Main cast: Brooke Smith (Lee Cooper), Dil Kainth (Sonny), Chris Benson (Zolgosh), Heather Mah (The Spirit), and Terence Stamp (The Host)
Director: Jeff Fazio

Anthropology student Lee Cooper takes up a part time job as a security guard at a seemingly abandoned warehouse. It doesn’t seem so bad, just boring as all she has to do is to make her rounds every 45 minutes to make sure that there are no squatters, vagrants, et cetera.

You’d think Hidebound would be a tale of a woman against ghosts or monsters like Malum, but it’s more of a character study of the protagonist—a morose little thing whose sole response to every situation she is in is brittle sarcasm. Her fiancé breaks up with her, and she walks a lot to and from the warehouse.

Oh, and the warehouse may be haunted, because the show stretches a scene vertically or use that fish eye lens effect along with loud screechy music to tell me that an otherwise mundane scene is, ooh, very scary.

The entire episode is a discombobulated and incoherent sequence of scenes that are barely connected with one another. It requires a forced-sounding monologue toward the end to give me an idea of what is happening with the ghost or whatever it is, because the show up to that point doesn’t know what to do with itself at all.

It’s a shame, because Brooke Smith is pretty charismatic in her role and she manages to utter her otherwise pedestrian lines with aplomb. I also wish there is more Sonny, as that guy has some pretty good lines and the actor playing him isn’t too bad.

On the whole, though, this is one episode that doesn’t know how to tell a coherent story. Maybe a lot of things got chopped up in the editing room, who knows, but this is an episode that is lacking entertainment value or payoff.