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.

Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Captured Souls

This episode to a child: A mad scientist turns a girl’s parents old to keep himself 15 forever.

This episode to an adult: A white man born in 1907 attempts to kill the upper-middle class parents of a black 13-year-old and seduce her.

While most of these episodes can still be watched as an adult for a mixture of humor and creepiness, this story goes from generically scary to absolutely horrifying when you’re old enough to realize the implications of racism and ephebophilia.

This is the first story for Kiki (Jodie Resther), the tomboy of the group.  I get the impression that the episode was reworked at some point, because the opening sequence really doesn’t fit.  While the episode contains both the use of mirrors and cameras to show the villain as an old man, it’s the mirrors that he ultimately uses to “capture souls,” but Kiki’s opening is a ramble about the power of cameras.

Danny (Maria Taylor) and her parents (Barbara Eve Harris and Don Jordan) go to a hotel out in the country for vacation.  The “Hotel” has no other guests, and the owners are away “on a cruise,” leaving their “teenaged” son Peter (Ethan Tobman) to check the guests in.

Peter is a creepy guy, but Danny’s parents seem to miss it.  From the first moment they meet, he’s clearly undressing Danny with his eyes.  He shows her his room, and seems to constantly try to isolate her.  He’s also terrified of having his picture taken.  And, we as the audience see his laboratory, from which he can spy on the family through all the mirrors of the house (there’s a running gag about the “bad wiring” in the mirrors shocking Danny, to her great confusion).

Over the course of the episode, the family begins to grow older.  Danny’s parents age decades, and approach death.  However, Danny seems to age just enough to give her acne, and (in a moment that took me a third viewing) just enough to give her bigger breasts.  Given that he clearly intends to keep her young, it seems 13 is just a bit too young for his tastes…

Danny catches on when she finds her way into his lab, and see him through the cameras installed behind the mirrors he’s scattered about the house: he’s an old man.  She then notices the numerous graves and tally marks in the back yard, indicating dozens of people he’s killed, and his own grave giving his birthday in 1907, but no death date.

The climax has the standard “it’s already too late” refrain, as Peter offers to keep Danny young and with him forever (...or, in my expectation, until he gets bored…).  Then, predictably, she shoves him in his own machine, reverses the process, and turns her parents young again, and he becomes a 90-year-old (he says that he plans to join his family in the graveyard.  With Danny’s family leaving, I’m wondering if he plans to bury himself alive, and then die.).

The acting isn’t fantastic from Danny or her parents, but Peter really steals the show as a charismatic creep who you love to hate.  I kind of wish the actor was someone I saw more, but it appears that Tobman’s career has mostly been bit-parts.  Still, he’s a scary guy.

Kiki could have used a better introduction as a story-teller, but the story itself is one I really enjoyed.  Seriously, just marathon this show, you won’t be disappointed.

Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Hungry Hounds

I’m not sure how much I should comment on the Early Installment Weirdness of Are You Afraid of the Dark.  It’s been many years since I saw this show, and this is my first time seeing the episodes in order, so I’m not sure if I can trust my memory.  That said, these early episodes put a lot more emphasis on the Midnight Society themselves than I remember.  This time we have Kristen (Rachel Blanchard) bringing a dog named Elvis to the Midnight Society.  She explains he’s there to provide “sound effects” for her story.

I think when I do the second season, I’ll want to review my opinions of the first, to see how the different story-tellers wove their tales.  As with the last story, we get a literary reference that our young story-teller surely feels smart remembering from class.  However, this time it’s only a short reference to Hamlet.

Most the story feels very much like a play, making me suspect that Kristen may be a drama nerd drawing inspiration from theatrical performances.  For much of the story we have two characters, who go from one set piece to the next while talking.  This works well, allowing the show to give us a creepy, yet minimalist experience.

It’s a bit hard to say who our protagonist is.  Mia Kirshner plays Pam, a girl who wants to learn to ride horses, as well as her deceased aunt who possesses Pam for much of the episode.  However, with Pam being out of commission for so long, her sister Amy (Jennifer Gula) ends up as our sympathetic character for much of the episode.

The episode doesn’t really dwell on the fate of Aunt Dora, but from implication I can gather this: Dora was an avid rider.  One day, when she was supposed to feed the farm’s hounds, she died in a riding related accident.  Because she was unable to feed the hounds, and no one found out about her death until it was too late, the starving animals attacked their elderly stable hand Giles (David Francis), causing him to have a fatal heart attack (apparently just outright having a man killed by hungry dogs is too much for a kids’ show, but that hardly detracts from the story).

Later, Pam and Amy are playing with a talking board, and are led to a box of Dora’s possessions.  Pam puts on Dora’s coat, and becomes possessed, leading Amy on a walk around the property, telling her about a fox she calls Mon Petit Rouge, and eventually encountering the furious ghost of Giles.  Dora then heads to the barn to feed the now-howling ghost dogs, but for some reason wants to open the door before getting the kibble.  This leads to a bizarre scene where Amy must hold Dora back from the door while Amy gets the food, even though Dora herself told Amy where the kibble was located.

The ending makes no sense at all, as the ghost-hounds trapped in the barn run past both Dora/Pam and the kibble to attack Amy, but for some reason Mon Petit Rouge shows up and they’re lured away, despite still having eaten nothing.  We’re even told in the closing narration that Dora is no longer tormented by the sound of the starving hounds, which I suppose might mean they ate Mon Petit Rouge.

...and then, they’re back in the attic, with the coat apparently having no effect on Pam.  The only indication that anything strange at all happened was the sudden appearance of kibble in Amy’s pocket. And in the closing, we’re told that Amy’s mother finally agreed to let her learn to ride, presumably because she could now sense that her sister’s spirit was at peace…or something…

It probably sounds like I’m bashing this episode, but far from it.  It makes about as much sense as you’d expect from an unedited story by a girl in her early teens, and as always, the atmosphere is awesome relative to the budget.  I even love that they were able to sneak in a reference to the girls being a “twinkle in (their parents’) eye,” something that I imagine would have been far too close to sexual for Goosebumps.

So, yeah, like every episode of this show so far, check it out.