Main cast: Joe Pantoliano (Brother Charles), Coraly Zahonero (Alice Ames), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Bruno Gantillon
If you’re wondering why I am reviewing this fifth season of The Hitchhiker at such a quick rate, that’s because this freaking season has double the numbers of episodes in each of the past two seasons. I was optimistic about this show during the last two seasons, and now I just want this show to be done with because I just want to move to other things. So yes, I’m suffering, and you guys should suffer with me too because we are all about sharing and giving.
The Miracle of Alice Ames is the seventh episode of this season, so this means there are still 19—nine-freaking-are-you-kidding-me-who-wants-this-crap-teen!—more to go. Please just kill me, somebody.
Bruno Gantillon is once again the director. Have all the others fled the coop?
Then again, Joe Pantoliano is in this one. He’s always good at playing the villain I love to hate, so things can’t be that bad, right?
He plays Brother Charles, the preacher that founded the Church of Limitless Love. If that name made the church seem like a dodgy sex cult, well, Charles is a fraud and he is using the church gig as an excuse to take advantage of vulnerable women and pimping them out.
The fun begins when one of his followers, Alice Ames, experiences what seems like a stigmata while attempting to “show love” to one of Charles’s clients.
Oh sorry, I should have said “nonsense” instead of “fun” because this is an incoherent episode. I have to force myself to watch this thing three times to make sure I have not missed out on something important, but I am still confused by the whole thing. What just happened in the end? Why is Alice even having stigmata in the first place, and why would Charles go from being eeuw’ed out by her to being horny for her? It doesn’t make sense.
Then again, nothing about this episode makes sense. Perhaps huge chunks of the episode that contain key plot moments had been accidentally erased during post-production, I don’t know, but this episode is just one hot bloody mess. Joe Pantoliano looks good here in a smarmy yet sexy way, and he is fun to watch as expected, but he is wasted here, as the whole episode makes no freaking sense at all.
What a pointless waste of time.
