Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Phantom Of The Maggot Neck Is Here
By Demian | Season 8 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.29.2005
All The News That's Fit To Fuck Me. Phoebe, pensive. Vex, apologetic. Me, not caring. Basically, they break up for good. I think. Oh, come on. You know it has to happen sooner or later tonight, and I'd much rather it be sooner. Vex does, however, make an excellent point when he calls Phoebe on all of her elevator-premonition-related crap thus far this season. Unfortunately, I can't explain to you what that point is, because I keep falling asleep during this scene. BORING!
Nonexistent Attic. The Retarded Bimbo rushes in to re-recite that "Painful Memories" spell from earlier, but pulls herself up short when she finds Raige at the Book's stand, performing a little abuse of her own. The Retard lies and lies and lies until Raige has finally left the room, then hastens to the Book. Once she finishes rereading the appropriate verse -- and by the way, she's misread the second part of the spell twice in a row now by omitting the second "my," because Kaley Cuoco apparently can't remember her lines even when they're printed in two-inch-tall letters on a massive sheet of parchment one foot from her face -- she glows and is again thrown into her flashback, which is a little more detailed this time: We can now see that the black-clad figure has a little brunette in his arms. The Retard gasps and flips her hair around.
The camera cuts to a darkened bedroom, where a rather masculine-looking alarm clock reads 11:52. The shot cuts once to take in a half-empty bottle of liquor, then again to show us a cluttered desk and a crowded bookshelf, and already this scene feels like it belongs in an entirely different episode. The camera eventually shows us Seth sprawled atop his bed asleep as Raige arrives on a cloud of orbs to fuck with the poor guy's head. She glances around the room for a second, then downs a vial of some unidentified substance. Bright white rays erupt from her body, and when the screen clears, we see that she's glamoured herself into the spectral form of Seth's dead hooker. I'd wonder why the hell she needed a goddamned potion for that when glamouring is one of her base powers as a Whitelighter, but the effects in this scene are decent for the first time this season, so I'm not going to quibble about the minor details. Dead Hooker Raige eyes Seth's sleeping form for a moment before spinning around and screaming, "Windows!" Her orbing telekinesis sends said windows crashing shut in their sashes. Seth snaps awake at the sudden noise and flips around to gape at Dead Hooker Raige in abject terror. As she rises into the air, Seth starts to bellow for help, but Dead Hooker Raige orbs a wadded-up sock into the guy's mouth. She next telekinetically orbs a couple of belts from the dresser to the bed, lashing the now-mute Seth to his headboard. Dead Hooker Raige then launches herself into a screamy, echoing tirade against Seth and his complete lack of journalistic ethics, and I've got to hand it to Laura Milby, because she's clearly having a hell of a time playing up the campy, B-movie horror aspect of this haunting scene. Dead Hooker Raige finishes up her rant with the following warning: "If you ever hurt anybody again, I'll be back for yoooooou!" On that last word, the spectrally rotting Mafia prostitute flies headlong into the camera. At the last instant, her features distort horribly, with her eyes darkening black and bulging to expand across the top half of her face while her mouth turns into a gaping, fanged maw. It really is very well done. Pity we had to sit through all of that useless garbage with Phoebe, Vex, and The Retarded Bimbo to get to it, and pity that it's pretty much the highlight of the entire evening. Yep, it's all downhill from here, gang.