Main cast: Linda Blair (Lia), Rob Morrow (Vito), and Maria Tucci (Mamma)
Director: Lizzie Borden

Phew, finally the last episode of the first season of Monsters is here, and it’s the 24th episode. It feels like I’ve been watching this season for a decade!

La Strega stars Linda Blair, which should be some grand occasion to celebrate. Okay, she probably took a week off from being in a string of awful B-grade horror flicks to film this episode, but hey, at least she cared, people.

Lia owns some antique and period clothing store, and one day, she has a fellow, Vito, showing up with a knife and threatening to kill her. That’s okay, she has a pistol and fires a bullet to show that she means business.

She learns that Vito believes her to be the witch—the la strega—responsible for a curse that eventually killed his mother. Well, she tells him that he’s mistaken, and that witch is actually her late mother. Still, he’s welcome to stay with her for the next two weeks to find out for himself whether she’s telling the truth.

He agrees, and soon falls for her. Ah, but is she a fiend that is just using him, or is she genuinely not the witch he thinks she is?

Okay, there is a potentially fun, whimsical love story here, but the way this episode is cobbled together, I only get scenes. No build-up, no lead-up, no evidence of developing trust or other feelings, not even any proper focus on Vito learning the truth between his mother and Lia’s.

Instead, I just get scenes of these two characters doing things that are meant to show me how clever and wacky the script is, only to leave so many things unanswered. The result is a story full of holes, and sadly, I can’t really be arsed to care about the story to think too much about how to fill these holes with my own theories.

The worst scene is the last one. Vito learns of something that shatters everything he has believed in up to that point, and he just acts like it’s a trivial thing because he has a new woman in his life now.

Oh, and this episode has a fairly tame make-out scene, but in the context of this show, that’s like soft porn, ooh. Parents may want to shield their kids’ eyes at crucial moments, because this one is pretty steamy for a Monsters episode!

Anyway, the season-ender is a huge missed opportunity, which is a big pity because Ms Blair and Rob Morrow do show some pretty decent chemistry together. If the story had been executed better, they might actually be proud to tell people that they were on this show!