STITCHERS Gets Spooky
S1E11 “When Darkness Falls”
The team is out to solve the suicide of a college student in the Halloween episode of Stitchers — which is definitely creepy — especially for scaredy-cats like me.
The power goes out at Kirsten’s house, and she leaves her room to investigate. A mechanical zombie crawls on the floor around the corner. To Camille’s disappointment, Kirsten is not the least bit scared. Camille, Linus, and Cameron are excited for Camille’s Halloween party.
At the lab, Camille finds out she lost the venue for her party. They have a new case to solve: the suicide of Devon Landry. He is suspected to be connected to the disappearance of Kelly Marina.
Inside the stitch, Kirsten is jumping around locations, and she sees Devon approach Kelly at night. He passes Kirsten, and looks straight at her. Kirsten bounces, thoroughly creeped out. Linus and Cameron tell her it is just a phantom memory.
The team goes to Devon’s house to investigate, and Camille wants to throw her party there. Kirsten heads upstairs, and says she feels a presence. They all decide to leave, not having found anything.
Linus and Cameron go get decorations for Camille’s party, and Kirsten heads to bed. There is a storm, and she sees Devon’s face in the window. When she goes outside she can’t see anything, so she goes to Cameron’s apartment. Cameron explains that it is just an after-effect of the stitch, but she decides to take over his bed anyway.
Kirsten has a nightmare, so she gets up to wake Cameron. She hears something in the hallway, and sees Devon through the eyehole. She wakes Cameron up, and he tries to calm her down. Kirsten asks him to stay in the bed with her.
Cameron and Kirsten meet Fisher at the cadaver lab, where Devon worked as a temp. Kirsten sees something inside the body, and pulls out Kelly’s cellphone. The background is a picture of Devon with Kelly tied up next to him.
At the lab, the team figures out that Kelly must be in the basement of the house by the picture on the phone. When they reach the house, they find her alive behind a hidden wall.
Camille decides she still wants the party at the house, so they all go. Cameron asks Kirsten to dance with him, but she has glitter in her eye so she goes upstairs to the bathroom. Kirsten finds Devon there, alive, and figures out that he actually has a twin brother. The team calls Fisher, and Kirsten is able to incapacitate Devon’s twin.
Once he is arrested, Fisher tells them that Devon’s twin is named Gavin, and is completely off the record. He killed Devon.
Fisher also threatens to charge them with trespassing if they don’t invite him to next year’s Halloween party.
The Halloween special for Stitchers was the classic evil twin story. The only thing that could have tipped me off that he was a twin was that the episode would have ended too early. Looking back, there were several clues: the “phantom memory” (which still doesn’t make sense to me, since he looked straight at her), Kirsten seeing Gavin everywhere, and the fact that Devon was so awkward towards Kelly in the stitch. He didn’t fit the extremely creepy personality that Gavin had.
Another plot point that confused me was that Devon had the memory of Gavin kidnapping Kelly. If Devon had been there, wouldn’t we have seen two people? Even if Gavin addressed Devon in the stitch? This episode left me slightly confused at the end, but mostly freaked out. I might have slept with the lights on after watching the episode.
The season finale definitely threw fans through a loop, and we still don’t know if Cameron is alive. (But, let’s be real, he definitely is going to be alive for season 2) The writers gave fans many cute moments between Cameron and Kirsten, and fortunately they were not as painfully awkward as usual. Maybe this will be a good sign for season two.
Camille and Linus are also cute together, and make a good team.
Everything seems to be business as usual with the Stitchers crew. Overall, the acting and writing were better in this episode than in the first season.
There is no news yet on when season two will premiere.
Thanks for the recap, Alley. I was confused by this episode in that I thought the season was over with episode 10 in August, and that the story did not carry on where that episode left off. Heck, they didn’t even try to fill in the gaps between August and October: Cameron and Fisher are fine, Linus has completely forgotten his whole jealousy thing, no mention of Kirsten’s ex, and the whole Maggie / Les conspiracy is out of the picture. I know that some shows like to take a break for a holiday episode, but I always prefer those that at least try to be consistent with the story arcs of the program, even if they don’t move them forward. This one felt like a one-off do-over for the characters and their story lines.
I agree that the writing is improved over the early episodes, although the hand of the writer was prevalent, what with the team all agreeing to throw a party in a recent crime scene, etc.
As to the confusion about the memories, perhaps we were seeing this from Devon’s perspective, which explains the “Don’t try to stop me” comment that Kirsten thought was meant for her. It also would mean that Devon watched and did not try to stop his brother. My beef: stitching precedent has been set in previous episodes, and the audience is conditioned to understand a 3rd person viewing experience, rather than 1st person. If this episode was meant to show Devon’s point of view, it was inconsistent with the established “rules” and, I’m sure, intentionally set to throw us off.