Elliot and Arianne are walking through the cemetery.  Elliott has a contraption that he wants to hook up to a dead brain.  Dude, Arianne is right there; and she’s no rocket scientist!  Quite the opposite, she ridicules his narrow focus on “physics” and “facts”.  She believes metaphysics has the answers.

They enter a mausoleum which holds the body of Valdemar Tymrak.  Elliott says he is #13 in the World Class Psychos Trading Card set.  Literally — Elliot pulls out the rookie card with his name on it.  He reads, “26 certified kills, 19 women, 7 men.  Tymrak was a renowned mesmerist who apparently hypnotized his victims with a single stare.  Under his control, they were made to commit terrible and depraved acts before he murdered them and bathed in their blood.”  Elliott believes Tymrak’s powerful brain makes him a good candidate to hook up to his device.  Some people might have preferred final revelations from Gandhi or Hawking or Einstein or Jeffrey Epstein, but they didn’t have no trading cards.

Elliott opens the tomb and Arianne winces at the smell.  Elliott explains that the smell is formaldehyde.  Well, wouldn’t it have smelled worse without formaldehyde?  For any trip to a exhumation, a COVID-19 N95 mask dipped in camphor or catshit would probably be a good idea.  Anyhoo, I happily suspend disbelief and accept that this guy’s machine can read a dead man’s thoughts.  But after being embalmed?  C’mon, man!

The whole time, Elliott has been a little snippy because he suspects Arianne stole some research papers from him.  Arianne says she has no interest in such things.  She uses a red marker to draw a heart on the palm of his hand and says, “You’ll always have my heart in your hands.”  In a good episode of TFTC, that would literally have come true.

He hooks Tymrak up to the device.  While adjusting the settings, he sees his stolen research papers spill out of Arianne’s bag.  Fortuitously, she happens to be putting the other headset on her own noggin.  He angrily cranks up the volume causing her to scream.  Once she starts shrieking, he suddenly becomes very concerned.  Well, what did he expect?  He pulls the headset off of her and she stops screaming, but I suspect that heart drawn in his palm will be smudged in the morning.

Oh, Arianne was killed.  Elliott wakes up in an asylum due to his guilt — especially after he learns Arianne only took his papers to submit for an award for him.  He dreams of Arianne and 2 other topless women, but seems to have actually awakened before flies land on his window and assemble in the shape of a new circuit.  Elliott uses this new circuit to upgrade his device.  Like every WordPress / Excel / Adobe upgrade in the past 5 years, it is a disaster.

Maybe I fell asleep and missed something — I admit to the falling asleep part — but nothing after this point makes any sense.  He, of course, decides to use his new device to resurrect Arianne.  He appears to have procured 3 dead women for the process, none of them Arianne as far as I can tell.  What are the 3 women for?  Was it just because he dreamed of them?  I dream of topless women all the time, but they don’t show up at my job.  He turns on the device and papers start swirling around the lab like Nakatomi Plaza.

Arianne appears in a ghostly form, then hardens just like Elliott.  That is not the way I expected her to return.  He was working on a scientific approach, not supernatural.  He is OK with it, apparently, as within minutes he is banging her.

Unfortunately, the device must remain on, and Tymrak returns through the same gateway.  Although, he seemed to take a different off-ramp.  Arianne and Elliott are in the bedroom when they hear Tymrak tearing things up.  They rush back to the lab, and Tymrak breaks down the lab door to kill them.  Well, wait — wouldn’t he have also materialized in the lab?  Where did he go?  There was no English bird waiting to have sex with him — he killed them all.  It’s just that lack of foresight that kept him out of the Top 10.

Anyway, Elliott has to shut down the machine to get rid of Tymrak, and Arianne is lost in the process.  A few days later, Elliott is found to have committed suicide.  He is bloody in the tub, probably from trying to scrub the smell of formaldehyde off his wiener.  I guess we are to assume that he was distraught after killing Arianne twice, something not even Tymrak ever pulled off.  Or maybe this was his attempt to join her in the after-life.

However, we also see a sign that she returned to him.  The police notice a heart drawn on the window, but I still can’t figure out what they are getting at.  An officer says to a detective, “It’s on the window sir.  There’s something written in the dew.”  Well, drawn not written — there is a heart.  The officer seems to think it is strange that it is on the outside, and that all the windows are painted shut.  I get the callback to the heart she drew on his palm, but what is the big deal about the dew being outside and the window painted shut?

Of course we are meant to assume Arianne came back and drew the heart, but how?  There was no fore-shadowing of an ability to come back yet again.  Why can’t Tymrak come back?  OK, Elliott was reading a book about talking to the dead, so did he actually find a way bring her back without the device?  Why did he bring her back outside?  Was she floating outside his 2nd floor window?  Can she fly?

Another missed opportunity.  The pacing is humorless and plodding; however, the actors are great in their roles.  Tymrak’s make-up looks like a drunk 3rd grader put it on in the car; however, when combined with the editing, it is surprisingly effective.  The episode is done in by the complete lack of self-awareness, irony, campiness or gore that is supposed to be the sine qua non of the series.

Other Stuff:

• Title Analysis:  Hunh?  There is a grave — or at least a mausoleum — but no report is filed from it.
• Great comment on the You Tube version:  Any less pixels ……………….. would make this radio.
• The awful screen-caps above are from the DVD.  I mucked up the color somehow.