Main cast: Maya Israel (Fran Rayburn), Greg O’Donovan, John Rogers, and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Frank Wayne
Frank Wayne actually returns for the very second last episode of Ghost Stories—he must really need the $100 they must be paying their directors, or he probably has to come back in order to keep them from leaking some incriminating photos of him. Yes, Parting Shot is just one episode away from the end game of Ghost Stories, and in hindsight, it’s actually a missed opportunity not to have an episode with this title be the series closer.
Well, it’s the 1990s, a time when tabloid writers and paparazzo were reviled as third-rate scums. Funny how times have changed, as today, the mainstream American news outlets would be falling over themselves to hire these people. Anyway, Fran Rayburn is a disgraced photojournalist now stalking and taking photos of reclusive retired rock star Nicky “The Snakeman” Van Adder. Now that he has kicked the bucket, she is hoping to score a jackpot with the pictures of him that she had amassed. Finding no buyers, she decides that she needs to take the ultimate shot: that of The Snakeman as a dead body in the morgue. A stranger that calls himself Flash offers her a chance to take that photo, in exchange of any payment that she deems will be fair. She agrees, and so the game is on.
Parting Shot could have been a decent “scary night at the morgue” episode. It certainly has that rare decent actress in Maya Israel here, as she doesn’t deliver lines in a flat monotone and she certainly can show fear and bitchiness with equal ease. However, the whole thing is just too stupid for words, and the “twist” that leads to Maya apparently being hounded by a paparazzo that only she can see, taking pics of her non-stop, is far more comical than the people behind this show likely intended it to be. Indeed, this episode should have played things up as a comedy, given how dumb things become as the show progresses, but no, it wants to keep a straight face throughout.
Playing this up as a straight spooky episode is a mistake because the lighting is too bright most of the time, making it very hard to generate a scary kind of tension, and the special effects are pretty bad, far more comical than anything else. Really, they should have just turned this into a comedy, so that the cheaply produced and absurd elements in this episode would be seen as an audacious type of humor.
With it being what it is, this one is a sad consequence of trying to film an episode on a budget that is way smaller than the ambition of the people behind the whole thing.
