Episode
Title: Slow Burn
Season 08,
Episode 05
Episode
165 of 344
Written
by Joel J. Feigenbaum
Directed
by David Jacobs
Original
Airdate: Thursday, October 9th, 1986
The Plot
(Courtesy of TV.Com): News of
Gary and Jill's affair hits the papers. Abby's furious, and has a little talk
with Peter. At a debate, Peter makes it
clear that Gary's personal life is not an issue. Gary and Jill resume
their affair. Greg has Phil's license plate traced to an address in Dillon, CA,
and drives there. Jean keeps trying to call Ben, and he keeps hanging up on
her. Karen escapes the burning house. Phil sees her on the road and tries to
run her down. She escapes into the woods and eventually comes across a vacant
house. She breaks in, but Phil finds her. She throws a bucket of ammonia in his
face and runs out back to the barn. He is breaking down the barn door when Greg
shows up and stops him. Greg says he'll let him go for old times sake, as long
as he goes back east and never gets involved in their lives again. Karen is
confused when she hears two cars leave. Police tell Mack they received a tip
about where Karen is. Mack and Karen run into each other's arms, and he brings
her home.
Time to discuss Slow Burn, the culmination of a disk of
eps for My Beloved Grammy and myself.
The first thing worth mentioning, something I find rather significant,
is that the genius David Jacobs directs this ep himself, his first directorial
effort since A Price to Pay near the
end of season six. This marks his fifth
directing job out of eight altogether, although I confess I’m going to have
some problems with this one. I think
these problems reflect my problems with this season so far, the fact that, no
matter what’s going on and how much I care about the characters, things just
look and feel kinda cheap right now. In
the last four eps that David Jacobs directed, I always felt the style just
oozing out of every frame, but this one just feels kinda regular, and that’s
too bad cuz I got all excited when I saw his name in the credits. Anyway, let’s explore.
This might be a
pretty fast writeup because the majority of this ep is strictly focused on one
thing: Karen and Phil. Before I talk
about them, though, let’s talk about what’s going on with the other characters,
if anything. My favorite storyline
continues to escalate nicely, although I confess that now I need to backtrack a
bit and admit that I wasn’t totally clear on something. See, I kinda assumed that everyone knew that
Gary and J.B. were fucking and nobody cared.
Nope, that’s wrong. Gary is
trying to keep his relationship with J.B. on the D.L. and, last ep, Peter made
the decision to release the affair to create a scandal and get Gary all mired
in a controversy. Obviously, this
creates drama in all sorts of ways, most especially between Peter and J.B. In case you’re having trouble keeping track,
I remind you that Peter and J.B. (AKA Dorothy Simpkins) are brother and sister
and their parents died because of the evil Paul Galveston’s evil ways, but only
we viewers know about their relationship to each other, at least I think. Does anyone else in the cast know Peter and
J.B. are siblings? Well, if they don’t
right now, I’m sure they’ll find out in time, perhaps on the next disk we are
all scheduled to watch.
Greg and Laura
connect directly to the Phil Harbert shenanigans, because, see, last ep, Greg
jotted down Phil’s license number real fast as he was hauling ass off the
ranch. This ep, Laura gives him some gentle
prodding about how, if he knows anything about Karen’s disappearance, he ought
to do something about it. Since he does
love and respect his new wife, Greg kicks into action and looks up the license
plate and traces it to the scary house in the middle of nowhere, a house that’s
on its way to burning to the ground at the start of the ep. When we begin the ep, we get a quick review
of the last minute from our prior ep, showing Phil lighting the matches and
turning the house into the prom at the end of Carrie, all while Karen frantically looks for an exit. She winds up sliding through a hole in the
ceiling or something; to be honest, both My Beloved Grammy and myself had a
hard time figuring out how she gets out.
Where did this hole come from? Is
it a new hole? Did she create the hole
herself and I just wasn’t paying attention?
It doesn’t really matter because, suffice it to say, Karen manages to
escape from the house right before it dramatically explodes, and then it's off
to the races for a very Friday the 13th
chase through the woods.
Now, this I liked
a lot. I didn’t like it as much as I did
the first time I watched it, back in college, when I remember just clutching
myself and being in unbelievable suspense, peeing my pants a little bit. This time, I wasn’t in the same type of
suspense, but I still appreciated the way that Karen just can’t get away. Seriously, all this stuff goes on
forever. She runs through the woods, she
hides in the woods, she flags down on a car only to reveal that it’s being
driven by Phil. Oh yeah, that’s one
little arty touch that I liked in this ep.
We’ve seen that Phil has a fondness for classical music throughout the
last couple eps, and he likes to blast the classical while driving his car, so
it creates this cool effect where the music almost serves as his theme music,
like the shark from Jaws. If we hear classical music getting quieter,
we know that he’s getting further away, but if the music is getting louder, it
means he’s getting closer and closer to Karen.
I thought that was stylish and cool, and another fringe benefit of it is
that it means we don’t have to suffer through an awful episode score. Instead of listening to terrible New Wave
synth garbage spreading its filth throughout the KL aural experience, we just get silence for awhile as Karen runs
through the woods and then we get classical as Phil gets closer.* Phil’s definitely
crazy, by the way. I was kinda giving
him the benefit of the doubt the last eps, thinking he wasn’t that bad, that he
was just kinda weird and a smidge unstable, but this ep proves that he’s
coo-coo. Why? Well, cuz when he’s near
Karen and trying to figure out where she is in the dark, he keeps chatting with
her casually, trying to draw her out, busting out an apple and being like, “Hey
Karen, I got you an apple!” Apples are
great and an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that, but if someone had
just locked me in a room and then tried to burn me alive, I don’t think an
apple would get them back on my good side; it would at least have to be a
pineapple.
The chase
continues well into the next day. First,
Karen manages to fall asleep in the woods under a tree, and when she comes to,
it’s bright and sunny, but danger still looms.
Phil is still hot on her tail, and we do get a pretty nifty scene in
which Karen accidentally stumbles upon him, fast asleep on the hood of his
car. I enjoyed this very much, watching
Karen have to sneak around him and hope not to wake him up; it reminded me of a
very suspenseful scene in Scream 2. Anyway, Karen manages to find this abandoned
house that, well I dunno what the deal is with this house. Is it just abandoned? Is it on the market and not yet sold? The inside of the house is a mess and there’s
just random crap hanging around, including a big jug of, like, rubbing alcohol
or something. Karen suffers from the
same affliction that strikes many female leads in horror movies by making some
questionable decisions here. Most
obviously, she finds this house, smashes the window of the front door so that
she can unlock it, and then she goes inside and locks the door. Okay, that’s great, but I’m pretty sure Phil
would be able to stick his hand through that window you just smashed and unlock
the door from the outside. I guess it’s
unfair for me to pick on Karen too much, since I’ve never been chased all night
through the woods by a psycho hellbent on killing me; who knows how I would
behave?
Phil busts into
the house, but Karen cleverly throws that bucket of rubbing alcohol or dish
soap or whatever in his face, a nice little move that made me cheer, but then
she immediately makes a dumb move by rushing out of the house and into a, um,
barn. Ugh, stop locking yourself into buildings that you can’t escape from when
the killer is chasing after you! Things
take a real Shining turn when Phil
grabs an axe and starts trying to bust through the door, but wouldn’t you know
it, in the nick of time Greg shows up to put a stop to this, ordering Phil to
leave the state and never come back, and Phil obliges. Throughout this whole, rather large exchange
of dialogue, I guess Karen never peeks outside to see Greg and Phil talking or
she never hears their voices or anything like that, which is maybe a bit hard to
swallow, but whatever. While I’ve
enjoyed the suspense of this ep, more or less, I’m just ready for Karen to get
back home and be safe; I’ve had about enough of her kidnapped and/or being
chased around. The ep ends on a
happy/scary note, because Karen is reunited with Mack outside of the barn, and
then later with both Eric and the sexiest of the sexy, Sexy Michael, back at
the house. It’s a real touching family
reunion, but it’s marred by the camera panning out away from her house to
reveal Phil lurking in his car, listening to, you guessed it, classical music,
telling us that he’s not actually leaving town any time soon and Karen had
better watch out.
So yeah, that was Slow Burn. I think I enjoyed it, but not as much as the
last two eps we discussed, and certainly not as much as I remember enjoying it
in college. I still can’t quite put my
finger on what has changed, because I was fucking loving all of this in college, but now I’m just sorta meh. Like, it’s fine, it’s good, there’s suspense
and I like how the ep is really just 48 straight minutes of suspense and
action, yet I still felt kinda un-involved, not terribly gripped, and still
unable to fully explain why. Also, I am
aware that this is probably the shortest essay I’ve ever written about a KL ep, so allow me to provide a little
context. I am sitting in a dandy little
coffee shop, one of those real hole-in-the-wall places that are quiet, darkly
lit, and very cozy, and I’ve been sipping coffee and writing about three damn
eps in a row, which is more than I would usually do at one time. This is the last of those three, so it’s been
a marathon session of several hours of coffee and writing and I think, at this
point, I’m just tired and I wanna go home and relax. If I failed to give the proper attention to
this ep that it really deserves, well, sorry.
*I just want everyone to note that I actually like New Wave music and I like synth very much; I just hate the awful, badly done soundtrack attempting to sound like New Wave that is polluting my much cherished KL at this precise moment in time.
You're too kind. This episode was all kinds of awful.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think it was awful, but at this time point, the writers seem to be moving over to plot-driven vs. character-driven plots. And it shows.
ReplyDeleteWhat were your specific problems with it?
ReplyDeleteI may be alone here but this is a go-to episode for me when i just wanna watch one episode before going to bed, I will put this one on and have chills the whole 49 minutes
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this ep and its thriller vibe, a nice change of pace... though I'd say the drama of the escape makes the other storylines feel a out of place and dull in comparison.
ReplyDeleteA bit ridiculous that Karen is able to escape through that hole in the floor, made apparently by water disintegrating the wood in the floor??
Karen was in that and floor bedroom for awhile- and there was a lot of smoke. I don't think she would have survived that. Still, I appreciated when she tried calling home - and Michael and Paige just happened to be chatting at the exact same time. !!!!
I also liked how Cathy was mentioned again in scene where Ben answers late night phone call "wrong number" from Jean in front of Val. He says it would not be in Cathy's nature to just call and hang up.