666 Park Avenue
Episode 9: Hypnos
By: Carlos Uribe
666
Park Avenue is about the resident managers of a supernatural
apartment.
Spoilers
Ahoy!
Hypnos
is acting as the winter finale before this series comes back in the
new year with it's last batch of episodes. After watching it, I'm not
entirely convinced that it was supposed to be a finale. It had a
pretty good cliff-hanger but it felt more like the build-up to a
finale. Take the Jane story. The series utilizes Whoopi Goldberg to
uncover Jane's memories from when she went down the spiral staircase.
She reveals that Jane didn't travel to a location but rather to the
past. This is actually all a neat way for the series to do what is
pretty close to a flashback episode. It's executed nicely from the
moment that Jane gets hyponotized by Goldberg's character. Jane goes
all the way back to the nineties. It's October and she's following
the last moments of the person named Libby. Libby is a character who
had created a strong bond with Jane's grandmother when she had saved
her from being a blood sacrifice to a ritual that her
great-grandfather was a part of. This plot is being executed well
even if it only adds bits to the little that we already know. We knew
that Jane's great-grandfather had been involved in some kind of
ritual that gave him and his friends some kind of power. All this
episode does is reveal the cost of that power and the ritual itself.
The power that they got or why they are peforming the ritual remains
a mystery. For the most part, we really haven't learned that much
about the past nor on why we should care. It's true that I'm
predicting that Gavin is a part of that group and that might explain
the source of his power but the series has yet to establish that. Now
that Jane knows what happened to her when she went down the spiral
staircase, she has to figure out what to do next. Her clue? The Libby
character is haunting her through mirrors.
Whoopi
Goldberg does a fine job in the episode but that's to be expected.
She is after all an Academy Award nominee. She plays a character who
got her phD as a therapist but that's not why she can help Jane. She
happens to have some connection to the supernatural. She's able to
not only hypnotize Jane, with the help of tea, but the signal at her
door keeps Gavin from entering her apartment. This is an action
that's supposed to signify that her symbols are actually good and
that her character is therefore on the side of good. This doesn't
stop her from making a deal with him. She'll tell him when Jane went
after going down the stairs in return for being able to safely leave
the Drake. She's tired of being cooped up in her apartment for the
last twenty-seven years. She honors the deal and she's allowed to
step out of the building. She looks up at the sky and promptly turns
into a whole bunch of doves. This is supposed to symbolize that she's
good but this does bring up a couple of problems. For one thing, she
did sell out her patient. For another thing, it also calls into
question exactly what she is. Everything before then had pointed to a
psychic but now I'm thinking witch. Of course, it would be nice if we
knew what kind of magic was at play here. Whatever the case, it does
lead to my summary of the episode: a whole bunch of white birds come
together to make Whoopi Goldberg so that she can hypnotize Jane into
finding out that she had time-traveled. That's ridiculous and awesome
at the same time.
While
this is all going on, we also get to deal with Olivia's search for
her daughter, Sasha. This largely involves her taking Shaw to a
construction project with the help of her doorman. I kind of forgot
that Tony existed until this episode. Anyways, most of the episode is
largely an effort to stall until the very end. There is literally a
scene where Olivia completely forgets everything that Shaw told her
and he's forced to go through the entire reason he's there with her.
That scene literally confused the heck out of me. Not only did it
happen half-way through the episode after we've seen him call Sasha
but the emotional beat that Olivia took (from reserved to acting like
this is the first time she's heard her daughter is alive) was sudden
and abrut. I understand Shaw having to prove that he had called Sasha
or wasn't lying but that doesn't mean that the episode has to cover
the exact points he's already made. Olivia does find Sasha's
apartment only to find it abandoned and Shaw is quickly killed by the
mobster. We do find out who Sasha is.
This
is done through Henry's plot. He wants to run for city council and he
sets up a meeting with a political consultant. He's shocked the
discover that his wife's recent visit to the psych ward can be used
against him but he decides to resort to blackmail to get the
consultant on his side. This is really all a huge move by the writers
to have Gavin realize that Henry's public relations manager is the
one who had told the consultant about Jane's mental stability. At
first I thought that she just wanted Henry all to herself but she
might have been trying to undermine Gavin. Why? This is because the
public relations manager isn't named Laurel but Sasha. This was a
legitimate twist that I didn't see coming and it helped to provide
the episode with a good cliff-hanger. It was also a clever way to use
Henry's plot to advance the Sasha plot.
Hypnos
is acting as the mid-season finale but let's think about what we
learned: Laurel is Sasha and Jane is now being haunted by Libby. The
first is a major move but the second is standard development. When I
think of a fall finale, I think of an episode that threatens to at
least change the status quo. A good example is the Grimm show: it's
fall finale really shook things up. Hypnos felt like an ordinary
episode of 666 Park Avenue. This is fine and all and the cliff-hanger
carries some narrative momentum, but I'm not exactly dying to see the
show come back in January.
Hi There:
ReplyDeleteThank you for your review. None of my friends watch this show, so I always have to go online for some commentary about it. Your review connected a couple of dots for me. Thanks so much! Also, you are the only reason to give a good explanation for the Whoopi Goldberg white bird thing. I was so confused!
And I found a typo . . . "person" not "reason".
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