Scream episode review — 2.13 — Halloween Special
Original air date: October 18, 2016
Director: Oz Scott
Writers: Brian Sieve and Eoghan O’Donnell
Rating: 5/10
This is the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer of the Scream series, I guess you could say, as we take our surviving main characters to a somewhat remote island where there just so happens to be a killer. The killer lured them, but maybe the killer was already there, or maybe it’s one of our two new characters: Audrey’s girlfriend, Gina (Zena Grey), or Stavo’s and Noah’s new comic book business partner(?), Jeremy (Alex Esola). Or is it basically the only other person on the island, some boy who Emma immediately has a crush on?
Seeing as how this is a pretty self-contained story here (and it’s twice as long), we get more deaths here than any other episode, which is nice, and some of them are fairly gruesome for an MTV series.
It all starts with Kieran, actually, who shows up to get a pretty great death via throat slit from probably the person that called him at the end of the last episode.
It’s heavily implied at the end of the episode that it’s one of two people, but at any rate, the main plot of this is completely removed from the Kieran/Piper/Brandon James story. Though yes, obviously Emma’s being targeted, because why not.
Instead, this all starts when the three young comic book entrepreneurs are vacationing to a house near a murder mansion that Stavo and Jeremy are trying to get Noah to write about. He doesn’t want to because nobody knows the motive of the killings, and he thinks most of it is all a ghost story or urban legend, and he’s more interested in covering real things.
As weird as it is to throw a new character like Jeremy into the mix, it at least makes sense that Stavo and Noah are working together, so I like that. And it makes sense that Emma would want to get out of town right after Kieran’s been killed and the press is questioning her and shit like that. And I guess Brooke’s there because Stavo’s there. And I guess Audrey’s just there — whatever.
This is a classic horror/mystery setup, where the characters are all trapped in the house as a storm rages on, and they can’t get anyone to help them. But there isn’t much tension here. It’s even mentioned in the dialogue by one of the new characters, but at this point, our main characters are way too unphased by dead bodies, and of course that makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is characters like Emma being so quick to trust a guy that shows up right after a killer disappears, particularly when this character is interested in her romantically. You’d think she’d have learned by now.
Sure, she figures things out and acts fairly clever after that, but this character’s been doing a bunch of dumb shit all season long.
And I guess those are my main complaints here. This doesn’t feel “special” in any way to warrant being a double-length episode. There are more kills, sure, but it’s just nothing all that special.
