Episode Report Card Wing Chun: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT "My Husband's Back And He Phases Through Solid Matter"
By Wing Chun | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.29.2006
After the break, Niki and D.L. are back home. D.L.'s fortifying himself with a little Dutch courage as he paces, asking Niki if she's "ever seen anything like that before." What he probably didn't expect was for her to reply that she has: "In the garage." She exposits the incident with Linderman's men, from the pilot, concluding, "I have gone over it a thousand times in my head. I didn't see anything. Anyone. I was the only person there. It was me!" D.L. tries to calm her down, taking her face in his hands and assuring her that she couldn't have done it. "What if I did?!" she squeaks. "What if I got up in the middle of the night and I went --" "Baby, you are being played!" D.L. insists, saying that whoever set him up is now doing the same to Niki. She looks desperate to believe that D.L. could be right, but they are interrupted by Micah, calling off-screen for his backpack. Niki tells him she'll help him in a second, and when he's wandered off, she tells D.L. that they have to go to the police. "They'll never believe us," he replies. "The only way I can clear my name is to find the person who did this myself."
Niki takes a minute to put on a happy face for Micah, and awkwardly stomps into the living room (girl, either learn to walk in heels, or ask Wardrobe for some Chuck Taylors, damn), where she quickly locates Micah's backpack. Taking it to him, she gets a big fat look at ikiN, smirking from a decorative mirror. This seems to pull Niki up short...
...but when we cut back to Niki, she's no longer standing at the mirror; she's sitting on the couch, having taken off the long-sleeved hooded henley she was wearing before, and looking confused. She gets up and goes to Micah's room; he's stuffing things into the backpack she just had in her hand. Niki somewhat scarily demands to know where he got it, and he's like, "You just walked in here and gave it to me, Frances Farmer." Niki's like, "Huh?" Micah tells her that she was just in there, telling him to pack some clothes, because they were going to "Grandma's." Niki stares. Micah asks if she's okay, and she says she's not feeling well and needs to lie down. Under a blanket made of thorazine. And some lithium sheets.
Niki staggers into the bedroom, closing the door and leaning against it for a moment before stalking to the mirrored closet door and glaring into it, tearfully demanding to know what's wrong with her. Niki turns and does the classic slide-down-the-wall move, favourite of messed-up chicks for years now, and as she's staring at the bed, ikiN calmly tells Niki to pull herself together. Niki turns, terrified, and sees ikiN sitting next to her, cool as the other side of the pillow. Now, here is where the problem with this character really becomes clear: it's not that Ali Larter is a bad actress; it's that she is much better at playing someone who's bad but confident than she is someone freaked-out and fragile. Anyway, Niki tells ikiN she's not real; ikiN counters, "Oh, I am as real as you are." Niki, not looking at ikiN, tries telling herself that she just has a brain tumour: "This is --" "Poor little crazy girl," ikiN teases fondly. God, she even has prettier hair than Niki; choosing expedient solutions in a moral vacuum is like the best blow-out ever. "A hallucination," Niki concludes. "We're a lot of things, Niki," says ikiN, "but we're not crazy."