The episode starts out on a miscue with a title card for the Southeastern Florida School of Medicine.  There is no Southeastern Florida — there is only South Florida and Southwest Florida.  Doesn’t seem fair to me either, but tell it to East Virginia.

Medical student Diane Barnes (erroneously named Diane Ballard on IMDb) joins two other students, Paul and Cheryl, in the morgue late at night to examine a body.  They uncover the stiff and see that it has a tattoo on its forehead — a leap too far even for Henry Rollins.  She recognizes the man as a Bokor — an evil voodoo priest — and knows that the tattoo was applied after death to keep him dead and block his evil power.

The lovely Samantha Mathis (Diane) has a slight southern accent.  I don’t ever recall hearing that from her.  I have too much of a tin ear to know if it is well done or legitimate; it does make her even more adorable, though.

Diane refuses to slash into the tattoo.  One of the other students is not so smart and slices right through it.  Diane asks for a coffee break.  When they get back to the slab, the Bokor’s body is missing, along with his extracted organs, and Diane.

They follow Diane out of the morgue.  The Bokor follows Paul and Cheryl, even following after they fall into a well.  Turns out it was a ruse, that Diane is in cahoots with Richard who Paul and Cheryl had caught stealing morphine.  They toss the dead Bokor into the hole with Cheryl and Paul.  Diane and Richard pull out shovels and start filling in the hole.  A couple of things wrong with this:  1) That hole is about 10 feet in diameter and 20 feet deep — it would take a week for them to fill it in.  2) The rate at which they could refill that hole by hand is so slow that Paul and Cheryl could easily just step up on the dirt they shovel in and walk right out.

Back at their love-nest, Diane is cleaning up after their murder spree.  She realizes her bracelet is missing and must have fallen into the well.  That night she goes back to the site and re-digs the hole  All the way down.  Alone.  By hand.  Richard wakes up, goes to the hole and clubs her with a shovel.  He admits aloud that he actually pawned the bracelet last week.

Richard rushes back home a packs a bag because nothing screams innocence like fleeing the scene of a crime.  That night at a hotel, he wakes up bound and gagged.  Standing over him is a bloody, muddy, hot Diane.  She breaks out her autopsy toolkit.

So what happened?  Certainly it is intended that Richard killed Diane because the whole point was to eliminate witnesses to his addiction.  When he awakens, she tells him he should have burned her bones and spread the ashes.  Why, is she also a Bokor?  There is nothing to suggest that.  She does go on to say her Nanny told her, “a Bokor’s lover must be as pure as the sky just as a Bokor’s heart must be as black as the earth.”  I guess she is a Bokor which is really out of left field.

So far, both segments of the first episode have taken some solid, if well-worn, tropes and undermined them with a really sloppy narrative.

Post-Post:

• Meh.  Just that Samantha Mathis should be much more successful.
• IMDb and YouTube.