Helen wakes up on the titular New Years Day feeling a little woozy. She manages to make it to the bathroom to pray to the porcelain god. She hears sirens and a bullhorn warning, “This is not a drill.” Clearly it is not a drill — it is a bullhorn, duh! She goes to a neighbor’s apartment and finds blood on the floor. Checking on her roommate, she finds his room covered in blood also.
In a scene I can’t figure out, Helen’s cellphone rings. When she answers, she gets her not-boyfriend James’ voice mail as if she called him . . . the end. For me, anyway. I did finish watching it, but couldn’t bring myself to make any notes.
I watched this episode stunned almost from the first second at how awful it is. The performances from Helen and James are incredibly ordinary. Anyone in the audience of a community theater could have brought more to their parts. Helen’s roommate Eddie and her girlfriend Christie come off a little better.
The real problem is the visual experience. The lighting is terrible and the editing is god-awful with constant jump-cuts. On a completely different level, the choppiness of the narrative also dooms the episode. We are constantly switching between New Years Eve and New Years Day. The whole episode is just offensively poorly conceived.
Along the way we are supposed to care about these adults. Helen tells James she loves him after misinterpreting something their friend Eddie told her. Eddie has an unrequited crush on Helen and expresses it with sudden awkward kisses. Helen is heart-broken to see James swapping spit with Christie. If the twist of this episode was that these were 13 year-olds who were somehow transported into adult bodies, I would have believed it.
Happily, that was not the twist. The sole redeeming aspect of this episode is an excellent reveal that caught me completely by surprise. If anyone is masochistic enough to sit through this episode, they deserve to be surprised. There is another shocker after that, but spatially it makes no sense, and it adds nothing to the story.
I rate New Years Day 1 out of 365.
Post-Post:
- Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw II – IV.
- Briana Evigan (Helen) was in Burning Bright which I remember as being pretty good. She is locked in a house. That is boarded up, preventing escape. A hurricane is coming. She has her autistic brother with her. And, oh yeah, there’s a goddamn tiger in the house! Best set-up evah — but sadly all I remember is she wore a hot wife-beater for the whole movie.
- Her father Greg was in a series in the 1970’s about a trucker who traveled with a chimp named Bear. Them Eviganses loves animals more than the Irwinses! Well, before.
Ol’ Cap Zanser is telling 12 year old Sally Burgess tall tales about Dune Rollers. They are flaming hoop snakes that roll along with their tail in their mouth, taller than a man can reach. Cap attributes the high number of deaths on this island to that fabled creature. The fact that this is called Lightning Island and not Flaming Hoop Snake Island seems to undermine his theory a little.
Sam shows Dr. Burgess his rocks and is stunned to see the two rocks that he filed have fused into one pointy stone, and that the weight is now double the two stones combined. Burgess theorizes that the stones are a mineral from a meteor. The fragments are trying to recombine into the original rock.
Instead of the usual commercial for Kreisler Watchbands, this episode has a bizarre break where a man gives the mission statement of the series. “The stories may seem improbable but are they impossible? Nobody really knows. We do know the universe that surrounds us is an enormous mystery. Our stories try to break through the barrier of life as we know it through discovery and our imaginations what life beyond may be like.” And if you understand that last sentence, you should be working for the NSA.
The very end should have had one of those horror movie question marks at the end. We pan to see a glowing dune roller. But is it a large fragment from the blast? Is it another one? The 
This episode is rated dead last in the IMDb User Ratings, redeeming a shred of credibility in that dubious index. As I watched it, it just seemed like a mess. At the end, I realized it was worse than that — it was also a hugely missed opportunity.
I’m not sure I can fairly evaluate the writing because the execution was so bad. That’s why the 
The first five seconds of this episode are just wrong and wronger . . . no, the ones after 
Crewman Mark Stevens is inspecting the area and hears the screams from the container. He finds the Captain [1] and First Mate Taforner and tells them he thinks they might have stowaways because he hears “whispers, moans and screams” in the cargo hold of the ship, and they don’t sound like 
Turns out the Captain and Taforner are in cahoots. They tell Stevens the things inside are not human. The Czars used them to terrorize the serfs. The Russian mob uses them as assassins. And as they get hungry, they feed on their own.
Sheriff Jeff rides out to the Tom & Ben’s shack in the desert. The town council is concerned about the two old coots living with no visible means of support. They claim to be homesteaders but can provide no evidence of being farmers or prospectors.
The Sheriff is on their side and just needs some evidence, any evidence that they are really homesteaders — say, growing a single crop or mining enough gold to sustain them. The absurd plot-point is that they finally agree that if the geezers can grow a single rose bush that flowers, they can can technically be considered farmers. Are we sure these guys aren’t making campaign contributions? That kind of sleazy technicality is the essence of politics.
One month later, the Sheriff comes by again looking for Killer. He doesn’t find Killer, but the boys do show him a thriving rose bush on top of a burial plot-shaped mound of dirt.