Scream episode review — 2.12 — When a Stranger Calls

Original air date: August 16, 2016
Director: Patrick Lussier
Writer: Eoghan O’Donnell

Rating: 6/10

This is a fun, exciting finale. Sure, it’s not really the finale, but it sort of is. The Halloween special’s listed as part of the season in Wikipedia and IMDB, but I think it’s probably safe to say that’s a different story, based on how things wrap up here.

I mean, sure, there is a cliffhanger — kind of a half-assed one, if you ask me, but the story’s pretty resolved.

We start off with Audrey and Emma being driven away by a police officer, who’s forcd to swerve and crash when the killer shows up in the middle of the road.

He’s in turn killed, and the killer leaves the keys for Emma and Audrey to escape.

So they’re on the run until they’re able to contact Noah when he’s with Brooke. They all, along with Kieran, meet up at the movie theater and wait for the killer to show up, arming themselves with weapons.

Then Stavo shows up but they won’t let him in because it’s suspicious that he shows up. So pretty much everyone who’s there is thinking it’s Eli. They don’t really talk about it here, but Noah did show the sheriff a photo of Eli at a funeral a year ago.

Then a noise brings everyone but Audrey to the auditorium, as a film of the murders of the past two seasons is playing.

When Emma goes to shut off the projector and Kieran goes to check on Audrey, Brooke is stabbed in the back. Emma pursues the killer, but she’s a pretty bad shot, it turns out.

With the police on their way and Audrey now missing, Emma has to go on the run again. She’s eventually lured to the orphanage and told that if she comes with any one else, Audrey will die.

When she finds Audrey, though, Kieran shows up, and then Eli.

Eli claims that Kieran stabbed him, and when he approaches, Emma shoots him. They all act like it’s over until Kieran says something that makes Emma suspicious, and it’s revealed that he’s the killer, and had been seeing Piper before he dated Emma.

I’ll be honest here. We all know that in the original Scream, the boyfriend was one of the killers. The first season not going that route with either boyfriend character go tmy guard down for this season. I can’t say I was shocked, but I definitely knew it wasn’t going to be Eli, since they were setting him up way too hard. So I was kind of surprised.

After Emma and Audrey take him down and Emma passes up the option of killing him, letting the police handle him, he’s taken in, before getting a phone call taunting him over wearing “his” mask.

Considering the third season has an entirely new cast, I can only hope this is picked up on in the Halloween special.

So this was pretty fun. Amadeus Serafini does a little better of a job in his crazy man speech at the end when he’s revealed to be the killer than Amelia Rose Blaire in the first season, but not much better. I’ve always thought he was one of the weaker actors in the cast, anyways.

The biggest complaint I have here is that this finale has a lot in common with the first season finale. Brooke is attacked, stabbed, but not killed. Brooke is also previously begged to be let in by a character who’s been set up pretty strongly as a red herring. It’s all a tad too familiar.