Get ready to pucker your butts in terror, 3.5 readers.
SPOILER ALERT: This is less of a review and more of a discussion, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it, then come back and discuss, although trigger warning, this is probably the scariest, twisted episodes of the series.
Are some scabs better off left unpicked?
You’d think so. The gavel comes down. The suspect is judged guilty. The high-profile case is over and all the TV cameras leave town. Years later, the horrific crime that rocked a community becomes but an eerie footnote in local history.
But with the rise of streaming media, there’s an overwhelming demand for true crime podcasts and documentaries, especially since everyone is trying to be the next Sarah Koenig, she the mother of all true crime podcasts, Serial. Over the past decade, Netflix has become home to a seemingly endless supply of true crime docs. You could pop them on and never watch them all in your lifetime. Well, maybe you could if you never had to work, drink, eat or poop, but you get the gist.
Enter Davis and Pia. They’re film students from London, he a Scottsman and she an African-American living abroad. (Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold). They’ve returned to Davis’ hometown of Loch Henry to produce a documentary about an egg collector. Pretty bland stuff but hey, at least they can practice their camera work and score an easy A.
Or so they thought. Whilst visiting Davis’ friend, barkeep Stuart (Daniel Portman in his best role since Game of Thrones’ Podrick), Pia inquires why such a beautiful town, full of picturesque landscapes isn’t rife with tourism.
Much to Davis’ dismay, loudmouth Stuart spills the beans. Once upon a time, the town was indeed a tourist spot, that is until the late 1990s when town scumbag Ian Nadair was discovered to be a maniacal serial killer who kidnapped tourists, then dragged them to a secret lair where he tortured and murdered them.
Davis even has a personal connection to this sad tale. His father, Ken, was shot in the shoulder while attempting to arrest Ian. While Davis is proud his father is a hero who brought a madman to justice, he is sad the wound, while not immediately fatal, led to an infection that killed his old man, leaving him without a dad at a young age. So sad was he that he never told Pia this story.
Pia meets Davis mother, Janet, an old woman who is the epitome of sweetness, going out of her way to welcome the couple with homecooked meals. Though she is overly pleasant, there is a clear pallor of sadness and at times, she laments how the vile madman ruined her life by taking her husband from her, leaving her to raise a young son all on her own and now leaving her alone in old age.
Blah blah blah. Against Davis’ protestations, Pia declares that THIS is the story they should be telling, so screw that egg guy. Advised by a streaming media exec to find new dirt on this story long considered old news, the trio go about town digging (Pia and Davis for their film project and Stuart because the greedy little bastard hopes renewed interest in the town will bring paying drinkers to his long dormant pub.)
And boy howdy, do they ever find new dirt. There are some fake outs, some twists and turns, an occasional insinuation that Stuart’s crusty old father Richard (John Hannah) might have been involved, but one night, while Pia is editing tape (she prefers the grainy look of old video cassettes to digital media), she finds, to her shock and horror, an old camcorder recording of Davis’ parents, Ken and Janet, torturing a young couple that had been reported in the news long ago as missing.
I can tell you, I felt that disgusted feeling as I saw a young Janet dawn a creepy mask and saunter into the room in a skintight outfit, dancing about and wielding a drill, spinning the bit menacingly at the tied up hostages. And I gotta be honest, 1990s rap group’s K7 old party in the club standard, “Come Baby Come” will always freak me the eff out whenever I hear it, because now I associate it with Davis’ parents dancing around to it on grainy home movie footage while they torture people.
I’ll leave the plot there. More horrors ensue. In the end, Davis loses his girlfriend and mother (Pia dies by accident while running away from now elderly Janet, while Janet, fearing discovery, hangs herself, but not before leaving out a stockpile of new evidence for Davis to find.) The poor lad does get an award, but as the show closes, we can’t help but think he would have been so much happier if he’d just made his silly little egg collector movie. He’d still have a mother. He’d still have a girlfriend. He’d still bask in ignorant bliss, believing his father was a hero cop who took down a serial killer (not a scumbag who shot his accomplice to pin it all on him before he could tell on his accomplices) and his mother as the strong old gal who put on a brave face for her son’s sake all these years.
Critics have complained this episode, as well as a few others in season 6 have little to nothing to do ith the horrors of technology, as is the show’s theme. However, I’d argue that streaming media did indeed lead to an increase in public interest in true crime documentaries, and any schmuck who aspires to become a story teller can simply grab a camera and a mic, interview townsfolk who remember a creepy case, pierce it together with old news footage and voila, a documentary is born.
But will these documentarians be repulsed by the new dirt they dig up? Is it better to let sleeping dogs lie?
STATUS: Shelf-worthy though I have to say, I felt so dirty after watching this one. I do like John Hannah, always have since he played Evie’s con man layabout brother in the late 1990s Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser, so I’m glad his character wasn’t the killer after all.
Kudos to Netflix. Between episode 1 Joan is Awful and this one, the streaming service really was a good sport about letting Black Mirror kick the crap out of them this season.
Bookshelf Battle 