Main cast: Tempestt Bledsoe (Dottie), Steve Harper (Paul Nichols), Ed Wheeler (Dad), Marcella Lowery (Mom), and Eugene Byrd (Brad)
Director: David Misch
Once a year in a sleepy town, the dead rise to eat people. Nobody knows why, but who cares about the reason – these people organize themselves so that, on that night, they will barricade their homes, and then arm themselves and go out to bang bang bang those creatures. Our heroine Dottie is on her one-week college break during this night. Friendless and an introvert, she chooses to stay in and read instead of joining her parents on the zombie hunt or accompanying her annoying younger brother Brad in protesting the zombie “murders”.
Left alone at home, she is content… until the guy from her French class, Paul Nicholas, drops by with some flowers. How sweet. The thing is, he’s been dead for a while, and he’s now a zombie…
Paul has always had a crush on her, but she barely recalls him other than he was some funny guy in class who died in a car accident. Still, when she decides to let him in, she discovers that he’s a charming, funny guy – everything she has dreamed of. Well, aside from the dead and zombie thing. Can there ever be a happy ending here?
My Zombie Lover is a straight out, flat out comedy, by the way, and the whole episode, like this show itself, doesn’t have a bug budget. Paul’s zombie look is both adorable and ghastly enough, though, so kudos to the person who handled these things. That aside, there is plenty of humor here, from outright corny ones, like the hotline Dottie frantically calls up at first for advice on how to deal with Paul, to more playful jabs at the way we stereotype people and act first without thinking. I mean, yes, Paul wants to eat Dottie, but he’s not so bad, so don’t stereotype zombies, okay?
I like this episode, but there is one reason why I can’t give this one a higher score: Brad. I know, that kid is meant to be this precocious loudmouth, but he is so annoying here and he won’t shut up. His presence also turns the final scene of this episode into a punchline that sabotages much of the goodwill the episode has been building up up to that point. Still, don’t let that and the three-oogie score stop you from taking a look at this one – without Brad, this would have easily been one of the better episodes of the show.
