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Terry O'Quinn and Vanessa Williams own a super fancy Manhattan apartment building, the Drake, and they need a new resident manager to change the light bulbs and fixing the leaking washing machines and also be the pretty, gullible newcomer whom they will lure into their demonic, evil web by dangling prime real estate and expensive clothes in front of them.
Their marks: Jane and Henry, an unemployed architecture aficionado and her boyfriend, who works in the mayor's office of city planning. They take the job and Jane starts exploring the ninety-year-old building. She learns that a bunch of creepy Skull-and-Bones types used to meet in the laundry room (because it's a real bitch trying to get goat blood out of your cowl), and also maybe Gavin wants to bite her neck or make an evening cape out of her skin.
Other residents include the surly doorman, Tony; light-fingered urchin Nona and her as-yet unseen grandmother; the bickering sixth-floor couple, playwright Brian and photographer Louise; provocative yoga-doer Alexis, who likes to get undressed in front of her uncurtained windows, where Brian can see her; and the doomed Barlows of the eighth floor: Mary, who is already dead, and her husband, John, who has sold his soul to Gavin in exchange for revivifying Mary.
So, yes. Gavin seems to be the devil. The Drake is spectacular and has hardwood floors and twelve-foot ceilings and gorgeous fireplaces, but it's also haunted and no one will make it out alive. But Jane and Henry are living on Park Avenue rent-free, so basically they're breaking even, right?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Ah, the symphony. Hellmouth of sleepiness. Terry O'Quinn and Vanessa Williams look bored as shit. The first-chair violinist has a cut on his finger and he is spraying blood all over his music and shoes. Yikes. I can hardly type when I have a paper cut. Now all of his fingers are bleeding. Groooooss. Terry O'Quinn watches, malevolently. (To be fair, it's nearly impossible for him to look otherwise.)
The violinist runs through the storm into his fancy apartment building and into the elevator. In his apartment, he throws things frantically into a suitcase. He smashes his violin and runs out of the apartment. But as soon as he gets downstairs, all the doors slam shut. A phone rings. Like, one that's attached to the wall. It's even a rotary. Children, that's what the phones at my grandma's house looked like. The violinist answers and Terry O'Quinn remarks, "Hard to believe it's been ten years, Mr. Hartwell." The violinist begs for more time. Terry says nope, sorry sucka. He tells a story about a violinist who wasn't quite talented enough but who would've given anything to be the best, and says he, Mr. Hartwell, signed a binding contract that has now run out. He hangs up. Hartwell breaks through the front doors and out into the storm. The doors slam behind him and then a peephole opens and he's suddenly sucked back inside. The camera pans over to the address, 999 Park Avenue, but when the shadows reflect up, it's 666 Park Avenue. Well, no it's not, because "Park Avenue" would also be upside down and... you know what, it's too early for this shit. So "666" it is.
Sweeping panoramic views of Manhattan! So pretty! So expensive! A lovely young couple played by Dave Annable from Brothers & Sisters -- and the hilarious one-season Fox melodrama Reunion -- and Rachael Taylor the Failed Charlie's Angel pull up in front of 999 in a beat-up yellow Volvo. Dave remarks that they can't afford to rent a closet in this building. Eh, I slept in a closet for five years. It wasn't too bad. At least it was dark. Maybe it was more like a pantry.
Inside, Rachael remarks that she recognizes the building from Architectural Digest. They find the bellman (who is Dr. Dave from ER!) and ask for Mr. Doran. Dave asks them to sign in and they introduce themselves as not-married Jane and Henry. A teenage girl in a knit cap asks if her grandmother's package has arrived, and Dave brushes her off, pretty rudely, actually. Dude. Be nice to the tenants. Anyway, Jane and Henry are there to interview to be the building managers. Dave sends them up to see Mrs. Doran in the penthouse.
In the penthouse, Vanessa introduces herself as Olivia Doran, and goes to get her husband, Gavin. He tells them the resident manager is responsible for basic upkeep, maintenance, and collecting the rent at the Drake. He asks where they're living now, and Henry says "Queens." They're subletting a one-bedroom. Gavin barely stops himself from vomiting delicately all over the desk. Jane babbles that they were looking for apartments on Craigslist and saw the ad (which I kind of doubt was on Craigslist? Gavin still looks like he's going to hurl just from hearing the word) and figured they could handle it. Henry works for the mayor and Jane doesn't have a job -- her job at an architectural firm fell through. "This is New York -- not everybody gets to make it," Gavin says blithely. He tells Henry and Jane they don't look like they know what they're doing and thanks them for coming.
As they turn to go, Jane asks Gavin when he had the building's foundation retrofitted. He asks why he'd do that. She explains that the mob-controlled concrete suppliers back in the 1920s, when the building was erected, cut corners and so it's a good idea to reinforce the foundations of buildings that old, just in case New York gets hit by an earthquake or a hurricane or "some other nasty act of God." Gavin is impressed by Jane's knowledge and reconsiders them.
Dave gives Jane and Henry the tour. The building is twelve floors plus the Dorans' penthouse on the thirteenth. Ooh. Spooky. He says there are 388 residents total, and the building is all rental, the last one in the neighborhood, and Gavin likes to approve all the residents. That sounds kind of horrible. Dave confesses that he wanted the resident manager job, and when Jane apologizes, he gets all spiky and says it wasn't her decision, it's not like they took the job from him. In the hall they run into Brian Leonard, who greets Dave as "Tony" and tells him the trash chute is blocked and whines about having to walk down three flights of stairs. Poor lamb. Brian is a playwright, and he and his wife live on the sixth floor.
Tony unlocks 3B and shows Jane and Henry into today's selection of hardcore apartment porn: two bedrooms, two full baths, gas fireplaces in the master bedroom and living room. Henry asks what happened to the manager. Mr. Hartwell (dun dun DUN!) moved "someplace warmer," Tony says. "Arizona, I think." I've often considered Arizona pretty hellish myself. Tony hands over the keys and Jane and Henry make out because oh my God LOOK at the FLOORS.
Up in the penthouse, Olivia purrs that Jane seems nice, and she's beautiful. "I like her spirit," she tells Gavin. "She's how we get Henry," he says. They're about a millimeter away from verging over from sinister into hilariously campy.
Brian walks back into the Leonards' apartment. His wife is on the phone. She seems to be a photographer or something. She asks Brian if he'll go out and get the things on her list, and he says he wasn't planning on going out. She's all, do my bidding, minion. That looks like a health marriage. He tells her he met the new managers, and then sits down to work on his play on his laptop -- all he's written is the title, his name, and "Act One." From the window at his desk, he can see into some lady's apartment across the street, and now he's watching that lady undress after yoga. Those chunky-knit shawl collars always disguise the pervs.
Down in the parking garage, Jane and Henry unload the last stuff from their Volvo. She goes over to their storage locker and when she slams the door there's a creepy man standing behind it. He says he didn't mean to scare her and starts shambling off like an extra from the "Thriller" video, but Jane insists on introducing herself and holds her hand out to shake. "John Barlow," he says, showing his hand, which is covered in blood. (He also looks like a cheap Xerox of Matthew Modine.) "Excuse me, I cut my hand," he says, and runs off.
Jane and Henry discuss John's bloody hand while they make the bed. Then they forget all about him and start making out. Meanwhile, John Barlow is out-out-damn-spotting his hand, which won't stop bleeding. "Please forgive me!" he says.
Gavin tells Jane his lawyer is drawing up their contracts. He says there are some ongoing building-maintenance issues he wants to discuss with her, like the "temperamental" elevators, sixty-year-old gas boiler, and a couple of floors that need renovations. Jane offers her help. Mrs. Leonard gets off the elevator and introduces herself to Jane as Louise, then invites her and Henry over for drinks. In the elevator, Gavin says, "It's a friendly building." She mentions John Barlow. "Eight-B," Gavin says. He's an accountant and his wife, Mary, died recently. I'm sure that's not suspicious.
In the penthouse, Olivia compliments Jane's necklace and says the Crawfords canceled on her and Gavin, so she invites Jane and Henry to join them Saturday night at a cocktail party and performance for patrons of the symphony. Jane accepts, even though, as she tells Henry on the phone later, she has $11 in her checking account and nothing to wear to a black-tie event. That is what calling your friends is for, lady.
Elevator to the basement. Jane meets teenage Nona, the girl in the knit cap from earlier, who's doing her laundry and tells her a washer is leaking and there's a thief in the building. In the poorly lit and echoey laundry room (but hell, the laundry in her building, so I'd probably do my wash there even if the walls ran with blood rather than lug my stuff three blocks up and down the hill), Jane sees a bunch of notices of missing property with rewards offered. A light is flickering, so she grabs a ladder to fix the bulb. She doesn't turn it off at the switch first, of course, and burns her hand. As the light flashes on and off there's a skeletal, spectral form behind Jane, slowly getting closer to her so it can eat her hair... and then once she fixes the light, it's gone. Ick.
As she's climbing down off the ladder, Jane notices a pattern in the tiling on the floor (at least I think that's what she notices). She moves some boxes to see it better and it looks like a dragon or a demon or something.
Henry gets home to find Jane in the bathtub by candlelight. He starts unbuttoning his shirt to get in the tub with her and says Gavin invited him to hit golf balls tomorrow. She tells him about the mosaic on the basement floor and gets all architecture-nerdy, saying she's going to do research and wants to prove to Gavin that she can be helpful, even though he turned down her help with the renovations earlier. They have tub sex.
Barlow is looking at a newspaper headline that says a judge has been murdered and the killer is at large. His phone rings and it's Gavin, asking how he's doing. Barlow is nervous, and says, "They're looking for me. I did what you told me to do, and you said you'd bring my wife back." Gavin says he kept his end of the deal and tells Barlow to check the bedroom. There's a woman sitting on the bed, and John says, "Mary?" He embraces her, and she doesn't look particularly delighted at being reanimated. Maybe she'll eat Barlow's face.
Louise's phone rings on the bedside table, interrupting the lousy sex she and Brian are having. He tells her she needs a twelve-step program for her phone. Louise starts freaking out because her assistant quit in an e-mail and she has her first cover shoot for Vogue on Monday. He follows her into the kitchen while she flips out. He really is very cute. He talks her down, then goes back to his screenplay, which is going nowhere. Instead he spies on the blonde yoga lady, who is just waking up. Oh god. For a second I thought the blonde yoga lady was that awful Melissa George who ruined eeeeeeeeverything on Alias (SEASON THREE I SHAKE MY FIST AT YOU) but thank the TV gods, it is not her. IMDb tells me it's some nice Swedish lady who presumably hasn't forcibly hurled any beloved TV series over the shark so I don't have to go put on my pink wig and STAB MYSELF.
Chelsea Piers. Gavin and Henry are driving golf balls as Gavin says he bought the Drake in '86 and it's doubled in value a dozen times. Jeezy creezy. Gavin compliments Henry's swing and asks if he ever plays for money. Henry says he's not a gambler, but Gavin says moving to New York shows ambition, and with ambition there's risk. "So I'm gambling with my life?" Henry asks. "Always," Gavin says. Um, sure, dude.
Jane comes back to her place to find Olivia posing in the dining room. Egad. She says the door was open and she's here to take Jane dress shopping. Jane protests that she was going to the library, but Olivia steamrolls over her and orders her to try and transform herself into something less resembling a grubby ragamuffin, and quick.
Gavin introduces Henry to Daniel Stone, who gripes at him for offering a short sale on one of his properties. Or something. People talk real estate and leverage and giant sums of money and to me it just sounds like the teacher in Charlie Brown. Gavin exposits that Daniel is having some financial trouble and he can help, but Daniel says he'd rather go bankrupt than sell to Gavin. Gavin's like, be my guest. Daniel tells Henry he seems nice, and should keep better company. Henry asks if Daniel was talking about the "Greenpoint Towers complex." Gavin confirms, and Henry reminds him that he works in city planning, and that they're in a legal dispute with that building, and therefore it's borderline illegal for Henry to have contact with Daniel. Gavin apologizes, and Henry brushes it off and says, "You didn't know." He turns back to his ball and Gavin smiles, because of course he knew.
Dress shop. Jane has been eyeing a dramatic red McQueen. Olivia remarks that red was her daughter Sasha's favorite color. She died in a car accident a long time ago, Olivia says. Jane gets a case of the awkwards, but then Olivia insists she try the red dress on. In the dressing room, she looks at the price tag and has a small aneurysm because it costs more than my first car. She comes out of the dressing room and tells Olivia this place is just too rich for her blood, and Olivia brushes her off, insisting on paying. Jane says she just can't, and Olivia gets snippy and offended and rushes off to another appointment.
The Leonards'. Louise calls Brian in to meet her new assistant, who is the blonde yoga lady, Alexis. Oh, I'm sure that will end well.
Jane goes to the library and looks up the dragon mosaic on the laundry-room floor. It seems to be connected to a fire during the building's gala opening in 1923, and also the suicide of a Mary Barlow, who jumped seventeen stories from a psych-ward window.
Meanwhile, in what looks like Soho, John is walking Mary past the café where they had their second date. I still think she's a zombie. Her nose starts to bleed, and Barlow says Mr. Doran will know what to do. On the phone, he tells Gavin he can't lose Mary again. "There's only one way to cheat death," Gavin says. And that way is for Barlow to keep killing people, apparently. Gavin says he'll tell Barlow who to knock off , or it's Mary's life and his.
Wearing half of his tux, Henry comes into the living room looking for his cufflinks and tells Jane they only have half an hour to get ready. She shows him her research on the dragon motif, that at one time the laundry room hosted spooky fraternal brotherhood meetings of redundant redundancy back in the '20s. She shows Henry the photo from 1927, which shows a door in the laundry room, but it's not there in the photo she took today. Then she jumps up suddenly and rushes off to get ready. She finds a package in the hall, from Olivia. The note says, "I'm not good at taking no for an answer." Inside is the red McQueen, obviously, which fits her perfectly and looks amazing, but it's really starting to bother me how dark Rachael Taylor's eyebrows are to her blonde hair.
Brian Leonard's Peeping-Tom window. Louise reminds him they have a reservation. He's still spying on Alexis, who now knows he's watching and takes off her robe. In the elevator, he asks Louise how she found Alexis. She says she was referred by a friend at Elle, and Louise asks why he's so interested. "Because she's so smokin' hot?" she asks. Brian denies it, kind of, and gets off the elevator. As Louise follows him, the doors slam shut on her, knocking her down and slamming on her again. Brian yells for help and tries to pry the doors open and pull Louise out, but she's dragged up and down in the door, stopping just short of the full Six Feet Under.
Jane and Henry enjoy the symphony, which the closed captions tell me is Beethoven's No. 7 in A Major. It's very bass-heavy and gloomy. A few rows behind them, Gavin watches them creepily. Barlow finds a photo of his target in an envelope, slid under his door. Nona uses a key to get into apartment 3B and steals Jane's necklace. Monstrous child. Barlow waits on the High Line (maybe?) for his target, then follows the man down to street level. The man falls but Barlow can't kill him. He goes home to Mary, who's become all gray and veiny and kind of looks like Kristen Stewart at the end of Twilight 4: The Spawning. Jane notices that Gavin is staring intensely at the back of her head. She turns and he gives her like four degrees of a smile, which doesn't seem to reassure her.
Jane and Henry arrive home and she looks plastered. Henry basically has to peel her off the wall she's holding up. She asks him to unzip her dress, and he starts taking it off her, but she gets all peevish and pulls away. She lies down on the bed and Henry asks her what's wrong. She says Gavin gave her a weird look during the concert. Henry's like, you're drunk. But she's still pretty freaked out, and asks him if they'll be okay here at 999. Oh my God, this is the longest pilot in HISTORY.
The Barlows' spooky morgue of an apartment. John wakes up to find Gavin sitting at the foot of his bed, still in his tux, although he's undone his bow tie, because it's after midnight and this is how humans project casualness, or so he's read. John asks where Mary is, and Gavin says she's going back where she belongs (Hershel's barn!). Gavin says he expected more of John, but that it's time to settle up, since John didn't hold up his end of their bargain. The walls begin to shake and hands start pushing out of the wallpaper. John gets sucked back against the wall and then sucked through it, screaming, Poltergeist-style. Gavin looks mildly concerned, but it could be the ugliness of the wallpaper that's irking him.
Jane wakes up in the middle the night, asking Henry if he heard anything. Henry doesn't wake up. She goes out in the hall and a ghostly form drifts by while she looks the other way. Jane goes to the stairwell and looks up. The door slams behind her, locking her in the stairwell. Oh, dummy. She looks down the center of the stairwell, and someone is walking up, but we can only see a hand on the banister. Jane calls down but no one answers. She starts walking down, into the basement, because when I'm locked out of my apartment, barefoot and in my pajamas, the first place I go is the creepy basement where a bunch of dudes might have held satanic rituals or circle jerks or cosplayed as St. George.
The door that was missing earlier has been restored to the basement, so obviously Jane is going to go poke it. She opens the door and walks out... onto the roof? Sure. Doesn't everyone's basement laundry room have a roof? Mary Barlow is there, in a white gown, and she walks to the edge of the roof and turns around. "You never should have come here," Mary tells Jane. "They're never going to let you go." Then she falls backward off the roof and plunges down toward the street. Jane wakes up just before Mary hits the ground. Henry brings her a cup of coffee in bed and asks how she's feeling. He tells Jane about Louise's elevator accident. She says they should visit her in the hospital. Henry adds that Gavin called and said the contracts are ready to sign. Jane shifts to get out of bed and her feet poke out from under the covers -- they're filthy, like she walked ten blocks barefoot in New York in the summertime. Ew.
Gavin says the contracts are a standard year with an option for another, that they can quit or he can fire them any time. Henry says they won't be quitting. Gavin says Henry told him Jane was doing research on the building, and he grabs some blueprints and says he wants to restore the Drake to how it looked originally, and he wants Jane's help. She's flattered and overwhelmed and has forgotten that Gavin is super spooky and probably has Moira Kelly locked in a cabinet somewhere. They sign the contracts.
Nona's jewelry hoard. She rubs Jane's necklace and sees Jane, in the red McQueen, fleeing in terror as she gets ax-murdered. But she's wearing the necklace Nona is holding. Hmm.
time: Jane finds birds living in the building's walls. Alexis tries to bang Brian. Jane investigates a long-ago murder and the covered-up laundry-room door. Because nothing says spooky like vermin infestations and unexpected renovations!