REVIEW: Dead of Summer , Episode 102
Dead of Summer takes another step in its season with the second episode entitled “Barney Rubble Eyes”, in which the campers arrive to Stillwater, making all things even weirder.
Like last episode, and like most episodes in the future, we saw some flashbacks, this time telling Alex’s story, and it surprisingly started in Russia. The episode begins with his grandfather telling him that if Alex wants something in this world, he is going to have to take it, because this world bears no gifts. This is actually not a bad advice, and Alex made into its life mantra. We even saw him applying it: when he started working at a Dry Cleaning shop he found out that his boss was having an affair with another employee, and so he threatened he would tell his family about it if the Boss didn’t let him take a few shirts every once in a while. And this makes the mystery of the shirts, presented in the last episode, solved. Of course that this was a smaller mystery and no one actually thought it was connected to THE main mystery, but it is a nice way to start.
Of course that when there are creepy mysteries there has to be children around, and so, as I said before, the campers arrived and in the midst of them there was a very peculiar kid, Anton. Like Alex, Anton is Russian so, for this and other reasons, he reminded Alex of himself. As the episode unfolded, we could see that Alex identified himself in that kid more and more, but he didn’t want to say anything to him while there were other people around, probably because no one knew Alex is Russian. But in the end Alex helped him, which was great: he told Anton he should change his name to something a bit more american and even helped him stand up to the mean kids.
But reminding Alex of himself wasn’t the only thing Anton was up to during the episode. On several occasions, this kid spoke to someone he referred to as “Tall Man”, who is actually the ghost we saw in multiple occasions during the pilot. Of course that no one believed him, and they all started to think about living people that Anton might have seen, and so Sykes started pointing fingers to Damon, a character we only met this episode.
Another episode, another death. Even though everyone thought Anton’s mystery was solved, Alex and Blotter still lost sight of him in multiple occasions, so someone had to go down for it. Because Alex wanted to keep the job, he drugged Blotter with his own stuff, so Deb would think he was stoned all the time. Deb fired him and, on the way home, Blotter found the Tall Man, looked back and we only had time to hear him scream. Even though we didn’t see his body, I am sure he is dead.
One thing this episode did really well was pairing people up, of course not simply in straight lines, but also made some triangles. Alex and Amy seem to have started something real, but now Amy knows it was all a bet. Amy and Sykes also made a connection last episode, something Jessie isn’t very happy about. Cricket is now going after Alex. Summing up: things are very confusing to what it comes to romances. The ones that seem simpler are Blair and Drew, who seem to have made a connection, however small. Aside from all these, there is also a little blue bird between Joel and Deb, but for now it seems like the chemistry is mostly in Joe’s side, even though he knows she is hiding a few things.
All things considered, Dead of Summer is developing its story slowly for now and that seems to be a plus, because overwhelm the audience with a lot of mysteries right in the first couple of episodes would definitely have had an even worst impact. I think these two episodes so far have been kind of equally good, but because last episode was a bit scarier, I am giving this one a 7.3/10 (a little less compared to the previous one).
The third episode is entitled “Mix Tape” and it will have Cricket as centric character, promising to also answer a few mysteries.