Main cast: Kevin Dowling (Brian Tyrrell) , Tina Brock (Cynthia Tyrrell), Peter McCabe (Charlie Tyrrell), Thomas Grube (Detective Brock), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Jeffrey Fine

I’m not going to lie. Conscience gets an extra oogie because the Charlie Tyrrell is so hot. The actor, Peter McCabe, has this clean-cut, boyish earnestness to him, which makes for an adorable kind of contrast to the fact that his character is some amoral mercenary that has done some really bad things before. He is slavishly devoted to his older brother Brian, too, looking up to that man as a decent counterpart to him. Hence, he will do anything for Brian. Ooh, that is a guy that will make an incredible hero in a romance story, I tell you.

Sadly, this isn’t his story, even if Peter McCabe is the only cast member that manages to emote even halfway like a realistic human being.

This episode is minus Rip Torn’s opening narration, something that is sorely missed because, given the average acting ability of the cast of Ghost Stories, he is often the closest one can have to a human cast member in every other episode. This episode is about Brian Tyrrell. The CEO of a mega-corporation with a reputation for being a philanthropist, he carries himself as a beacon of truth and fidelity. Naturally, he is systematically embezzling money and he is also cheating on his wife Cynthia with the receptionist. When the episode opens, he has already murdered his mistress during a messy argument (he wanted to end the whole thing, and she naturally disagreed with the decision). Well, no worries there, as he will just call Charlie to come clean up his mess, like he always does.

The problem is that the night guard soon reports that Brian has come to him to ask the man to follow him to where a body is hidden. Then, Brian’s bosses and colleagues begin to thank him for calling them to begin investigations into the account books and helping them detect a massive case of embezzlement going on. What on earth? Is Brian somehow sabotaging himself without him realizing it, kind of like Mr Hyde becoming Dr Jekyll that happens to still look like Mr Hyde?

This episode is one hot mess. Detective Brock is the dumbest cop character to grace this episode to date, and there had been some bad ones in the past. Without any evidence or warrant, he crashes into Brian’s home and office repeatedly, to rant and rage and basically give away his entire plan to the person he is intending to apprehend once he finds proof. That’s really stupid, I tell you. It’s lucky that this episode celebrates stupidity instead of punishes it. Cynthia, for example, knows very well that her husband is always “late at work” and “having meetings” every other night since forever, and she is shocked—shocked!—that he’s actually cheating on her all this while. You can argue that Charlie is dumb too for letting himself be used by Brian all this while, but that guy is hot, and I will not listen to any blasphemy about him.

Then oh my, the acting. Both Kevin Dowling and Tina Brock seem to reading out lines from signs held by an intern off-screen, and they are reading those lines for the first time. The acting isn’t just flat, it’s flat with a big, fat hippo sleeping on it. Thomas Grube has the scariest unibrow this side of existence, but it’s a good thing that they probably didn’t have the budget to buy even a pair of scissors for him to trim it, because that thing over his eyes is a nice distraction from his horrid overacting.

Given that Mr McCabe is the one here among the cast that doesn’t look like he had been risen from a grave by a necromancer and ordered to act, this episode could have been easily saved if Brian and Charlie had been twin brothers, and Mr McCabe plays both roles. This is because Brian needs to express fear, confusion, terror, guilt, and more throughout this episode, and Mr Dowling is nowhere capable of doing even a smidgen of that. His lines are devoid of emotion and he sports a blank look throughout the whole episode, and Ms Brock is giving him a run for the money when it comes to the best impersonation of a sack of turnips. At one point when Cynthia is supposed to be shocked and shuddering into her hand, I can see Ms Brock looking up from her hand straight to the camera for whatever reason.

The story itself is predictable, and the title of the episode gives away what is happening to Brian. This kind of story has been done much better in other anthology shows. Still, this one has Charlie, poor dumb hot Charlie, so there’s a plus. At the same time, this episode is so bad at every level, from broken clogged toilet-tier acting to the logic behind everything Detective Brock does, so that’s a huge bloody minus in every sense and way.