Main cast: Sara Bakker (Kate Bradshaw), Eddie Weiss (McNall), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Frank Wayne
Hmm, so the director of Going Down is… wait, who’s Frank Wayne? Stuart Taylor must have really flown the coop, and they probably had to promote some key grip dude to the director’s seat as a result.
Sadly, the title of this episode isn’t a reference to any naughty antics one can do with one’s mouth. No, it’s about elevators.
Kate Bradshaw has a crippling fear of… actually, I’m not really sure. She is rendered incapable of speaking after some traumatic incident three years ago, or so Rip Torn informs me in his opening narration, and since Kate doesn’t speak. She hears her own voice speak to her in her head, though, mostly to calm her down, urge her to take action despite her fears, and to fill in viewers with some exposition. What Kate is terrified of will be revealed in due time, but it has to do with confined spaces.
In this episode, she reluctantly takes the elevator to the tenth floor, to see a “specialist” that may help her with her condition. Oops, too bad, because she soon finds herself sharing the elevator with a recently fired security guard that had just killed his employer and is now taking her hostage. Eventually, the fellow will discover just how real and terrifying Kate’s fears are, when they materialize and even affect his own sanity in the process.
This episode may make some people that are scared of confined or narrow spaces feel uncomfortable, because it takes place almost entirely within the elevator. It’s a pretty spacious one, but the two lead characters do a pretty good job ramping up the claustrophobic tension in that space.
Only, I can only wonder why Kate will even want to step into an elevator if she knew it would lead to all… that. One intriguing possibility is that she may be deliberately looking for unwitting victims to pass her fears on to. If that is the case, though, then Kate’s thoughts and actions in the first few minutes of the episode contradict that possibility. I suspect that this episode, like many episodes of Ghost Stories, occasionally raises some intriguing concepts and notions by accident while flailing around to the finish line.
At any rate, the ending doesn’t make much sense, which kind of dampens the pay-off considerably. Then there are the atrocious “special effects”… shudder. That “opening” in the elevator floor is rendered as a solid block of red that it radiates Atari 2600 realness.
Still, compared to many episodes in this show, Going Down is alright. Also, the guy playing the fellow taking Kate hostage is kinda easy on the eyes, and that always makes things better.
