Dead of Summer - She Talks To Angels - Review: "Nothing Happens by Accident"

I'm a little later than I wanted to be uploading this but I was visiting family. I hope everyone enjoyed their Labor Day weekend.

The finale is finally here, and as promised, it was a straight up fight for survival. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my favorite of the season.

The episode picks up just about right where we left off. Garrett, Alex and Jessie wait for Amy by the car. It’s taking Amy a little bit longer to get all the blood washed off, I suppose. Everyone piles into the car only to discover they can’t leave because Amy is still carrying the demon. Is it still possession if the two entities sharing the body are working together?

The reason Amy can’t leave is because Holyoke hasn’t been completely destroyed. He left some of his essence inside Jessie. So of course Amy now has to kill Jessie. She reveals that her helpers in this quest are the counselors she’s already killed. That was gloriously creepy.

The three survivors take off running in an effort to keep Amy from getting to Jessie. They hide in the cabin where Amy left several bodies. When Amy comes through a window, Garrett gets a piece of glass in his side. He’s the first to fall.

In town, Blair and Drew deliver the kids to their parents. Anton tells them that Jessie and Alex are in trouble and they need to return to the camp to help them. Being red-blooded American teens, in a slightly less disillusioned age, they call the police. They basically condemn the poor officers that answer the call to death.

I couldn’t quite figure out the purpose of the quick Blair/Cricket flashback. It felt like a left over scene, whose only purpose seemed to be to tell us the origin of the candy bar Blair put in the box they buried for Cricket. Was it added for time?

I was much happier to see the brief flashback with Alex and his mother. She finds out the kind of person her son is and isn’t happy. I was happy she admonished him for calling his father weak. She’s disappointed that her son doesn’t understand that it takes a lot more strength to resist the urge to fight. Because Alex has never been one of my favorite characters, I wasn’t too upset that this flashback was followed by Alex’s death.

When Garrett caught up with Jessie again, she was grateful to see him because he could help her with her plan. She manages to trap Amy and hold her while Garrett plays the cylinder over the camp sound system. Not surprisingly, Amy destroyed its ability to play just before they got into the police car. Luckily, Garrett remembers that Joel caught Holyoke’s song on his video recorder, and he plays that over the sound system.

This works and completes the exorcism. When the evil is sucked back into the lake the spirits of Amy’s victims are able to find their eternal rest. Deb and the murdered counselors walk into the lake before disappearing into “The Light” except for the two Redshirts (Dan, who was killed in the pilot and Amy’s fellow high school student who came to warn Deb.)

Garrett, as I suspected, had indeed been killed by Amy. (His makeup was really successful for me.) He was passed a bit of Holyoke’s essence (when she kissed him just before he died) and is now replacing Holyoke as lake protector. It was nice that Garrett got to see his father again.

I found the episode to be only okay. I finally figured out why. It has to do with the basic structure of the tail end of the series. They’ve tried to do a double climax, and it just wasn’t as satisfying for me as the showrunners intended. The tension built into the exorcism episode very nicely. But they were never able to generate the same level of tension in this episode. I wasn’t very interested in watching Amy stalk Jessie, Alex and Garrett.

That said I did like the fact that we got to see Jessie walk out on her and get to college. Of course Blair and Drew's trip into the sunset is heading into a David Bowie concert. I have enjoyed this series a great deal more than I expected to. I really hope they get a second season pick up. If they do I will be there watching.

What did you guys think of the finale?

About the Author - Prpleight

Prpleight is a screenwriter and senior software engineer with solid geek cred. When not writing code, screenplays, or watching TV (sometimes she does all three at the same time), she uses her broadsword Bessie to battle evil. She's been a frequent contributor to the SpoilerTV discussion boards for several years now.

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