Fear Itself: Episode 10 Chance

Starting this review out on a complete tangent: when I was in High School I used to love Ebert and Roeper. (my blooming as a movie buff came too late for Siskel). In 2003, I sided with Roeper on Terminator 3. He accused Ebert of contradicting himself by saying both that the film was mindless action, and that the film left questions unanswered. Ebert's answer was “I don't want my questions answered, I want my confusion resolved!”

This episode made me understand that quote. Chance (Ethan Embry) spends most of the episode talking to a doppelganger of himself. Most of the episode seems to imply that this is just a visualization of his inner monologue, and he discovers how ruthless he can be to escape a desperate situation. However, a single scene shows Chance and the doppelganger carrying a dead body together.

So, is this Fight Club-style insanity? Is this a supernatural being? If either of these are the case, why isn't Chance acting like a copy of himself showing up and offering to help him with cynical advice isn't the least bit strange? Has this been an ongoing thing?

Beyond that, I'm getting tired of saying “this movie/episode is saved by the acting.” Yes, Embry does a great job, but this is basically a simple story of one guy who kills several people due to his poor impulse control, with an unexplained gimmick thrown on top of it.

Chance and his wife (Christine Chatelain) are on the verge of destitution due to Chance favoring get-rich-quick schemes over steady work. He's convinced that he's finally found his pay-off after an antique dealer named Walter (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tells him about a rare vase in the hands of another collector, who doesn't know it's value. Chance borrows money to buy the vase for Walter, only to be told Walter had misidentified it's time-period, and it was worth a quarter of what Chance had paid.

Curtis-Hall does a good job here as well. He manages to make you legitimately unsure if he's running a con with the other dealer, as Chance suggests, or if he just misidentified the vase from a distance. I think a strong argument can be made that it was a con, but the episode makes the right choice by never fully confirming this. Either way, Chance kills him in a fight over the money, setting off the events for the rest of the episode.

Chance needs to clean his tracks, find the money he promised his wife, and get clear of the crime scene before the murder comes to light. It's at this point that the doppelganger shows up, played by Embry as a far snarkier, more confident version of Chance. He feels that Chance has allowed himself to be screwed over repeatedly throughout his life, and pushes him towards more and more violence.

Things get more complicated when Chance sets off the fire-alarm by mistake, summoning a rent-a-cop (Ricardo Betancourt). Chance nearly talks him down, before the officer discovers Walter's body, forcing Chance to kill him as well. Then, Walter's wife (Ellen Ewusie) shows up. Her murder takes more discussion with his doppelganger, but it eventually follows (also, her husband's antique store has a shower for some unexplained reason).

After he kills her, he heads home without the money, and imagines an alternate version of the day in which he was given his money without incident, and holds out Walter's severed fingers to his wife, thinking that he's holding money. His wife freaks out, and the doppelganger killers her...or makes Chance kill her, or...something. Then the police come, and arrest Chance, or his doppelganger, or someone played by Ethan Embry!

This episode has some memorable moments, but for the most part the story is just too confusing for it's own good, and has very little to offer outside of it's gimmick. The story would probably be ten minutes long without the doppelganger, and ultimately he contributes very little beyond filler dialogue. Are there worse stories? Yeah. But there's also far better. At best, this episode falls right smack dab in the middle.