Main cast: Gwendolyn Thorne (Sara Reiner), Paul Ulloa (David), Cheryl Clifford (Claire), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Joe Wiecha
Sara Reiner is a cheery young lady that works in the morgue of the Grand View Medical Center. She has so many friends. Well, since this is a Ghost Stories episode, her friends are her charges, the corpses that are wheeled in and out on a daily basis. She will hold long conversations with them, apparently hearing them speak to her back, and hence, it’s not surprising that she doesn’t have many friends that are of the living variety. Still, she seems very happy, and she even knows the detailed histories of these cadavers.
Of late, she believes that she has fallen in love with the best man ever. Fortunately, that man is alive—David is studying to be a mortician, and he seems to understand Sara’s social anxiety perfectly. They have so much in common, and he wants her to be his date.
If he seemed too good to be true, well, he is. David is actually in cahoots with his lover Claire. He thinks Sara is “creepy as hell”; all he wants is a chance to get close enough for him to steal and make a copy of Sara’s key to the morgue. He will break in while Sara is waiting for him to show up for their date, steal the cadavers’ jewelry, and then ride off into the sunset with Claire. Well, the two lovebirds will soon realize that Sara’s Friends are very protective of her, and they will not let anyone break her heart…
Well, well, imagine that: this is finally that one episode that feels like a cohesive, well-paced spooky show. Okay, the acting is passable—with this series being what is, decent is the new OMG—but everything else fits together nicely. There won’t be anything here that will surprise folks that have seen enough of such shows, but overall, the episode is very solid. Sara is pretty believable that that kind but socially awkward person that has a hard time relating to other people, while David is a nicely done character that is just shady enough while still somewhat likable. Plus, David is so inept as a thief that it’s also easy to see him as a hapless kind of fool, although one can argue that his final fate is pretty hardcore—equivalent to being forced to eat a food that one has been pretending to enjoy for life, shudder.
Really, I have to watch this episode three times just to be sure that I am not imagining that it is actually pretty solid. Yes, it is, fancy that! Can I hope that this is the start of an upward trend for the otherwise bumpy and uneven Ghost Stories? Here is hoping.
