Dennis Mahoney (played by the unfortunately-named Colin Ferguson) is attending a perfect church in his perfect suit with his perfect wife Kathy and 2.0 perfect young children.  They are quite the active members, knowing the 2nd verse to Amazing Grace, cooking for the upcoming church pancake breakfast.  Daughter Courtney blurts out that the secret ingredient is ice cream.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess vanilla.

They go back home to their perfect McMansion and dad agrees to play a little catch with son Sean.  First though, he must crunch a few numbers at the office.  On the way, Kathy calls his cell and asks him to pick up some milk   Sadly, she did not also ask him to look to the right, where he would have seen a pickup truck ready to T-Bone him.

He awakens in the hospital, but discovers that his family can’t see or hear him.  He is joined by Richard Brautigan (no, not that one).  Brautigan is a serial killer a/k/a “The Family Man”.  He takes Mahoney on a tour through the hospital whose staff now seems to be frozen in place.  Brautigan shows him his own body where he is dying from gunshot wounds, then shows Mahoney his body which was in the auto accident. Strangely, Brautigan seems to know what is going on and is unphased by it.

Mahoney does regain consciousness, but that’s all he regains — he awakens in Brautigan’s body.  Of course, he tries to tell this to his court-appointed attorney and comes off looking crazy; even for a serial killer.  Holy crap, the attorney says Brautigan is wanted for 26 murders and 19 kidnappings.  Mahoney protests that he is just a banker, probably expecting a bailout or a bonus for his body’s reign of terror.

To his credit, his attorney says spiritual transmigration is a crappy defense.  To his debit, he tells Brautigan that the only real evidence the state has is a shoe-print and the testimony of a 3-year old girl.  The rest of the evidence is circumstantial, which is inadmissible in TV-court.  He thinks he might be able to get Brautigan off.  He is a little concerned that Brautigan’s juvenile shenanigans might be used by the  state — you know, murdering one’s own entire family can really be blown out of proportion.

His jailers aren’t so impressed; they rough him up and toss him back in his cell.  He is brought out when he has a visitor.  When he sits down, it is like looking in a mirror (except the image is not reversed) as he sees his face on “Family Man” Brautigan sitting across from him.

Visitor’s Day:  Brautigan tells Mahoney he is sorry the way things worked out, but that it is God’s will. Brautigan considers this his chance at redemption; and at boning Kathy. His attorney returns and tells him that tapes have been found showing him “raping and murdering entire families, one by one.”  I hope that sentence is grammatically incorrect. It might be possible to avoid the death penalty by disclosing where the bodies are buried.

Is it Sunday already?  The family is back in church.  Just as in the Star Trek Mirror Universe ^[1], it is easier for a civilized man to blend into a savage environment than for a savage to blend in to a civilized setting.  Brautigan is just not used to decent folk.  He loudly belts out Amazing Grace (which must be in the Top-40 of 1779 as they appear to sing it every week).  He is ready to chow down the pancakes rather than helping with them, he snaps at his kids.  Sure, he is being a lout, but strangely his wife doesn’t cut him any slack for just nearly being killed and maybe suffering from some noggin trauma.

Distraught over the loss of his family, Mahoney accepts a deal from the DA to show them where the bodies are in exchange for a life sentence.  While on the field trip to find the bodies in the field, Mahoney overpowers the guards and goes back to his house.  He and Brautigan end up in a struggle and both die again.  Mahoney regains consciousness and this time regains his correct body also.

Tragically, Kathy and Sean have been killed by Brautigan in Mahoney’s body, but Courtney is still alive.  When the police ask who killed her family, she points at Mahoney, now back in his own body.  It is a nice ending unless you think about it.  A man who has killed 26 people breaks into the house of this nice church-going family.  Not only that, Mahoney has been stabbed in the chest, beaten with a frying pan, thrown through a glass table and strangled. Are the police really going to take the word of a traumatized 9 year-old girl against the likelihood that Brautigan was the killer?

None of that matters, though — it still feels right.  The performances were uniformly excellent.  It was, however, strange that there wasn’t more carryover of mannerisms. We only got to see pre-switch Brautigan in one scene, but that body seemed to retained so of the same tics — head tilted 15 degrees, frequent sneer — even after Mahoney occupied it.

Many people seem to think this was the best episode so far, or maybe even of the season.  I wouldn’t go that far — it is very good, but I still have to award 1st to The Sacrifice.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Or maybe it was the one where the transporter splits Kirk into passive Kirk and Yeoman-Rand-sexually-assaulting Kirk.
• A point is made of showing 2 bloody spiderweb cracks in the pickup’s windshield, but a passenger is never mentioned.  In fact, the driver is never mentioned either. Wouldn’t it have made sense to have Brautigan be the driver, fleeing from police?  At least that would have provided some nexus for the body-switch to have occurred.  As is, it is never addressed.
• Another Star Trek connection: Clifton Collins Jr. was the Romulan to whom reboot Kirk said, “I got your gun.”

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.

After the perp, Rory Bemell, croaks from natural causes (being beat to death after abducting a child), Internal Affairs hauls Siegel in and goes through a stack of suspects Siegel has worked over.  The IAD suit gets a big smile from telling Siegel to turn in his badge.

Fifteen years later, Siegel is working as a private dick staking out a philandering husband.  He gets no pleasure from playing tapes he made for the man’s distraught wife.  He does, however, get pleasure from playing another tape for the woman — one of her banging her husband’s brother, which is worth tripling his fee.

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.

Neither Siegel nor Mr. Kane get lucky the first night.  Siegel does, however, pick up some strange voices from the Kane house.  The voices and a light in the window suddenly go respectively silent and dark.  The voices start up again and he determines that they are coming from inside the house he is using. He looks around and finds a pentagram drawn on the floor of the basement. He catches some kids who snuck in on a dare.  One of them tells Siegel that some kids had once been killed in this house.

Finally at 3:06 am, he hears a man and woman and sees their silhouettes in a window of the house across the street.  The woman says she was burned with cigars . . . by a cop named Siegel.  He meets with Ms. Kane again to quit the case, but she won’t let him.

The next night, through a large widow he sees two young kids in the house watching TV downstairs.  In an upstairs window, he sees a man with a knife.  Then through yet another window, he sees the man coming down the stairs with the knife raised.  Christ, this greenhouse ain’t the place to conduct a clandestine affair.  Siegel runs across the street and busts down the door only to find the house deserted, not even any furniture. Looking back across the street at the hovel he was perched in, he sees a face in window over there.  So he runs back to that house and hears a swirl of voices that talk about being stabbed, burned, beaten.

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.

In the house, Siegel experiences a flashback to an incident when he was a kid.  After his older brother pulls their father’s pistol out of the closet, Siegel accidentally fatally shoots him. Siegel’s father tells him that this must remain secret and they secretly bury the kid.  OK, I guess Siegel’s mother was already dead.  But what did they plan on telling the school and the neighbors?  That his brother went to live on a farm?

Blah, blah, blah, Siegel realizes Meredith Kane set him up to be killed by the haunted house.  He heads over to her real home to mete out some of the justice he was used to as a cop.  Then there is a twist that left me a little cold.  I know it is bizarre, but I think the problem is that the twist is too good for the show.  Meredith suddenly has a back story that was a complete void.  Even the haunted house has a history that is too-briefly summed up in one sentence.

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 The Sacrifice just worked better so they went with that. Not that this is a bad episode at all — the performances were good, the visuals were interesting, it just seemed that there was too much story to fit into one hour.  To be honest, it might not even be possible to tell this complete story and keep the current structure.  It was probably as good as it could have been.

Post-Post:

• Harry Siegel changed his name to Bender after he was fired from the force.  On the wall of his detective office, he has clippings from his career.  I guess he counts on no one reading them and asking who this Harry Siegel was and why he looks identical to Harry Bender.
• Second consecutive show where IMDb got a name wrong.  Yesterday, Joanne was credited, but she was always called Joanna.  Today, Eric Roberts’ character is credited as Siegel, but a police name tag says Siegal.
• I’d love to say Harry Siegel’s name was a Dirty Harry homage — Harry Callahan’s first name and the last name of that film’s director Don Siegel.  But who knows?