Main cast: Elizabeth Franz (Mother), Finn Carter (Sheila), and Tom Gilroy (Nelson)
Director: Bette Gordon

In The Mother Instinct, our main character identified simply as Mother or Ma keeps a greenhouse at her big place. She does research in it, talking to her plants that they are her children—children that she conducts tests of who-knows-what on, that is.

Her daughter Sheila is married to an abusive man, and they only drop by when the SOB wants money. Well, that’s what they do when the episode opens. When they discover that Ma may be keeping something valuable in the greenhouse, they decide to break into it and steal that something for themselves.

Ooh… what awaits them in that greenhouse?

Now, this episode could have been a decent Goosebumps kind of episode, as it already has the big scary house thing down pat.

Meanwhile, Tom Gilroy plays a pretty nice POS that gives the episode an appropriately menacing vibe.

However, this episode ends up being a tug-of-war to control the ridiculously stupid Sheila, and it’s hard to care because we are talking about a doormat that happily follows the husband to break into and damage the work and passion of a mother she claims to love.

The tacked-on happy ending here is an unsatisfying one, because the idiot learns nothing and has only moved from under her husband’s thumb to her mother’s. In fact, it negates much of the well-done sinister atmosphere of the episode, robbing itself of a more satisfying, darker ending—had this been a different show, Sheila would most appropriately end up as fertilizer for her mother’s beloved plants, and I would be so happy with that.

This had been an alright episode until it falls off the cliff with that ending, so chalk it up as one missed potential.