Main cast: F Murray Abraham (Dr Carl Winters), Glynn Turman (Sheriff Nate Craven), and Luke Roberts (Joe Allen)
Director: David Prior
I’m starting to think that this show is confused. Maybe it is growing pains, but considering the pedigree of the people assembled to make this show happen, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities should be a triumphant milestone in present day genre anthologies. Instead, I’m starting to feel that it is more at home in the same tier as the very average Creepshow.
The Autopsy is mostly exposition, narrated by Sheriff Nate Craven to his friend Dr Carl Winters, whom Nate has summoned to perform some autopsy on the bodies of some miners. These miners were killed when one of them, Joe Allen, set off a bomb apparently for laughs.
The insurance company will only pay up if these miners were killed on the job, and they argue that being killed by a lunatic colleague doesn’t fall under that category of things they will pay up for. Hence, Dr Carl is summoned as a desperate effort to come up with something, anything, that will allow the families of the deceased to get some money.
Before the good doctor can start performing his autopsy, though, Nate will go on and on about the mysterious disappearances of townsfolk and the appearance of badly butchered corpses without a drop of blood in them.
Despite the fact that the scenes are narrated from Nate’s point of view, the show also includes scenes that Nate will never know, much less be able to narrate to Carl. What is this? Are the people behind this show really that awesome or…
Oh wait, this thing is co-written by David S Goyer, the fellow behind masterpieces such as Suicide Squad, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the worst episode in Perversions of Science. Sure, he also wrote Blade, but then again, he also wrote Blade: Trinity. You can argue that things could be worse—Damon Lindelof perhaps, shudder—but the sad fact remains that this show is just another one of those made by an incestuous circle of the who’s in at the moment in Hollywood, proper qualifications and talent not required so long as you’re BFF with the right people.
The autopsy finally happens halfway into this almost-one-hour-long episode, and renders the whole previous exposition to be just a waste of time, because the answers to the questions posed in Nate’s overlong exposition dump are quickly answered in a more succinct manner in this second half. In fact, if the first half of this episode were cut out completely, the second half can still stand alone well with some minor alterations here and there!
If anything, the first half actually damages the episode because it over-explains the sinister threat that ties the missing townsfolk and the explosion at the mine, robbing the second half much of the gripping tension and mounting suspense that should have been present in there.
The second half is a nice one because it’s gruesome and the denouement is pretty ingenious, but it should have been allowed to be stand as the entire episode, without being bogged down by the unnecessary first half.
