Main cast: Billie Lourd (Liv Whitley), Ronen Rubinstein (Matt Webb), Virginia Gardner (Bernadette), Vanessa Williams (Dr Eleanor Berger), Michael B Silver (Dr Mounds), Kimberley Drummond (Emma), Chad James Buchanan (Rory), Jake Choi (Stan), and Misha Gonz-Cirkl (Norma)
Director: Sanaa Hamri
If Billie Lourd is capable of playing someone that doesn’t appear and behave like she is dead inside, I haven’t seen that show where she did that. In BA’AL, once again she plays another woman that acts and looks like death without a cursory warm-up, but at least this time such method acting is in character. Liv Whitley wants a child so bad, but so far she and her husband Matt are not hitting the baby jackpot. Their fertility specialist Dr Mounds (really now?) suggests adoption, but Liv insists that she really wants to feel a baby growing inside her, so it’s IVF or bust.
The receptionist of the clinic, Bernadette, offers her a fertility totem that may help, and hey, what’s the harm right? Liv and Matt shag with the totem under their bed, and voila, baby Aaron is born. Alas, something feels off with Aaron, and after some research, Liv discovers that her fertility totem is actually a statuette of the demon Ba’al. Has she accidentally conceived a demon-possessed baby or something? Oopsie.
Sure, Ms Lourd shows that she can do at least three different varieties of dead inside here, but at least that feels right for her character. On the other hand, Ronen Rubinstein is just horrible, as he can’t elicit any believable human emotion at all here, and he’s not even that cute to look at. Considering these two are supposed to be carrying the whole episode, it’s like it is being dragged to the finish line by dead-eyed Barbie on one side and dead-faced Ken on the other side.
The episode itself takes on a familiar structure that had been done many times before in anthology horror episodes that revolve around a troubled wife thinking that she is going insane or haunted by supernatural forces. This isn’t anything new, as the episodes so far in this season have been content to rip off stuff from its own American Horror Story franchise or lazily recreate scenarios that are reminiscent of better episodes in better anthology shows, just add lots of vapid characters for that last bit. Indeed, this is another episode in this show that features wealthy, shallow, narcissistic characters that have no discernible personality other than douchebag. I’m not sure whether this show is just mocking itself or it’s a case of wealthy, vapid people making shows about what they know best.
What really kills this episode, though, is the implausible twist piled upon another equally implausible one, with the added insult of a character then explaining their entire plot to the audience shortly before the episode ends—as if the audience is too stupid to get what is basically hammered into their skulls in the scenes up to that point.
Hence, BA’AL is just business as usual for this show: lazy borrowing of overused horror tropes without making any effort to make sure that these tropes fit together well. How many more episodes of this crap-tier joke of a “horror” show do I have to sit through, before I can consign it out of my mind?
