Otherside Picnic #02 — Head Gate

January 11th, 2021

 

We hardly knew you, crazy conspiracy dude.

Impressions:

I don't know whether the writer or the director should be more embarrassed about this episode. So much of it made zero sense. I think probably the writer because that's where the episode began to fall apart first. The random girl who they swung by so that Blondie could infodump about something else was dumb, but not unusual. Then they found the rando dude who first called up Chekhov's landmine (which proceeded to be ignored and forgotten), then launched into a bizarre tale about the alien secret society kidnapping people, infilitrating the government, and how his wife disappeared, so he discovered an unrelated other portal miles away in a different city and managed to accidentally stumble through it, and that's why he went from living in a penthouse to being a grimy homeless dude.

All of this was leading up to monster of the week, which is where the direction fell apart too. Don't get me wrong, the writer was still struggling. It throws up a twist that Grumpy was the one tricked by the pitcher plant monster who creates illusions of what you want to see, which is then defeated by going "Oh wait, I have a magic eye that lets me see the truth." They handwave this off by "Oh, I guess I just ignored it." But the visuals on that scene were just bizarre. The monster was actually some kind of… uh… wooden gate? A severed head in a wooden gate? It's really not clear. And by touching it with your magic hand, that disables its powers? The same monster that vaporized a dude for coming within 20 feet of it? Was the vaporization on cooldown? Why are we running towards the disintegration monster after pulling away from it? The visual direction of the scene is just an absolute mess.

But I guess that still leaves more to write about here than in the other Monday show. But this was still a very tedious first half of the episode. Better than being yelled at and irritated, I suppose. 

Posted in Otherside Picnic | 1 Comment »

One Lonely Comment

  • Marmot says:

    Is this some kind of yokai or something?