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 
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.
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.
A police lieutenant comes into Cyril Jones’ gun shop and asks when is the last time Jones sold a gun to Dan Foley. Without asking for a warrant or subpoena, Jones sings like a canary showing the officer that he sold Foley a gun in January.
Rather than go home, he gets a hotel room “with a view” for $3.50 ($75 if he uses the mini-bar). The next morning, he has a clear view of Foley & Felix across the street. He loads up his rifle and takes aim at the two pin-striped bastards.
We open in Ferguson’s Wax Museum. Do these things even exist anymore? [1] Mr. Ferguson himself is leading a tour which includes two sailors on the tamest furlough since Gomer Pyle went back to Mayberry. After checking out waxy Marie Antoinette [2] (who is sadly not topless in either sense of the word), they move on to waxy Cleopatra. This place ought to be called the Museum of Murdered Women.[3]
Senescu asks to buy the wax figures as he can’t bear to see them destroyed; although, he doesn’t seem to care much for Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette. Movers deliver the figures to Senescu’s house. He installs the exhibit in the basement which he has rigged up with a new industrial strength 
Ferguson stops by and tells Senescu that a museum in Brussels wants to buy the figures. While Ferguson is measuring them for shipment, Landru garrotes him. When Senescu sees another dead body, he chews the wax figures out for betraying him. He grabs a crow bar to destroy them, but they become animated. They stiffly move toward Senescu claiming that he committed the murders, and fall on top of him.
When the wax figures advance on Senescu, how does he die? He is portrayed as a murderer in the titular new exhibit, so it must have been a heart attack. If he had been axed, suffocated, slashed or strangled, he would have been considered just another victim.
Police Officer Harry Siegel is appropriately interrogating a low-life about a missing boy. And by “appropriately,” I mean he ties him up, pounds him in the face and threatens to cut out an eyeball if he doesn’t talk. The scumbag gives up the boy’s location — uh, upstairs. Really, you couldn’t even search the house before going all Jack Bauer on him? The pervert plans on inflicting a little off-book punishment of his own. Just before saving the taxpayers a million bucks, he tells Siegel that he will never let him forget this night.
The next day, he meets with Meredith Kane. She is another woman suspecting her husband of having an affair. She wants Siegel to get the evidence “to make him pay.” She says there is a run-down house conveniently across the street from their home where Siegel can set up his surveillance equipment.
He sees a lot of other crazy shit in the house. Finding himself locked in, he turns and sees dead Rory Bemell standing there with a knife. He says, “I didn’t deserve this, Harry.” He tells Siegel that a girl Siegel burned was innocent and now lives in pain. And a kid he kicked senseless turned out to be a witness.
This is the first episode on the disc, but the second episode to air. It makes me suspect that this was to be the premiere, but