Kate Morris’s alarm goes off at the crack of seven.  Her husband David shuts it off, opting to awaken her by lightly squeezing her nostrils shut. This is the creepiest affectionate gesture since John Travolta — no, the one in Face/Off. ^[1]

Kate seems to like it, though.  Or is at least happy he didn’t murder her. She fixes a fabulous bacon and eggs breakfast for David and their daughter Wendy.  Kate takes a Polaroid of David eating and has a strange reaction to the photo.  Dang if I can figure out why, but then this is another low-quality You Tube video, so maybe I’m missing something.  It is a keeper, though, so she puts it in the world smallest photo album.

After putting Wendy on a respectably-lengthed bus, she turns back to her house and runs into a wall of a man.  He roughs her up, even dragging her by a purse strap around her neck.  When it breaks, he runs off.  The police come, but Kate refuses to go to the hospital.

I hope this lettering is not foreshadowing anything.

The next day at the grocery store, a man is following her, buying each item that she buys.  And from this selection, both of them ought to weigh 300 pounds — a box of crackers, those tasteless crunchy orange Styrofoam sandwich thingies, cookies, and a carb-fest for breakfast. This man also begins roughing her up, saying, “You’re coming with me, Kate.”

She arrives home to find her purse on the lawn.  The first thug has rifled though her it and taken her photos.  Although he did take the time to remove them from the wee album.

Her husband suggests that she go get her hair done to feel better.  Seems like a 1950s thing to say, but is it really wrong?  At the salon, she is able to forget about being attacked by men — this time she is assaulted by a woman.

Her husband suggests that going to a doctor might not be a bad idea. Kate disagrees and begins chopping bell peppers with a ferocity that I think is supposed to have some meaning other than that they’re having stir-fry tonight.  If there is some significance to this, please let me know.

David takes Wendy to a friend’s house for a sleepover more timely than Dana’s in Poltergeist.  Kate gets a call from a man, then a woman who also says “We’re coming to get you Kate, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”  Kate tears out in her car and finds the Emergency Broadcast System on every channel.  This drives her mad; also, into a light-pole.

She awakens in an ambulance and sees the men and woman who had attacked her are now the EMTs.  She escapes back to her house, but opening a door, she sees herself in a medical ward with tubes up her noise.  She then occupies her body in the bed.

David and the people who attacked her are all doctors.  She has been in a coma, which is “not the way the warden wants a convicted murderer serving her time.”  She murdered her abusive husband and lost the baby girl she was carrying.  She then hung herself which I guess ties into the purse-strap strangulation.  She begs the doctor who is her husband in the coma to be sent back into the coma where she was happy.

When they refuse, she jabs herself with a syringe, going back to coma-world and her happy family.

The camera pulls back into a nice proscenium shot which again seems to signify nothing.  Then there is a camera shutter click and it turns into a photo.  I guess this ties back to the Polaroid in some way but damn if I can see how.

Like the first segment in this episode, there seem to be many things set up to be significant which never pay off.  I could sit here and try to figure it out, but other people are waiting for the table.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] There is plenty to mock about Face/Off.  But just looking at the cover, shouldn’t they have at least made the eye colors the same for Cage & Travolta?
• From the writer of Rest Stop and After Life.  Then a Farscape episode, and she was done.
• Wendy was just a kid here, but in 10 years, yowza!

Stephen Baldwin is getting the crap beat out of him.  Shockingly, it is not by his brother Alec.  He owes money to some bad eggs who think nothing of taking a Louisville Slugger to his gut and standing on his guitar hand. He is able to brain the guy with a liquor bottle and make a run for it.

Brief aside: Next time you get your hands on a liquor bottle — i.e. now, for me — note how thick they are.  It is really possible to break one over a person’s head and not kill them?  The windows at the White House are not as thick as a bottle of Gentleman Jack.

He carjacks Amanda who is driving though an insanely dangerous part of town.  She is a veterinarian, but still agrees to stitch up Baldwin’s wounds.  Did they learn nothing from Tea-Bag?  No, the one in Prisonbreak — wow, there’s a word you don’t want to Google too deeply ^[1].  Naturally, she takes the beaten, bloody stranger back to her house; then invites him to spend the night on the sofa.  The next morning, before he wakes up, she has gone to the pawn shop and rescued his guitar with the ticket she found in his pocket.  I don’t get treated this nice at family reunions.

That night, the guy with the bat comes up in rotation again.  When he lets himself in Amanda’s window, Baldwin sics her two dobermans on him.  Amanda comes downstairs to see what the racket is and Baldwin tells her the dogs killed the man. “Good dogs,” she says.

Amanda takes charge, burying the man.  Even Baldwin thinks this is a little extreme.  He goes upstairs to get his guitar.  When he is at the top of the stairs, one of the dogs goes up on his hind legs and shoves Baldwin down the stairs.  He wakes up in Amanda’s bed with a broken ankle.  She has set the break using her mad vet skillz.  She must also have some mad weight-lifting skillz as he is, for some reason, now upstairs again.

He limps downstairs and tries to use the phone, but one of the dogs is guarding it. When he finds another phone, the other dog yanks the cord out of the wall.  The dogs then block him from the exits.  He cleverly drugs the dogs with the pills Amanda had given him, but passes out.  When he awakens, the dogs are gone.  He begin walking out and slips on some brown chunky material which, thankfully, he identifies as dog food.  They trap him in the bathroom, even turning the knob to come in after him.

Amanda shows up and literally calls off the dogs.  On the other hand, she does plunge a syringe into him.  He awakens in the basement chained to the wall.  Blah, blah, blah . . . she is treating him like a dog.

All this is fine as far as it went, but it seems to be missing a final act or twist. There are a couple of red herrings that seem more like sloppiness than misdirection.

Amanda’s dogs seem to be far more intelligent than normal dogs; they seem more intelligent than the dog in Watchers.  They shove Baldwin down the stairs, yank phone lines from the wall, and open doors as if they had once been human, but are now stuck in the bodies of dogs.  Hmmmmm, but that goes nowhere.

Amanda asks Baldwin to play her a tune on his guitar which she got out of hock for him. He refuses in a way that sounds suspiciously like he doesn’t know how to play.  This also goes nowhere.

Finally, Baldwin ends up chained to the basement wall.  I guess that is OK, I was just expecting something more — maybe she would use her vet skillz to transform him into a dog, like the walrus in Tusk.^[2]  Amanda tells him he will have to learn to behave, unlike her previous victim.  OK, what then?  What is the end game here?  What happened to the previous victim?

Post-Post:

• ^[1]  Although, it seemed to work out for Mike Ehrmentraut who got a bullet wound sewn up, a job offer and a snausage.
• ^[2] Or the snake in Sssssss.
• The only TV episode directed by JoBeth Williams.
• The last of many TV episodes written by Earl Hamner, Jr.
• In no way relevant, but this episode aired 12 days before 9/11.