions with Victor make sense. It makes some of her past mistakes more understandable. They’re still frustrating, but at least we can sort of understand why she has done what she has done.
Victor
Peter gets some retribution this week in the form of a vicious hallucination played by Victor/Henry. After apologizing to Victor at the grave of his murderer, Peter sees that very same man walk towards him, point a gun at his face and pull the trigger. It’s a wicked little trick on Victor’s part, one that Peter very much deserved. It is unclear if Peter is actually a nice man, or if it is just a front he puts on to mask his true instincts. I’m betting on the former, but the latter would be pretty interesting.
Victor also gets his reunion with Julie this week, as he stops her from jumping off the roof of a building. There’s a really weird conversation between the two of them where he tells her she is his fairy, and she agrees to be his fairy. It’s a little odd but at the same time kind of endearing.
Adam
Lastly we have Adam, who is acting as caretaker for Lena. He is able to heal her back with a mixture of nettles. It’s a little disheartening that nothing more came of her scar. It was built up so much that you would assume it would play a bigger part in the overall mystery, but it turns out it’s just a normal wound.
Adam continues to be creepy this week as he cares for Lena. We still don’t have a lot of insight into what exactly makes him want to kill, but something about Lena doesn’t bring this out in him (though he does nearly pull a knife on her as she is changing). They do have sex, though, which is weird. We haven’t seen enough of Adam to really care about him. This is a problem The Returned has with many of the supporting characters, but Adam is hit especially hard by this fact considering that all we know about him is that he’s a homicidal maniac.
This was another solid, if not spectacular episode of The Returned. What did you guys think? I’m ready to see some more of these storylines merge together. What about you?
Random Notes
- One of my frustrations with the characters is that no one really seems to wonder why the dead are back and if something might be wrong with them. Both of these issues get addressed this week as Helen asks the why and Claire wonders aloud if Camille has returned to them different than when she left them. Progress!
- Camille tries to have sex with Ben, but he realizes who she is and bolts. He probably didn’t want to participate in necrophilia. Can you blame him?
- I’m just going to keep referring to Victor/Henry as Victor, until everyone starts calling him Henry.
- Claire and Peter have sex, so that’s a thing.
- Adam tells Tony that he’s actually hiding their returned mother inside and that she never wants to see him again. Poor Tony.
- Is no one trying to solve the murder of Julie’s neighbor? I feel like that should be more of a focus, considering her tongue was ripped out and her cats were found eating it.
- Speaking of necrophilia, did you miss Mary Elizabeth Winstead this week? Have no fear! Next week’s episode is named “Rowan.” Here’s the promo:
Books
‘Scary Movie Night’ Review: A Hitchcock-Themed Thriller Full of Juicy Twists But Not Much Else
A secluded mansion. A group of friends each harboring secrets. A party built around one woman’s love of Alfred Hitchcock. These are the ingredients laid out to begin Scary Movie Night, the sophomore novel from Miranda Smith and follow-up to her breakout debut, Smile for the Cameras.
They’re all, standing alone and taken together, very promising ingredients, and when Smith starts to bounce all those secrets and all that seclusion around with a little murder in the mix, they make for some juicy plotting. But fun twists and macabre themed party nights do not a thriller make. There is fun to be had here, but for all its reliance on classic horror tropes and the films of a master of cinematic suspense, Scary Movie Night never quite finds a way to become something more.
Movie blogger and influencer Tippi (yes, she’s named for Tippi Hedren from The Birds) is going through a rough patch. Her upcoming marriage was just called off, and she’s planning to hit the Cannes Film Festival then travel the world as a newly single woman, even shifting her career focus from movies to travel in the process. Her friends Ava, Marlowe, and Constance are supportive, but they also know it might be the last time they see Tippi for a while, so master party planner Ava comes up with the perfect sendoff: A themed scary movie night party, complete with costumes, hosted at the elegant estate of Tippi’s grandmother, Marmee.
Marmee, you see, has her own history with the glamour of Hollywood, and even has a private cinema set up in her mansion. It’s the perfect venue for the perfect night, at least until Tippi starts receiving vaguely threatening notes from her ex, and the first body turns up.
See what I mean about all the ingredients being there? This book starts with so much promise, particularly when guests turn up for the party and reveal their various movie costumes. There’s so much to chew on, and Smith wastes no time diving directly into the drama of it all. The book moves primarily through Tippi’s first-person perspective, so we get the lowdown on her friends, their various relationships, the quarrels that have defined previous social interactions, and much more. It’s a series of rich veins all tapped at once, and it feels like the book is genuinely going somewhere quite fun.
Here’s the thing: The book does go somewhere quite fun; it just gets there in a way that I found both frustrating and often unfulfilling. The characters aren’t defined by their choices in the book so much as they’re defined by what Tippi tells us about each of them, and while the notion of Tippi as an unreliable narrator is key to the plot, her supporting cast never really gets a chance to sit up and exist as anything other than archetypes in her head. The dialogue doesn’t help matters in this regard, and I kept finding myself wishing one of Tippi’s friends would just seize the narrative, just for a moment, so I’d get some sense of these people beyond the broad brushstrokes of the protagonist.
Which brings us to the issue of Tippi as the narrator in the first place. Like the Hitchcock blondes on which she’s clearly modeled, we’re meant to learn about her through her choices, and constantly question whether or not she’s made the right ones. Why did she leave her ex with a wedding looming? Why is she changing career paths? Why does she have to be talked into her own going-away party? How she reacts to these things, and what she’s really after, will be what defines her, but here’s the thing: Tippi, for all her Hitchcockian layers of plotting, never steps forward as a fully formed character. Like the Hitch films playing in the background during the party, she’s more like a suggestion of a character than a person.
Writing first-person present-tense is tricky under the best of circumstances, but doing it when your protagonist is meant to be harboring secrets of her own is especially challenging, and it just…never quite entirely works here, and drawing very direct parallels between her and Hitchcock’s various leading ladies doesn’t really help matters.
But here’s the really interesting part: I wouldn’t be invested in any of these issues were it not for a story that genuinely kept me reading. For all of this book’s shortcomings, and I found a few, it ultimately holds together because Smith has a genuine gift for plot twists, and secrets, and the kind of juicy drama that makes a thriller keep barreling forward on the page. There’s good stuff in here, even if it’s sometimes overshadowed by missteps, and that means that while Scary Movie Night might not obsess you or give you nightmares or stick in your head for weeks on end, it will entertain you. I wanted more from this book, but I also want to see what Miranda Smith writes next, and that’s an achievement in itself.
Scary Movie Night is available July 14 wherever books are sold.
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