The fifth episode of the only season of Dead of Summer is entitled “How to Stay Alive in the Woods”, and it has Joel as centric character. This was definitely an episode that raised a lot of questions, but also that answered a few old ones.

In flashbacks to Joel’s early life, we find out that he used to have a brother, Michael, but he killed himself when Joel was still young because “He’ll never leave me alone”, at least this is what he wrote with his own blood on the wall. It was later confirmed that Michael was hearing voices, and he believed that killing himself was the only way to make them stop. We also found out that someone glued a camera to Joel’s hand in a very early stage of his life. But the fact that he wanted to be a film maker isn’t really the reason why he carries a camera in his hand almost 24/7. He does that because, like his brother, Joel started hearing voices and seeing things that weren’t there, and his camera allows him to see what is real and what isn’t. But the man he sees isn’t just some random someone, but Holyoke, also known as Tall Man, the guy who has been haunting the Camp since the beginning. This was definitely a great and really unexpected twist, but it sure wasn’t the only one in this episode.

In present day, Joel continues to see Holyoke and right from the beginning of the episode the ghost asks him to kill Amy, or someone else will die. Joel of course continues to believe that none of this is real, but we can see that he is afraid of himself and of what he might do, because, when asked, he refused to be alone with Amy. Everyone else starts to realize that Joel is acting weird, but of course that no one suspects the truth.

Do you remember last episode when I said that Joel and Deb had sex? Well, maybe not. This episode made us realize that most of the scenes which we saw from his perspective didn’t exactly happen as he thinks they did. Deb said all they did the previous night was go for a walk, she showed him what is inside her box, she told him about her friend Keith and that is it. A short while after this, Joel realizes that things work differently in Camp Stillwater, so he can’t trust his camera there.

In the meantime, Styles continues with his investigation in cults related to the lake, so he and Jessie go to the cabin in which we saw Holyoke play the piano right in the beginning of the series. There, they find a hidden door on the ground, inside which there is a doll, a tape and a cufflink with the initials JS, Jack Sykes, which means that Garett’s dad was investigating these exact same things.

Closer to the end of the episode, after losing the one thing that allowed him to distinguish reality from his imagination, Joel decides to tell everyone about everything, from his brother’s death, to Holyoke asking him to kill Amy. But when Jessie arrives with an old photo of Holyoke everyone starts to understand that in Stillwater there is a lot more than what meets the eye. When Anton walks in, he tells everyone the man he saw when he arrived was Holyoke. Jessie is still a bit skeptical about all this, but now no one can say that this is just in their heads. There is definitely something big happening, and even though we knew this from the beginning, the counselors start now realizing this too, which means that from now on, things will start to be very different.

But of course that none of this changes what Holyoke said, and with Amy still alive and kicking, he made good in his word. Right in the end, Cricket was going to meet Alex to watch the Blood Moon when someone pushed her and she fell on a bear trap, dying immediately. I have to say that this part doesn’t seem very realistic. Sure that there are bear traps in the woods, but when the Camp reopened those traps should have been deactivated, because there are kids around.

Nevertheless, this was a great episode. It had great twists, and it was definitely a change compared to other previous ones. The death at the end was also very surprising, because it gets to a point where you don’t think that anyone major will die, but you should be warned that in Dead of Summer no one is safe. I am giving this episode an 8.6/10.

Episode 6 is entitled “The Dharma Bums” and it will have Deb as centric, making us realize why she decided to reopen Camp Stillwater.