Main cast: Christian Borle (Trevor Mooney), Erin O’Neill (Carla Satchell), Harvey Shane (Mr Kravitz), Greg Provance (Vic Kula), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Stuart Taylor
Trevor Mooney is almost twenty-one, but he enjoys being a complete waste of flesh. He works at a mart with his friend Vic, slacking on the job and contaminating food products with their fingers and worse, while claiming that they have the best job ever because it’s one that sees them getting paid for doing nothing. Trevor has his eye on Carla Satchell, the young lady that works there, and complains to her that his parents are planning to send him to college.
Meanwhile, the store is patronized only by folks from the retirement home nearby. These morons naturally mock them while claiming that growing old sucks. Well, wait until Trevor starts to notice that the young staff members are starting to behave oddly—one by one, they start acting like responsible adults with directions and ambitions! He soon discovers that the retirement people aren’t here to shop for foods or what not; they are shopping for younger bodies to inhabit, yikes.
The good news is: Consumers is like that episode of The Twilight Zone that somehow got lost and found its way into Ghost Stories instead. It tries to preach, with Rip Torn openly castigating the young kids of today for being generally useless and dumb, and the entire episode demonstrates that youth is wasted on these putzes. They become so much better people once their personalities are replaced by that of older folks! Down with zoomers!
Indeed, this episode does its propaganda so well that Trevor, Carla, and Vic are all loathsome idiots that deserve to have their brains pod-people’d out of existence. Perhaps this is also a testament as to how decent the cast is in terms of acting. I hesitate to use the word “good” here because for once, the monotone and stiffness fit the premise, and I can’t tell whether this kind of wooden acting is an indication of actual acting talent or natural “I really need a different career” bad acting realness.
Unfortunately, perhaps because this is a Ghost Stories episode, there is a forced happy ending, at least for Trevor. This comes in the form of him giving an abrupt rant that somehow translates to him having depths and maturity, when all along in this episode he’s just a waste of flesh that is better off supporting the production of Soylent Green. In a way, this is a horrible ending, because it signals the release of a parasitic, useless member of society out into the community, when he’s better off just made into a host for an aged but productive member of society.
Oh my god, I’ve turned into a board member of Soylent Industries.
