Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT "Shiver Me Bitches!"
By Demian | Season 7 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.02.2004
...a shot of one of the city's many hills, with the Bay Bridge looming far in the background. Actually, they've used this establishing shot over and over and over again, and if someone would be kind enough to provide me with the name of the street, I'd be eternally grateful. Anyway, once we've established that we are indeed still in San Francisco, the camera cuts to an overhead of a slim brunette exiting what I'm guessing is her little storefront and locking the door behind her. Of course, Slim's not exiting onto the brightly lit and well populated sidewalk, but rather into the dank, forbidding alleyway at the back of the shop, because stupidity is endemic on this program. Slim pockets her keys and begins the trek to, um, her razor scooter, or something, when she suddenly hears a disembodied someone whistling a vaguely familiar and jaunty tune. Well, it would be jaunty were we not echoing through a dank, forbidding alleyway, which almost always has the effect of making any whistled snatch of music sound psychotic and stalkerish. Slim freezes and warily pivots to scan the alleyway behind her. A gust of dry-ice "fog" billows around the far corner and rolls towards her as the disembodied whistling continues. The shot cuts to reveal a matching wave of dry-ice "fog" advancing upon Slim from the opposite direction. Slim tightens her ankle-length knit wrap around her body and makes to push herself out of the frame, but freezes again when the whistling is replaced by the sound of someone taking deliberate, heavy steps through the mist. "Hello?" she asks, for it is incumbent upon every damsel in distress to greet her murderer politely before the screaming begins. Seriously, couldn't they every once in a while bellow, "WHO THE FUCK IS FOLLOWING ME? You wanna piece of this, huh? HUH?! Well, come and TRY to fucking get it, FUCKKNOB. 'Cause I will GUT YOU like a FISH!" It does seem a little more appropriate to the situation, don't you think? No matter. The whistling kicks back in by way of response, so Slim quickens her pace to flee. The fog, which had been swirling about at knee level, rears up to fill the alleyway. The sound of shattering glass tinkles in the near distance. Slim gasps a bit and darts through encroaching mist to vanish as her tuneful, as-yet-unseen, broken-bottle-wielding murderer paces slowly behind her.
Somewhere else, but presumably somewhere nearby, Slim slams into a tiny little apartment and locks the door behind her. She deserves to die for that hideous blouse alone. Seriously. It looks like someone (Eilish) scarfed down a rack of vintage Pucci and vomited the resulting mess all over Slim's torso. Slim heaves a sigh of relief now that she's safe, but ooops! She'd left the window open. Dang! Don't you hate when that happens? You're Jamie Lee Curtis, and you're running from something in the fog, and you run and you run and you finally get to your house and safety and slam and lock the door behind you, only to realize you've stupidly left every fricking window in the house open, so the fog creeps in anyway and DEATH! Speaking of death, sorry about your mother's, Lady Haden-Guest. No, seriously. I loved her in The Manchurian Candidate. Anyway, Slim scurries over to shut the window, and yes, the mysterious whistler pops into the frame at that very moment to grab her arm and spin her around into a chokehold. Only he comes at her from behind instead of leaping in through the window along with the mist, because this show is ass, and I want to die. "Anyone tell you not to walk alone at night, witch?" he hisses into her ear, and he's a pirate. No, really. He's got the do-rag and the earrings and the scurvy-ridden teeth and everything. Arrr! He also recently appeared as Richard Dawson in the critically acclaimed Auto Focus, so it's nice to know his career's been going so well lately. The pirate slings Slim over his shoulder in a fireman's carry as Slim cries for the help that of course will never arrive. The scurvy cur then leaps onto the windowsill and vaporizes into the fog as Slim's screams echo into the night. Because Raige will soon require a clue -- and by that I mean an actual, physical clue and not, you know, the brain she's been missing for a good two years, though she's sorely in need of that later on as well -- the pirate manages to drop a skull-emblazoned doubloon as he goes. The coin spins madly on the hardwood floor for a bit before settling into the opening credits.