Main cast: Matthew Barnes (Tim), Devon Hales (Lauren), Jibre Hordges (Saul), Lauren Richards (Mia), Kamran Shaikh (Bob), Sharon Eubanks (Catherine), Grant Feely (Timmy), David Alexander Kaplan (Henry), Danielle Harris (Marnie Wrightson), Ron Livingston (Mac Kamen), Fayna Sanchez (Serese, Carmella), Andrew Daly (Clark Murphy, Deputy Anton), and Mark Hamill (Mayor Wrightson)
Directors: Jeffrey F January and Greg Nicotero
Time is the theme of this episode, as the titles of the segment will already tell folks. Time goes wrong for many people here, and that’s why time thingies are scary. Leave them alone, don’t touch them!
Time Out is a beautifully shot segment with lovely set pieces that make me itch to renovate my own place into a Gothic-themed hellhole. Tim Denbrough inherits his grandfather’s mysterious armoire, which turns out to be some kind of demiplane in which time is accelerated inside while time in the outside world remains unaffected. Hence, he can step inside to study everything needed to pass exams at the last minute, burn the midnight oil and produce results in a pace that he couldn’t otherwise, and so forth. As you can guess, this helps him to ace his exams and subsequently come out on top as a hotshot lawyer. However, he also continues to age inside the armoire, and as a result, he ends up aging faster than everyone else around him.
One, does anyone not see what will happen to Tim one minute into him discovering the special properties of armoire? That’s pretty much how this show works—the cartoon and comic book people they get to write the scripts can only take popular tropes and, failing to inject anything interesting into the proceeding, set to spend money to create set pieces, moody lighting, and all to distract me from the fact that the same imbeciles that completely ruined American comics and cartoons are now squatting over horror because this is the new public toilet for them to mess around in.
Unfortunately, it’s not like the set pieces and props are all there, like the ghastly thing on Matthew Barnes’s face that is supposed to be a beard or something, and everything about the hair of the poor kid actor they dragged onto this segment.
Is there a point to this segment, aside from helping the people involved in this segment to pay their rent?
As you can tell from the credits, they loaded the next segment with the big names while letting only the “Who are you?” sorts play in the previous segment. Clearly, The Things in Oakwood’s Past is meant to be the main attraction, and the previous segment is just filler until this truly… yikes, I take that back, it’s an animated segment, and I don’t know why this show persists in deluding itself that it is a top tier animation production.
The media is converging to report on the opening on a mysterious time capsule on the celebration of the entire population of Oakwood vanishing 200 years ago. Wait, why are they celebrating this event again? Marnie, Mayor Wrightson’s daughter, soon learns that something bad is likely to happen when the capsule is opened—like, very bad. You know how mayors are in this kind of shows, though. What is in the capsule and what will happen when it is opened?
Crap art, janky animation (only the mouths move in many scenes), drab colors… looks-wise, this segment is a complete 180 from the previous one. Still, despite being the shorter segment, this one does have some semblance of suspense, some build-up, and a pretty decent denouement all things considered. I can overlook the low-tier animation because I can understand why they have to do that for this segment. Otherwise, they will have to pay a lot of money for special effects, and have nothing left over to spend on happy fun powder for the after party. Plus, the story is better than most of the longer stuff that comes out of the rear end of Blumhouse Productions and the like these days.
Oh, and Mark Hamill is just going through the motions here. A paycheck’s a paycheck, though, and I guess he deserves the break after what they did to Luke Skywalker.
The downside to the whole janky animation thing is that it is hard to feel any emotion during this episode other than sheer disappointment that it is these people that get their hands on this script. In the hands of more capable people, this one could have been one gloriously gory thing to behold. Instead, it’s just an example of why horror animation should be left to professionals that also have the budget to do things right.
This episode is an acceptable kind of forgettable. It’s much better than the previous episode, though, so I suppose it makes sense to give it three oogies. Just note that it is perfectly alright to give it a miss, just as it is alright to watch it without fearing for the ills it may do to one’s liver. It’s meh, but compared to the previous episodes, it’s a somewhat better kind of meh.
