Stop me if you’ve heard this before: This week’s episode of Scream, entitled “Wanna Play a Game?”, opens with the death of a character no one in the audience cares about. But wait! There’s more! This time Scream actually shakes up the formula a bit, and the deaths are a flashback to the first two people Brandon James killed back in 1994.
We immediately cut to Noah telling podcasting Piper this fact and giving his opinions on the matter. He tells her that no one puts on a mask to murder someone and just stops, so the question is who’s next?
Maggie is still working on the autopsy of Rachel, while Emma lurks outside and overhears a lot. Not only does she find out that Rachel was murdered, she also discovers that her mom was sent a heart in a box. Sheriff Hudson decides not to tell Rachel’s family her cause of death until after the wake. (I’m not a law enforcement officer, but that seems like a screwy decision to me. Her house is officially a crime scene now and the sheriff is just going to let everyone run all over it. Smart.)
Brooke is in a hotel room, having a sexy Skype call with Mr. B. Apparently, her mother has a standing reservation at this hotel for spa weekends, or something like that. She tells Mr. B. that there is a naughty photo of her hidden somewhere in his classroom and he better find it before someone else does, which leads to a scene later where he’s attempting to “teach” while also looking for this picture. It’s incredibly awkward to watch, as if he thinks no one will notice he’s being a total weirdo, but he does eventually find it. (Honestly, I’m finding this storyline more disgusting than anything to do with slashed throats, tree branches to the eye or decapitated teenagers.)
The saga of Jake and Will continues this week and it’s becoming increasingly convoluted. Jake goes to the woods and digs up a box that is now empty, because Will has taken the money that was in it. It seems they had some sort of teen stalker porn empire that Tyler was also involved in. And now neither one of them trusts each other. Will continues to whine about keeping his scholarship, and Emma, and how he’s just a poor farm boy and not a rich kid like Jake. (If any of this was played for laughs, it would be a parody of a stock teen character from a thousand movies and TV shows, but it’s played completely serious.)
Emma shows up at Rachel’s wake and finds Audrey upstairs looking as if she’s about to hang herself from the ceiling fan, but what she’s really doing is testing to see if Rachel’s death was even possible. Emma informs her that it was murder and later at the coffeehouse, she confesses that she has a stalker who may have been the one to murder Rachel. Audrey convinces Emma to reply to the direct message she received earlier from @brandonjames_94. Yes, a DM, on Chirpster. You guys know Chirpster, that social media sensation that all the youths are on. Audrey says she wants to know why he killed Rachel, so Emma asks. (We all want to know that, Audrey. Rachel was a complete innocent in all this, the victim of bullying and not the perpetrator, and her death was completely arbitrary.)
Mr. B. puts everyone into pairings and asks them to perform a scene in class. Emma and Kieran are paired off, and while trying to pick a scene, Kieran mentions that his dad has the Brandon James files at his house. When this piques Emma’s curiosity, he offers to bring them to her house to look over.
Noah and Riley are scene partners, and she’s miffed because he ran off in the middle of their make-out session last week, and he gives a pseudo-apology and promises their next hangout will be better.
Brooke and Jake are another assigned pair and while she teases him about his falling out with Will, he teases back about her “college” boyfriend. He mentions a story about a bobcat attacking a shark (yes, it’s real), and how the shark thinks it’s the apex predator until the bobcat comes along, leaving her to ponder whether she’s the bobcat or the shark in her relationship. (I am a noted lover of all things shark related, so I perked up here and now I’m going to need shark references in every episode to make watching this worthwhile.)
Over at Emma’s house, she’s going over the files with Kieran and finds a picture of Brandon James before the surgeries. If that’s supposed to be the same as the Ghostface mask, well, I’m not totally buying it. She also finds out that the reason her father was attacked by Brandon is because of her mother, thus she connects the dots that Maggie is Daisy. When Maggie gets home, Emma confronts her with the truth and asks why the police want to talk to her dad, but Maggie doesn’t give her any real answers. The next morning, she’s Chirpstering with her new pal @brandonjames_94 who tells her he’s the only one telling her the truth, but if she doesn’t want to play, he’ll find someone new to play with.
Noah takes Riley to his workplace after hours for their date and it’s a weird hybrid of video game store, comic book store and record store (that looks like a set built in someone’s garage). His plan is to woo her with video games and it works, because Riley is just as big of a nerd as he is. They move their nerd love to the couch and get very horizontal, but are interrupted by a text from Tyler asking for help.
Riley gathers Emma, Will, Jake and Brooke at the coffee house and while Riley is fully on Team Tyler, Brooke, who also received messages from Tyler, is on Team Call the Cops. (For once, I’m on Team Brooke.) Emma explains that she has a stalker and that’s who is probably behind this, so the rest of the group outvote Riley and agree to go to the police.
The police set up a ruse to draw Tyler out with a fake Riley as bait, but instead they get a guy who was paid two hundred bucks by a stranger on the internet to show up at the park. (Oh, people on the internet, when will you ever learn?) While this is happening, the girls are at the station, until Brooke bails after texts from an “unknown number” that she presumes is Mr. B. wanting to meet her at the hotel.
When they discover Brooke is missing, Emma and Maggie leave to go search for her, and Emma starts getting more chirps from the killer, asking her to choose between the bad girl (Brooke) and the good girl (Riley) and if she refuses, he’ll choose for her. When she finds out that Riley is safe at the police station, she chirps back asking him not to hurt Brooke. Brooke, meanwhile, is at her hotel, handcuffed to a bed, wearing a mask and lingerie because, sure, that seems like a good idea. Even if you think you’re waiting for your boyfriend and not a serial killer, it’s still a bad idea.
Ghostface James isn’t going to hurt Brooke though, because he’s behind the police station texting Riley as Tyler, and luring her out there alone. Poor trusting Riley heads outside, sees Tyler’s car, but no Tyler. She’s chased by Ghostface James and stabbed in the back and the leg as she tries to climb a ladder to the roof. Once up there, she gets a really awkwardly timed Facetime call from Noah who she begs to call 911 because she’s been stabbed and as he freaks out and does not call 911, she dies while looking at the stars, as they did on their first date.
Emma arrives back at the station and sees Riley’s body lying on the skylight window above. She runs to the roof, and when she sees Riley’s dead body, she says that she didn’t mean to choose. Try telling that to Riley … oops.
- This was an improvement on the first two episodes, somewhat, partly because they strayed from the formula they set up in the first two and finally killed off a character that we know. As soon as I realized they were actually going to kill off a core character, I knew Riley didn’t stand a chance. So while it was a better episode than the two previous ones, it was still extremely predictable. I’m still waiting to be surprised, Scream.
- I’m not going to rant on the fact that the first (sort of) major character killed off is also the only non-white character on the show. I’m not at all surprised though.
- There’s some pretty weak CGI on the girl with the slashed throat in the opening scene. Not sure at all why that couldn’t have been a practical effect.
- Apparently, Emma has had about 58 iPods since whenever it was she had that one Will had been holding on to. God, you guys, she hasn’t even said the word iPod in six months, ugh, really. I guess this show wants us to care about these two and their romance, but I started thinking about cereal during this scene instead. Cereal is really important to me, these two aren’t.
- Kieran drops some info about how he’s been arrested before, and, while Will is the walking, talking, poor kid cliché, Kieran is the broody, mysterious, troublemaker who probably has a heart of gold cliché. Yawn.
- The kids in this town are really terrible at calling 911. First, Nina’s phone calls Pottery Barn, and now, instead of hanging up the phone and doing it herself, Riley asks Noah to do it for her? Get it together, kids, lives are on the line here.
- The police chase Tyler’s car, but it ends up driven off a bridge and exploding just as they get there. Between that and the preview for next week, it looks like the characters are finally going to realize Tyler is definitely not the killer.
- That picture of the bobcat with the shark? It’s from April of this year, and this show seems to be taking place in 2014, so I’m going to say right now that Jake is the killer because he’s a psychic or a time traveler.
Photo Courtesy of MTV
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