Main cast: Peter Bretz (Andrew Carter), Dee Pelletier (Dee), Joe Heffernan (Scott), Damion DaCosta (Major Carl Devlin), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Greg Francis
Cold Dark Space is arguably the best acted and the most heartfelt episode to date in Ghost Stories, but because this series is what it is, some aspects of the episode still don’t feel that well cobbled-together.
Our protagonist Andrew Carter, or Andrew Luke because I don’t think anyone checked the script or the episode for consistency, wakes up in a hospital, confused and frightened because the people he meet are not what he knows them to be. He recognizes the faces of the doctors and knows their names, for example, but he also is fairly certain that they are not doctors. Sure enough, they begin nagging him about weird things like how he can’t run away from something in his past. What is happening?
Well, the title is quite the spoiler once all is revealed, heh. After the revelation, the episode turns from some typical “Is this a dream or maybe it’s hell?” episode into something more poignant and heartfelt. Peter Bretz gives a solid, often sympathetic performance here, and that’s something I don’t see often in a series that boast amateur hour acting more often than not. The performances from the rest of the cast are a mixed bag, but this is Andrew’s story, and the actor playing him sells his role very well.
Now, the story. I would like to give this episode four oogies to distinguish it from the more average three-oogie episodes in this series, but when I think closely about the whole thing, some things don’t add up. Maybe I can argue that things early on are the way they are because they are viewed through Andrew’s confused and distorted point of view, and what is said to him is likely a projection of his guilty conscience. However, that doesn’t explain why his friends that clearly value him as a person—to have done what they did in this episode—behave so antagonistically at this part of the episode. The whole set up comes off too much like a contrived device to lead viewers to expect something only to be given something else, or a means to develop a twist for the sake of a twist, in other words.
Still, all things considered, it’s still the strongest episode in this series to date. I know, that’s not saying much, but given some of the really dire episodes I’ve seen in this series, this one is indeed a welcome sight for sore eyes.
