Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Pinball Wizard

And so Gary (Ross Hull) returns to tie up the season in an episode that’s...okay.  It’s safely not the worst of the season, The Tale of Jake and the Leprechaun sewed that title up nicely.  However, there have been such high points in this season already that this finale really can’t compete. The Tale of the Captured Souls stands out as a tale head-and-shoulders above this finale.

The opening sequence is a bit more relevant this time.  The Midnight Society are passing around a Gameboy, apparently taking turns playing a game.  The conversation they have seems to indicate that the writers had no idea how a video game works.  I wonder if the actors told them that randomly passing your game system around mid-level without pausing is a fantastic way to lose lives.

Gary, however, asks the ominous question: what if you had a play a game in which you couldn’t just reset.  I found myself asking how such a situation would be “game” specific, rather than simply a description of every important activity we ever do in our lives, or even of life itself.  That said, however, I digress.

The story that Gary tells suffers from one basic problem: the characters seem directionless.  Our main character, Ross (Joe Posca), while not necessarily contradictory, seems to have an almost random assortment of unlikeable traits given to him.  He’s desperate to get ahead, and will steal from a mall wishing well, but when a store owner (AJ Henderson) gives him a single shot at a job, he’s so lazy and game-obsessed that he uses the opportunity to play an antique pinball game he was forbidden from touching.  And lest you think he faked interest in the job to get to the pinball machine, he came asking about the job before seeing the machine.
Yes, such contradictory people exist in the real world.  In fact, almost all of us are bundles of contradictions.  However, in this case the contradictions leave us with no traits to latch onto our main character, and by extension no way to understand what he should or shouldn’t be learning from this life-lesson.  There’s also a love interest (Polly Shannon) thrown in because...reasons…

The boss, Mr. Olson, is even more confusing.  Mr. Olson agrees to hire Ross if he can mind the shop while Mr. Olson is at lunch.  However, Ross is forbidden from touching the cash register, or any of the merchandise.  How Mr. Olson expects him to help a customer I don’t have the first clue, and naturally this suggestion is ignored.  To make it even more confusing: Mr. Olson fearfully warns Ross away from the pinball machine, but the ending of the episode indicates that trapping Ross with it was his intention.

To circle back around: Mr. Olson, having recently fired, another teenager, is reluctant to hire Ross.  His concerns prove to be well founded, as Ross begins playing his antique game the instant he’s out of sight.  The writers seem to confuse pinball with video games, as Ross describes a story he can apparently follow from the ball whizzing around in the machine.  Before Ross knows it, it’s night, he’s locked in the Mall, and Mr. Olson has not returned.

Then, Mannequins in suits begin attacking him, and it soon becomes clear that he’s in the storyline of the pinball game...why a pinball game about medieval fantasy involves mannequins in a modern shopping mall is another thing I don’t know, but there’s also an Executioner (Normand James) and a Witch (Nathalie Gauthier), and his love interest returns as a Princess...also, the characters are afraid of water for some reason…

The final twist: after fighting a series of villains, Ross discovers he’s physically inside the pinball game, and Mr. Olson appears above him to tell him he’ll be playing the game forever.  Given that he learned the first time through “smash the glass, take the super soakers, and you can take out all the enemies easily” I imagine he could hold out for quite some time, unless the rules change in every repetition, which makes the ending seem far less frightening.

Was he supposed to learn to be less selfish from this?  Or less lazy?  More honest?  I’m not sure, and in a half-hour show like this I really shouldn’t have any doubt about the nature of the lesson.

The closing sequence gives minimal indication that’s it’s a season finale.  A standard ending, the Midnight Society are now scared of a Gameboy, and the meeting closes out.  Gary says “till next time” while breaking the fourth wall for a split second, and dousing the fire, but that’s it.  I suspect that they didn’t want kids to know they’d be watching reruns for the next few months, but looking at it in the day of serialized storytelling, it just seems strange for a season finale to not be remarked on.