Main cast: Alicia Silverstone (Erin), Olivia Rouyre (Finn), Teddy Sears (Jeffrey), Bobby Hogan (Jake), Heather Wynters (Millie Boone), and Jarrod Crawford (Sheriff Maldack)
Director: Tessa Blake
Four months ago, Finn and her brother Jake as well as their friends were boating over Lake Prescott, intending to explore a town called Reedsville that became submerged after they built a damn in the area.
That day ended in tragedy, when Finn claimed a hand reached out from the lake bed to grab Jake and drag him away.
Regardless of what she really saw that day, Jake’d body was never found, Finn spent some time in a loony bin, and today, Finn’s parents Erin and Jeffrey welcome her home.
However, it’s hard to move on in some semblance of normalcy. Finn continues to be haunted by the tragedy, while Erin also soon becomes convinced, through nightmares and hallucinations, that perhaps her son wants her to find his body. Her husband wants to just let things be, so both mother and daughter decide to look into the matter themselves.
Can they find Jake’s body? Perhaps, they will find something else instead, something far more sinister under the lake? Ooh.
Lake is… wait, we’ve reached the last episode of the second season already? Maybe I’m too dazzled by Bobby Hogan’s satellite dish-sized head lights early in the episode to notice how much time has passed.
This is a slow and predictable episode, made to feel more dreary by conversations that are either too staged and stilted to be something uttered by normal people or are thinly-veiled exposition dump aimed at the audience.
There are a few jump scares, but the most part, this one feels like an extended but even more boring take on The Deep House with a more absurd ending sequence borrowed from The Fog tacked on.
The presence of Alicia Silverstone in this episode had been hyped up considerable prior to its release, but I don’t see what the big deal is. Perhaps they just want something to make some noise about, and there’s not much else here.
Aside from genuinely looking like she could be the daughter of Alicia Silverstone and Teddy Sears, Olivia Rouyre has little to do here aside from pouting, while Teddy Sears and Bobby Hogan’s nipples are not enough on the show to make much of an impact.
At any rate, this is a slow, draggy, and forgettable episode, one that ends the second season on a resounding thunk.
Still, this second season on the whole is an improvement over the first one, as it relies less on being meta as can be and instead tries to branch out into something more distinctive. It wants to be a genuine horror anthology series and not American Horror Story: The Lost Scenes, and there are some good and interesting episodes to get the second season closer to its objective.
Let me put this way: I went into the second season with some degree of trepidation, but now, I’m actually curious about how the next season will turn out!
