Haunted recap - Episode 1

[diandrahollman]

So. I decided I should start thinking about posting my recaps to Livejournal. And since I have no idea how to go about doing this, I thought I'd give it a test run with some old recaps from my website. In honor of this week being Halloween (and because I miss seeing Matthew's face on my television screen), I'll be doing episodes of "Haunted".

Here goes nothing...


 

Staring: Matthew Fox, Russell Hornsby, John Mann, Michael Irby, Lynn Collins

Hi, I’m Diandra and I’m a glutton for punishment. (Hi, Diandra!). Gah. Seriously, why am I recapping a show that aired several years ago for only seven episodes (U.S.), of which I only have three and which stars a guy I just started recapping movies of? (Pause). Okay, who’s the wiseass who said “because you’re a crazy bitch”? I’ll deal with you later.

Ahem.

Pilot 1x01, Guest staring Robert Knepper and a bunch of people I don’t know.

We open on a blurry shot of a pipe dripping water. At least I hope that’s what it is and I didn’t accidentally download some amateur fetish porn or something. Never mind. John Mann is marching toward the camera in the pouring rain, holding some sort of bag. He’s barely out of frame before we see Matthew running up behind him, like twenty feet away. Seriously, where did he learn to tail people, The Vaughn-Bristow School of Worst Spies Ever? We only know he’s trying to be discreet because he hides behind a wall, peaking around the corner for a second, but really I’m thinking the only reason the guy hasn’t figured out he’s being followed is he is apparently incapable of LOOKING BEHIND HIM.

The World’s Worst Tracker whips out his cell phone the second he gets in the building to call his partner so we can establish that his name is Frank, his partner’s name is Detective Marcus Bradshaw and he needs backup at the old Fairmont Hotel because he thinks he’s found “Billy Mason and his babysitter David”. Marcus says he needs ten minutes and makes Frank promise to wait for backup to get there. Frank says yeah, sure, “scout’s honor” and hangs up. Except he clearly wasn’t actually a boyscout as he then whips out his gun and goes charging up the stairs after Mann.

The janitor mopping the floors is understandably alarmed to see some drenched man in a trenchcoat waving a gun. Frank does absolutely nothing to assure him that he is not just some mob hitman or something and gestures at him to shut up and get the hell out of there. The janitor does so obediently, not even bothering to ask if he’s got a badge or anything. Seriously? Does this happen a lot at this hotel? Remind me not to go there.

Frank picks the lock and bursts in on nobody. He does, however, find a newspaper on the bed with a repeating diamond and hash mark design scribbled all over it to make it obvious it’s A CLUE. It also has an article about a couple boys being kidnapped (the youngest of which is identified as Billy Mason) and we linger on their pictures for a moment. He hears a noise and goes to open the closet. The older boy falls onto him, gasping and choking and bleeding. Frank lowers him to the floor, calling his name a good dozen times for the idiots who haven’t yet put two and two together and figure out this is David. “Help us,” David gasps. Frank asks where Billy is. David just looks to the side and Frank turns just in time to see somebody whack him in the head with a crowbar.

Frank blinks awake as Mann - “Simon” (according to the label on his work shirt) - drags him across the roof of the building in the pouring rain. Um...he was right next to a window in the room, but instead of opening it and shoving Frank out he decides to drag him up to the roof (potentially past a witness or two) so, what, he’ll make a bigger mess when he hits the ground? Then again, maybe the people in this hotel wouldn’t question somebody dragging a body through the halls. Anyway. He drags Frank to the ledge and kicks him in the ribs for no reason other than he’s a sadistic bastard. Then he hesitates long enough for Frank to kick back and knock him to the ground. But he’s a spry sadistic bastard because he whips out a knife and stabs Frank in the side before he can even get more than a few inches from the ground. Frank gurgles and slams back to the ground, spitting a little blood. Simon bounces to his feet and snarls “Simon says it’s time to die”. Writers, if you’re going to rip lines from random action movies the least you could do is cite your source.

Simon kicks Frank over the ledge but Frank snaps to just in time to catch the gutter and avoid splattering the sidewalk below. Now, while I have no doubt that the gutter I attempted to remove last winter was nailed to the house so solidly that it could have held my entire bodyweight I’m guessing it’s safe to assume that I am a good hundred pounds lighter than Matthew Fox so I’m calling bullshit on this. Simon is not finished with the cliché spewing yet as he crouches down, pokes at Frank’s hand with the knife, and smirks “say goodbye”. In a move that totally defies the laws of physics, Frank lets go of the ledge with one hand, grabs Simon and yanks him over the side to his death. On a side note, while I was recapping this scene I paused the screen and walked away for a minute and when I came back I found a close-up of Matthew with an expression that makes him look like a lost vampire from “Angel”. It was seriously creepy. Um...yeah. So Frank pulls himself back up onto the roof and presumably passes out. I will assume that the rain is making the huge puddle of blood around him look worse than it is.
 
Fade out and fade in on an emergency room. Let me just tell you right off that this scene is totally evidence that the writers and sound effects people on this show were not speaking to each other. Doctors and nurses are flitting around Frank noting that he’s not breathing and they can’t hear any “heart sounds”. This last part is said while a PERFECTLY STEADY BEEPING IS COMING FROM THE HEART MONITOR IN THE BACKGROUND. There’s at least a five second delay before the sound guys realize their mistake and flatline the damn thing. Really, people, try to keep up. “He’s crashing” a woman announces. Oh, really? What was your first clue? We pan across the doctors’ faces as they continue babbling in medical lingo, their voices getting distant and warped and we stop on Frank, fully dressed, standing next to the bed, looking down at himself. A doctor waves a penlight in DeadFrank’s eyes as a woman repeats that he’s not breathing and
has no pulse (yes, THANK YOU, WE KNOW! Maybe you can DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT instead of POINTING IT OUT EVERY FEW SECONDS.) and a guy starts asking if Frank can hear him. Well, seeing as his spirit is currently walking out the door of the ER I’m going to say no.

They try to shock him and shoot him with adrenaline while GhostFrank wanders into the hall to find a good dozen people headed in the direction of a light at the end of the hall. Gee, I don’t think the metaphors are obvious enough here. (And as my mother pointed out: “That’s a really bad hospital.”) He kind of smiles when he sees a little boy standing at the end of the hall beckoning to him and his voice over says “Kevin?” He’s
distracted when the doctors shock his dying body again and when he looks back the little boy is turning to leave. He starts to follow when Simon appears and spins him around, clamping a hand over his mouth and saying “gotcha!” with this totally crazed smile. This segues clumsily into the doctor triumphantly saying the same thing as Frank coughs awake back on the table in the ER. One of the doctors announces that he thinks Frank is going to make it. I’d say that’s a pretty safe assumption.

Next day. I assume. A nurse tells Frank (“Mr. Taylor”) that his ex-wife arrived at the hospital. Frank groans “Why the hell did you call her? So she can kill me again?” Oh, no he doesn’t either. But seriously, Frank, did you forget to change your contact information or are you and your ex one of the elite few couples – along with Bruce and Demi – who manage to stay really close friends even after the split? Nurse says she has five minutes because he needs to rest because, y’know, coming back from the dead can take a lot out of you. A pretty brunette - who he calls “Jess” - parks herself on the edge of the bed and greets him with a smile. He asks how the babysitter is. For those of us who can’t add two plus two (which I understand is actually 7) she says “David didn’t make it”. He asks if they found Billy. Yes, Frank is actually asking questions about the case while lying in a hospital bed after being stabbed to death and resurrected. Dude...you really need a vacation. Also? I’m pretty sure he was stabbed in the ribs so why is the bandage on his shoulder? Jess assures him that every cop in the city is looking for him but they tore the building apart and he wasn’t there. He asks her to hand him the phone so he can call Billy’s parents. She ignores him and asks what the hell he was thinking going in by himself. That’s the problem, dear, he wasn’t. She points out that he could’ve been killed. He says he was. She doesn’t appreciate the gallows humor and says he can’t keep just charging in like that because he’s not a cop anymore. Probably explains the lack of a badge. He says if he was he’d still be waiting for the warrant from the D.A. Oh, pbbbbttttt. She gets a page and rushes off, but not before telling him to stop punishing himself because “it is not going to bring our son back.” Yeah, welcome to the pilot episode: lots of clunky exposition loosely constructed into a plot.

And in case that line wasn’t clear enough, this entire back story will now be spelled out through flashback. Frank and Jess are in bed. She’s behind him and they’re both giggling insanely. Fill in your own blanks here. She stops licking his back when she hears a noise from the other room. “What was that?” Clueless, who apparently can’t hear anything around his own heavy breathing, says whu? They’re quiet for a minute and hear something that is either wind whistling outside the windows or a small child’s muffled moan. Frank assumes the former. Jess makes a half-ass attempt to go check on Kevin and Frank stops her with the lame excuse that Kevin is afraid of his own shadow and would freak out if he thought there was anything “out there”. Crack of thunder. He latches onto this as an explanation for the noise as opposed to the ominous symbolism we know it is. They start making out and the camera pans away. So obviously Frank has issues with thinking things through. Or with the right body part. So, of course, the next morning he goes to wake Kevin up and finds the bed empty and a hole cut in the window screen. Jess enters the room behind him and just stands there in shock. He barks at her to call it in and they both run from the room.

Flashback over, we go back to the hospital, where Frank just stares blankly at the ceiling and doesn’t react at all. Just kidding. Of course he cries. It’s Matthew Fox. You don’t hire him and then totally pass up an opportunity to make him bawl.

“Look,” Russell Hornsby tells Frank in his car (or Frank’s car...it’s all kind of unclear) some unidentified time later. “All I’m saying is you should wait. Give yourself a week or two before you get back in the game.” Interesting how the “you should take a vacation” talk sounds a lot like the “you need a girlfriend” talk, isn’t it? Frank insists he’s fine. Russell says yeah, whatever, you almost died, man. Fine my sweet black ass. I may be extrapolating a bit. Frank chuckles that “almost” doesn’t count. Awfully giggly for someone who was headed for the light a couple scenes ago (which could be months their time I guess). Russell...I guess we’re supposed to recognize his voice as Marcus from earlier...nags a bit more and Frank says fine, already, MOM, just leave me alone!

A depressing oboe honks as Frank enters his office (ah...good old Mark “X-Files” Snow). He hits play on the answering machine to find a message from a total sleezebucket (it’s totally obvious from his voice) who wants someone to tail his wife for no apparent reason other than he’s a controlling bastard, something from an insurance company, Jess calling to check on him and a frantic call from Billy’s father wondering if he found Billy along with David. Yes, he saw him just before he was knocked unconscious, stabbed and nearly thrown from the roof. Oh, and judging from the presence of a kitchen next to the office I’d say this is Frank’s *apartment*. My bad.

Cut to Frank sitting in Billy’s parents’ living room, trying to reassure them without making promises nobody can keep because both David and Simon are dead and nobody else knows where the hell the kid is. Mom asks if he thinks Billy’s still alive. He stutters and makes fish faces and says he has no clue. Yes, Jack Shephard isn’t the only one with an inherent inability to comfort people in distress it seems. She flees the room, her husband on her tail. Frank stands and suddenly grabs his head in pain as a weird metallic whistling noise whooshes across the soundtrack. “Help us,” a voice whispers. He frowns and goes to press his ear to the wall like maybe somebody in the next room is pulling a prank. Then the picture of Billy two inches from his face leaps off the wall all by itself and he starts looking a little shaken.

Frank’s apartment, sometime later. Okay, I already said in my recap of an episode of “Lost” that I have no problems with Matthew Fox but his character on that show drives me absolutely insane so after four years I’ve pretty much been conditioned to grind my teeth every time I see his face. But when some woman enters with the cutest little dog and he smiles, pulls the dog (who he calls “Gus”) into his lap and starts doing that baby talk thing non dog-people make fun of the rest of us for I pretty much forgave him for everything. Seriously. Cutest thing ever. The woman notes that she hasn’t seen him smile like that in so long she almost didn’t recognize him. No kidding. And ditto. Frank frowns and notes that it’s Friday night and doesn’t she have a date or something? So I guess she’s just the dog sitter. She perkily says no and she’s got plenty of time to hang around and distract him from his work. No, not like that. Shut up. He hands her a beer he pulled out of his ass or something and she starts spewing exposition. How long has he lived there? ‘Bout a year and a half. And he still hasn’t unpacked? Hi, single male workaholic. Or, as he says, it’s not really his home. Yeah, yeah, dead son, trouble moving on blah.

That night he’s lying in bed still mostly dressed and covered in papers (it’s really sad) and Mark Snow is playing a song he totally recycled when he started working on “Ghost Whisperer”. Actually, I think he recycled a lot of the music from this show on the assumption that nobody would recognize it as I was apparently only one of about a dozen people who watched “Haunted”. Anyway. There’s a noise in the next room and Gus wakes up instantly and whimpers. Did I mention Gus is really freaking cute? I love him.



I manage to tear my eyes from him (and stop cooing stupidly) and notice just how many fewer tattoos Matthew had when this was shot. Huh. Also, the bandage over the knife wound is almost on top of his shoulder now like maybe Simon came at him from above. At this rate it will be on his back by the end of the episode. Frank grabs his gun and goes down the hall. He comes to a closed door with fogged glass windows, behind which we can see a fan running and something that looks only vaguely human moving around. Frank whips open the door to find water on the floor and a stack of boxes under the fan, the top one spinning in exactly the opposite direction as the fan blades. Now, I’ve compared this show to its successors (namely “Medium” and “Ghost Whisperer”) a lot in terms of reactions to dead people popping up randomly. Melinda drives me nuts because while she claims she’s seen dead people all her life she still feels a need to scream like a helpless female at least once per episode (note to Melinda: you could take some lessons in subtlety from Patricia Arquette). Frank, being new to the whole seeing dead people thing, totally has an excuse to freak out, however. But either this is not spooky enough or I remember him panicking more than he really did because he just looks at that box spinning all by itself like “huh...that’s weird”. He grabs it and sets it on the table and finds a picture of Billy sitting in a pool of water inside.

Day. Marcus bangs into his office to yell at Frank, who is hunched over a file drawer, about waltzing in and riffling through his shit any time he feels like it. They’re not partners anymore, damnit. Frank just hands him a picture of the newspaper he found at that apartment at the beginning. He says it’s a “hunch”. “You know, that little feeling that you used to get before they promoted you.” There’s a joke in there but I’m too lazy to find it. Marcus says he’s really not in the mood for Frank’s sparkling personality right now and asks what the hell is so special about a kid drawing on a newspaper. Um...Autism and OCD aside, I doubt most elementary age kids would draw deliberately repeating patterns like that, genius. Frank says as much and stresses that this is a clue. Marcus thinks it’s flimsy. Frank says he’s working on it and Marcus snaps that he can’t let Frank walk out the door with an active case file because he’s not a cop anymore and the boss’ll have his ass if anything happens. Frank tells him to look the other way then and totally gives him the pretty please, puppy dog eyes. Marcus NoSpine caves instantly and Frank says he owes him one as he scampers out the door. “Yeah, you owe me more than that,” Marcus mutters at his retreating back. Should I be jumping on the slash subtext here? Oh, forget it.

TO BE CONTINUED