666 Park Avenue

666 Park Avenue

Episode 2: Murmurations

By: Carlos Uribe

666 Park Avenue is about the resident managers of a supernatural apartment.

Spoilers Ahoy!

There is a particular scene in this episode where Jane enters the apartment of the guy who was sucked into the wall in the pilot. She goes into the bedroom and she starts to hear some noises coming from the wall. What made the scene of the guy going into the wall memorable wasn't the action but the hands that were trying to escape the wall. It's as if the building has sucked a whole bunch of souls inside and they were trying to get out. She goes over to the wall and she tries to figure out what she's hearing. She notices that there's a hole in the wall and she manages to make it bigger. All of a sudden a whole bunch of birds come out and start to fly around the room before breaking a window and escaping. Jane is clearly overwhelmed by this and it's a very effective scene in this episode. It's the scene with the highest amount of tension partly because of the pilot's wall-sucking scene. I'm not talking about dramatic tension but more horror tension. It's a horror sequence that works and it's the only one that the episode doesn't screw up. Compare this to a later scene where we see the exterminator hired to get rid of the birds is attacked and killed by the birds. It's supposed to be a scary scene but the show had telegraphed his death by having Nona reveal it a few scenes before. This made the scene lack the sort of terror that the show was going for. To make matters worse, the bird storyline didn't really go anywhere. Jane finds birds in the building, she hires an exterminator, he dies, and then she's told not to replace him by Gavin. There's no real point to it all and it might be important later on but right now it feels like a giant waste of time.

Jane doesn't just deal with birds in this episode but she also keeps having nightmares. She dreams that she goes down to the basement and there's a door. This door leads into a room where she finds a murdered resident. The scene has some fifties music and there's a sense this murder happened in the past. She wakes up when the dead body awakens. She has a similar scene later in the episode but this time what awakens her is the dead body's killer proclaiming her love of her victim. These dreams are important to the plot. She discovers the murder actually happened after the first dream and this is tied into the episode's plot. The dreams are also used to build up to her finally gaining access to the walled up door the basement. What's inside? We don't know, as the episode ends with her opening it and going inside a dark room. As a rule, dream sequences are a cheap way to develop the plot since it can involve doing crazy stuff without it actually affecting the characters. Having essentially the same dream twice is also a waste of time. There really was absolutely no need for the second dream, because the episodic plot would have fit in otherwise.

What was the weekly plot? It involved a resident named Danielle. She's a hot girl who apparently never goes on dates. That's at least how it appears on the surface. In reality, she has a tendency to kill all of her dates when they somehow betray her trust. She's been doing this since the fifties and hasn't aged a bit. It's referenced that the reason she appears so young is because Danielle's deaths have been giving her youth and life. There's a scene where she looks at herself and she looks old. This scene would have worked better if the show didn't have some really silly slow-motion scenes of her killing all her ex-lovers. It really wasn't necessary and the visuals didn't fit in with the rest of the show. Danielle ends the episode with her leaving the apartment building as if nothing ever happened. This is because she has a tendency to block out all of her dates. Considering that they generally end with her killing them, it's understandable that her mind pretends that they merely stood her up and that nothing had actually happened.

The worst part of the episode is the love triangle. It's simply so dull compared to everything else going on. When you have Gavin tempting Henry to see if he's virtuous, Danielle being stuck in a never-ending cycle of violence, and Jane's supernatural plots one has to wonder what this plot has to offer. So far it's a predictable love triangle. There's the married guy with the slightly overbearing wife being tempted by a blond seductress. When Louis is the most likeable character in this plot then you know the love triangle really isn't working well. There's a hint that Alexis is getting supernatural aid in her attempt to seduce Brian but it so far is a dull plot that is dragging down the rest of the episode. The series is going to need to find a way to make this interesting before it truly becomes a showkiller. It's already getting dangerously close.

Right now I like 666 Park Avenue. It doesn't have the best ratings in the world so it's not going to last, but this isn't a bad show. It just needs to find a way to ensure that everything is truly necessary and to focus on what's important. There's no need to have two nearly identical dream sequences and the birds plot practically added nothing to the table. The Danielle sub-plot was interesting but they messed up the climax by going with a completely different aesthetic to convey her murders. The only part of 666 Park Avenue I don't like at the moment is the love triangle. When you have something so predictable and boring mixed in with other actually interesting plots, then it makes you wonder why it's even in the show in the first place.