Previously: Red dragon tattoo. Is just about on me. I got it for you. So now do you…oh, hey. Didn't see you there.
The opening credits sequence features the dulcet strains of "Worry About You," from the band Ivy's awesomely underappreciated adult-ethereal 2001 recording effort, Soundtrack Your Parents Would Get High To If Your Dad Would Ever Chill Out And Stop Being Such A Goddamn Narc All The Time. Actually, it's called Long Distance, and your parents are getting high to it right now, because it's calming and breezy and they've never heard of Zero 7.
A grizzled, long-haired, elderly Native-American gentleman drives a tractor-like vehicle through an outdoor hospital parking lot. Whoever this person is and whether he ever becomes important is currently notwithstanding, because on self-consciously off-beat hour-long television programs like Twin Peaks or The X-Files or, say, Kingdom Hospital, random actions never require explanation if you're unlucky enough to dwell in the ghetto of Tangential Characters Engaged In Quirky Doings. Which, it seems, is the woeful plight of this unnamed gentleman here. Alone on a mission, He Drives With Enormous Horsepower (well, I say that if he doesn't have a name, he deserves to have us give him a name) aims his tractor toward the bleating din of a nearby car alarm. As the good and hearty He Drives With Enormous Horsepower pulls closer, we note telltale signs -- the tire lock, The Club, the nearby attending group of toughs -- that this car belongs to the evil Dr. Stegman, who parks in spots that don't belong to him and finds Andrew McCarthy to be petulant and oddly short. Boo, Dr. Stegman. Booooooo. He Drives With Enormous Horsepower steps down from his urban tractor and wanders grimly toward the car. He bypasses it and ambles to the paper bag Stegman placed over some incriminating sign he did not want us to see. Despite my consistent assurances that it would read "The actor whose car is parked in this spot appeared in Summer Catch. Please mock him relentlessly," we discover when He Drives With Enormous Horsepower pulls the bag off the sign that Stegman has parked in a handicapped spot. And he's not even handicapped! Depending on whether or not you believe that "Severe Trauma Of The Last Ten Years Of Your Professional Résumé" qualifies as a medical condition. He Drives With Enormous Horsepower looks at the sign and considers the savagery of human nature, a single tear falling from his saddened, disbelieving eye.
The toughs look on from afar, doing endless justice to the stage direction of "with chins tipping haughtily upward," as He Drives With Enormous Horsepower deals a swift right kick to the driver's side rear door, and the car alarm spins down comically and dies. He gestures back towards the toughs, who tip their chins up so haughtily that their haughtiness could be charted at a perfect 45-degree angle on an XY axis and measured mathematically. They laugh and offer their thumbs up, because Tangential Characters Engaged In Quirky Doings usually seem to get along, unless one of them is a midget.
Inside the titular hospital that is kingly, quirky though somewhat less tangential character Dr. Jesse "Ain't Too Proud To Begley" James scoops up stray buttons underneath his desk and searches futilely for whatever qualities once made him a believable television doctor. He explains, "Sorry about that, Steg. Turns out there's a fault line under the hospital. Continental drift. Something of that nature. Sure wish we'd known. Would've built on the other side of the river." But if you'd done that, the hospital wouldn't have been quite so haaaaaaaaaaaaaunted. It would have been merely haunted-adjacent. Which, come to think of it, might have been slightly more appropriate for a show that's, well, looking only good-adjacent at the moment. Steg (may I call you "Steg"?) asks if this kind of thing happens a lot, and Dr. James collects some stray leaflets (which, though they can't make any noise because they're just refined papyrus and ink, almost certainly have the lyrics to "Red Dragon Tattoo" on them, just to insure that that song is never out of our heads for long) and responds that there have been two or three tremors this year alone. "But the geologist the keepers of the Kingdom have brought up from Boston assures us that they'll stop soon." Collecting the tattered remnants of his workplace superiority and smoothing down the wispy cotton candy hair of his determinedly circus-y head, Dr. James makes it back to the chair while finishing the thought, "But you know geologists. To them, soon can mean five centuries." Ah, geologist humor. The great social equalizer. Regardless of race, finance, or social standing, a good joke about rocks has the universalizing effect of causing the hearer to crinkle his nose, cock his head slightly, and upwardly inflect, "Hmmm?" But ol' Dr. James can get away with it. Because of how quirky he is.
Steg finally gets to the point: "I'm having a serious problem with Hook." He reels off a laundry list of technical-sounding doctor-y things Hook has done to violate hospital ethics: ordering MRIs without permission, taking on the project of perpetual patient Mrs. Druse, forcing the whole department sit quietly against their will while he makes them sit through innumerable screenings of Fresh Horses that he broadcasts on the colonoscopy camera. Dr. James thinks on it a minute and kicks back in his chair, advising, "You know what my son would say?" Steg (may I call you…oh, never mind) does not know. James continues: "Illness sucks." Is his son a novelty bumper sticker from the hospital gift shop? And, if so, does he also believe that, as a cat hanging from a high branch, we should all "hang in there"? James waxes on, to Steg's consternation: "Unfortunately, patients come here, don't they? The problem with a hospital is, we're surrounded by them. More are coming every day." Steg half-nods, because his boss is a jerk and he's in the hospital version of Dilbert and he doesn't like it any more than we do.
Now, this guy's name I definitely do not remember. It's the guy. Who hit The Guy Who Totally Isn't Really Stephen King. In the van. Apparently the crash also woefully impaired the man's scant remaining sense of fashion, as he stumbles out of his very New England-y (quaint…but haaaaaaaaunted!) two-story home, wearing some kind of big-boy play pants and no shirt. And his top half is covered in what looks like nicotine patches. And his van's windshield has not magically healed itself at warp speed, so it's a good thing we get a clear pan past it to remind us that this is The Man Who Hit The Man Who Is Not Stephen King. Because otherwise we might not have known that at all. He stumbles up a ladder to his Rickety, Angular Roof Of Eventual Plot Contrivance, drunkenly slurring the wrong words to "Red Dragon Tattoo." Okay. I love Fountains of Wayne as much as, like, Wayne himself (enough to know that, yes, Wayne is not an actual person, so unwrite that angry email you've started writing and we can leave one by one and pretend that never happened), but it's maybe just about enough. It's a very good song. On Utopia Parkway, it's probably the best song, and it's better musically than the other achingly self-aware hipster ditty "Valley of Malls," which I completely love. And this two-hour commercial for this song really is tremendous exposure for a band that lingered in the shadows of semi-non-fame for a really long time. But eventually, if it goes on unabated for another few episodes, it's going to be the one-song greatest hits volume Songs To Crunch Your Frail Artist's Bones By, and then they're pigeonholed and in trouble. In the meantime, go buy Welcome Interstate Managers and listen to "Halley's Waitress" until your iPod bleeds. And then you and I shall be wed.
Climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing, to the tippy-toppiest of the tall roof he goes. But say! What's this? Just then, a police car comes around a bend and comes to rest in front of his house. The door opens and an officer of the law steps out, a consistently employed Stephen King device by whom ominous plot development is often conveyed with said salty character emerging from an automobile, sticking up a finger, and noting, "A-yuh. Storm's a comin', Ah reckon." But this copper is all about getting to business: "Hey, Dave." Dave? Oh. Shirty over there. That's Dave. "You want to come down off-a there?" Dave stumbles backwards off of a ladder, recovering himself undramatically. See, this is the problem with this show, right here. We already know that so-called Dave's head and the cold ground are about to get acquainted. We know he's going to end up in the hospital. We know he'll be room buddies with The Artist Formerly Known As Non-Plegic. So just get there already and kill the clunky exposition, like in the first episode where the wife was all, "Whatever you do, don't run in the road and set off a twelve-episode miniseries about your convalescing in a haaaaaaaaaaunted hospital, because that would be predictable!" The copper wants to ask about an accident on Route Seven, and Dave says he knows nothing about the accident and that he's just doing some drunk, naked home improvement. Which would vastly improve any number of home-refurbishment reality shows, if not improving whatever it is we're watching happen right now. The police officer notes the patches, which DrunkDave offers are not patches but "tattoos" ("I got it for you, so now do you want me?"). Then he falls again, because it's not foreshadowing unless it's done four times, I guess. Officer Entirely Too Patient again requests that Dave join him on the non-fall-y portion of the planet known as "its entire cumulative surface area outside of that roof," turning conversation back to the shattered windshield of the nearby van. Dave self-defends: "I ain't seen that artist all day!" Eep. "Villains," I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous Fountains of Wayne song!" Dave throws himself back against the wall and then, seeing no other way out, throws himself in slo-mo off the roof. A close-up of the dog finds it voicing over, "Way to go, slick. Who's gonna feed me now?" And you know the old expression: every time a dog talks, a formerly great horror writer's lost his mind.
Back at the haaaaaaaaaaaaunted hooooooooooooooospital where little dead girls dwell in elevator shafts and catheter tubes spontaneously turn into the tails of witches, we rejoin the comedy team of Stegman and James, already in progress. Steg angrily insists there by consequences for Hook's insubordination, but Hook won't be hearing any of it because his ear canals are stuffed with ghosts! Because of the haunted, um, thing. But instead of offering linear explanations for his protection of Hook (because that would be so passé and, like, the way people talk, and who wants that?), Dr. James walks around his desk and sits to Stegman, holding up a button showing a cartoon doctor with a sun rising behind him and emblazoned with the words "Operation Morning Air." I totally want that button. Begley (calling him "Dr. James" with a straight face was starting to give me carpal tunnel, and Begley's always playing some version of himself, so…) asks Steg if he likes said button, and Stegman -- he's so surly! -- deadpans, "No." Begley responds as if kicked a long time ago on the soft part of his head, "Good. Good." Stegman tries in vain (haunted veins!) to return to a more strict line of "and then you talk, and then I talk, and that's how you make a conversation!" conversation with the decreasingly responsive Begley, as he argues that Mrs. Druse has been admitted to the hospital fourteen times in the last two years. Fourteen. Like, as in the age of consent in one or more of the Dakotas. Fourteen! He's very passionate about it. Begley tosses off an airy, "It must be terrible to be so ill." You know what else is a very good song? "Hackensack." Depressing as hell, but the words were written for me and me alone. If you can make it through the lines "Sometimes I wonder where you are, probably in L.A. / That seems to be where everybody else ends up these days" without quietly informing your empty car, "Yeah, don't I know it," you probably don't know anyone who's moved to L.A.
Stegman's had it. He's, like, the "us" of fake TV doctors in a haunted hospital. He takes his leave of Begley's office and clomps past another doctor, haunted by the duel specters of shortness and baldness. He tries to stop Stegman by offering to show him the sleep lab, but Stegman mutters nothing and just keeps walking. Good call. Because you know what's playing on the monitors in the sleep lab right now? THIS SCENE. Short Doctor turns to Begley, and the two of them exchange their patented secret thumb-shake. Begley excuses Doc Hollywood's diva behavior, and Short Doctor foreshadows something about someone whose name I can't understand hiring a lawyer. Klingerman? Med mal? That must mean "medical malpractice" in, like, Esperanto, or some language twins teach each other where you only say the first syllable of every word. Like, if I said, "This show sucks," you wouldn't understand it because it would be couched in that clever code. Begley volleys that he would have told Stegman about the med mal, but he "thought his mood was foul enough as it was." Then they pause and spontaneously burst out laughing, because the joke is secretly on us right now.
A broken little girl moodily bounces a blue ball down a haunted hospital hallway. Okay, the spooky, mood-setting moments are not working, especially when they're offset fourteen seconds later by a Danish-eating dog with a vaguely Prussian accent. Little bouncing girl walks past the stoic Native man, and this time he is handling a mop and pushing it down the otherwise empty hallway. The camera pans Lynch-ily to a Room 719, which the sign tells us belongs to a "Mona Klingerman." Amazingly, that is the name shared by every single one of my grandmother's bridge partners. Uncanny. The attending physician on the sign has been crossed out, and "Stegman" has been replaced by "Clooney." Oh, you wish this were the doctor show with Clooney. ["So does that doctor show." -- Sars] But those days were a long, long time ago. Inside the room, a little girl of about seven watches vintage cartoons, and the screen is filled with the image of a bald man doing cartoonish things. The girl rocks back and forth and regards the television with dark, sunken eyes, as a nurse tries to give the girl medicine. The cartoons unfurl in bleached, '70s color tones. The attending director, Dr. Tarantino, files for med mal.
The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King is racing toward the hospital in the back of an ambulance. Hey, if someone doesn't turn on the van's radio and give us something red-like, dragon-y, and tattoo-ish to sing along to, I might forget what show I'm watching. A medic leaps to his feet to attend to a flat-lining pulse, yells, "Clear!" and puts those iron things on the chest of a man whose chest I've spent way too much time with this week already. They regain a pulse. The dude's eyes open with a start, and he notes the presence of a somewhat angry anteater in the back of the ambulance. His pulse goes out again. Oh, fine. I also really like "Stacy's Mom." I know it must be wrong
A picture of an angry-looking white dude on the cover of a newspaper (The King Gazette? The King Picayune? The coupon circular from the local King Kullen? We get that you named the show and that the hospital is named after you. All taken care of. Thanks) accompanies a front-page headline blaring, "Accused Killer of 6 Held in Androscoggin County Jail." Man. Just when you think towns in New England can't get any more foul-sounding than Ogunquit, we meet the residents of Androscoggin. Inside his security booth, Fritz Von Coke Bottle Glasses stares at the paper until he's interrupted by, y'know, his job. He stares into one of the black-and-white screens to watch the not-so-rapid approach of the hospital employee we'll remember from last week is crazy Diane Ladd's son. Fritz Von Coke Bottle calls through his little speaker, "Hey, Bobby. Come and sit down. I got you a coffee." Bobby tells Fritz Von Coke Bottle that "Mama" wants him "upstairs," at which point Fritz's dog lifts his head and adds -- in a vaguely Prussian accent -- "and a prune Danish. Big boy." And with that, I am officially checked out, hilarious hospital imagery intended. Fritz Von Coke Bottle repeats the dog's exact sentiment, and Bobby acquiesces. As Fritz Von Coke Bottle watches a body being wheeled in on a stretcher, Bobby explains something about Stegman being after his "mama" for her séances with the terminal cases. It's explained that abruptly, and explicated that not-at-all-ishly. I guess the writers made it to this sequence and they were like, "What more do they want? We already made a dog talk in a vaguely Prussian accent! We're creatively depleted! Do they think that we are gods, for crying out loud?"
One medic from the ambulance asks the other one if the other one wants a soda. Yep. That's really a whole scene.
The Daily Globe and Trite Exposition practically reads itself out loud as so-called "Bobby" rips it out of Fritz Von Coke Bottle's hands and starts reading it. "Hey, no problem, help yourself," Fritz Von Coke Bottle says all sarcastically, and it's this totally disjointed moment where the weird, creepy guy in the crazy glasses who convinces you in the commercials that he's haaaaaunted says something that is neither weird, creepy, crazy, or, um, glasses. They vamp on about a mysterious murder that sounded rather brutal, but Fritz Von Coke Bottle throws Fat Bobby out of his insecurity booth with a tart "I want to read Beetle Bailey." I didn't make that up. If I had, I would have used the far less imaginative "Kittens. So soft and downy. My first one was named Whiskers, and he purred like trains driving through heaven.'"
The H-plot (as it is literally the eighth most important story line in this episode. It's tied with a lot of other ones, though) arc introduced previously actually resolves itself: the medic who wanted a soda? Is getting a soda. What a show. He stands in a desolate hallway as scary music plays and faux-artsy angles come from cameras positioned in places as creative as a surveillance mirror mounted above the machine. As he presses the button on the machine to order up a nice, refreshing Haunted Cola, he is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a Tangential Character Engaged In Quirky Doings. It's an old man in a ratty brown suit who just appears from seeming nowhere, asking the medic, "Tell me where they took the children." Startled, the medic replies that he doesn't work here, but that "Pete's" is on seven. What a clever nickname for pediatrics. Dramatically ill children need a kitschy nickname. The old man ambles slowly away, and the medic stares from the soda machine practically into the camera, as if he's about to tell us that we've entered a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of generically spooky aesthetic derivativeness so acute it has to be hospitalized.
The Klingerman girl, seventy years younger than her name indicates and much crappier at bridge, sits in a corner and rocks back and forth. Advance cue-bid, Klingerman. Advance cue-bid!
Genre-mixing, doctor-y mumbo-jumbo abounds as The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King is wheeled into ICU. A younger attending nurse (or maybe medical student…I don't judge) fumbles with a needle and ends up with face full of blood. As she swoons and passes out, we pan to the window of the room to find a curious dead girl looking in. She wonders where her twin sister is, so that they might suggest to Danny that they go somewhere and play.
"I don't want to put him in with Hook's patient, but right now it's the only spot it ICU we've got," one of the doctors skywrites across the heavens, lest the mutant mole people and halfwits they think make up their audience not notice said occasion when this actually, y'know, occasions. Tsk tsk. Show, don't tell, Mr. King.
Just so you're aware of it? Diane Ladd and Diane Lane? Are two unbelievably different people. I'm just telling you this, PSA-style, in case you thought they were the same person and were extremely disappointed to find out that the one you thought might be on this show was, in fact, not. But then again, anyone who appeared on an episode of Battle of the Network Stars is good enough for me. This Diane, who is not now and never has been in A Walk on the Moon, rearranges chairs in an empty solarium and places a sheer red cloth over a lamp to up the inherent spooky factor of a solarium that is already, I don't think I need to tell you, 75 percent haunted with a lingering chance of ghooooooosts. Made brave from the sugar rush of a real live big-boy prune Danish, the younger Druse tells his blankly-staring, Moonie-smiling mother, "Mama, this isn't a good idea. Not with that Dr. Stegman mad at you." Diane Not Lane just laughs and laughs, because a thimble of crazy equals a whole truckload of actual characteristics, according to The Quirky Television Programming Code.
A nurse enters to attend to Druse's non-dead, colon-blocked, blind gentleman friend from last week, noticing on her trip through the room that the mise en scene is poised to go full-on light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board at a thirteen-year-old girl's slumber party. "I'd watch out for Stegman, if I were you," Nurse Condescending Reiteration tells us, and Bobby responds that he already told her that. Will someone please disengage the "track all changes" feature on the Final Draft that generated this script? We know what happened. We were there watching. We only need to see it so many times. Say, eleven. Druse says she's spent much of her life communicating with the spirit world, and she knows that there is "a little girl, not at rest" somewhere in the hospital. But the unnamed nurse administers herself 100 CCs of "talking points," sticking both to the script and the script from sixteen pages ago, vamping, "Don't let Stegman catch you talking to the spirits." The nurse leaves. A leave is taken by the nurse. The nurse leaves leavingly. Or so I imagine it reads in the script, if the stage directions are written in any way similar to this dialogue.
"The dead only want one thing, Bobby," Druse explains. Is it something about Stegman? "To go into the light," Bobby knows by rote. Druse explains that they half to figure out why some spirits won't leave the land of the living. But the old dude wakes up all lucid just then, knowing who Druse and Bobby are. He explains that he feels one day he's going to go to sleep and wake up dead. Druse tells him he's got a long time left on this earth, which opens the door (which, hopefully, Stegman will not be standing behind) to this rambling, senile, fork-over-your-navy-blue-blazer-because-you're-off-the-debate-team filibuster: "He used to leave. Had other business, I guess. But now he's always right behind me." Bobby asks who is right behind him. I'll say it's that crusty old Dean, Stegman! "The Emperor of Ice Cream!" Who, even with an assumedly fun job filled with caramel moats, a castle made of sugar cones, and flavoring his namesake's sugary confections with The Royal Sprinkles, must be thirty-one flavors of bored right now too.
Over in Peter "Boy, you read my thoughts! You've got the Shinning! Don't you mean Shining? Shhh! You wanna get sued?" Rickman's room, a new name has been added under the "patients" section under Rickman's name, to add a "David Hooman" to the guest list. Inside Room 426, Peter's dutiful wife Natalie "Waaaaay Outside The Actor's Studio" Rickman sits by the bed and taunts, "Peter, wake up, dammit. You were awake before. Where are you now?" Peter voices over, "I'm right here, Nat," but she does not hear, because even his internal monologue is being drowned out by Fountains of Wayne. Soon to enter is Dr. "His Career Weekends At Bernie's" Hook, who incurs the immediate, whining, wifely wrath of Bad-alie, who screams, "What happened? What, where? He was here! He was responsive!" Hook looks down and puts a hand on the back of his own head in a remarkable simulation of distant doctoral sympathy, and rasps, "He said your name, Mrs. Rickman. It may not be the same thing." Bad-alie sits down near the foot of the bed and utters those simple words that mean, "Please, good sirrah, won't you explain to me the plot?" And here they are: "I don't understand what you mean." Hook goes on to explain that Rickman might be able to hear everything they're saying, and she asks, "Why doesn't he open his eyes?" Because then he might have to talk to you. Peter, meanwhile, voices over, "They are open." They are not open. Hook goes on to say he's never seen anyone wake up as quickly as Rickman did. But according to tests, his spinal cord isn't all screwed up. And he's having normal brain wave rhythms. Hook's fly is unzipped. Bad-alie takes notice of it just as Rickman voices over, "Your fly's unzipped." And then, "Who gave you a license to sell hot dogs, Sonny Jim?" Oh, god. The only thing worse than a coma is a salty, homespun, New England-y coma. Hook and Bad-alie continue the serve-and-volley dialogue by which Hook says something technical ("He's still got some bacterial hot spots"), Bad-alie repeats the last word of the jumbo ("Hot spots?"), Hook explicates ("The gall bladder"), and I go, "Huh?" ("Huh?") Even that doesn't really make any sense. "Red underwear," Rickman tells us somewhat incredulously from the great voice-over beyond. Oh, can it, Sonny Jim. There's no need to cop an attitude just because underwear is the only red thing Fountains of Wayne never wrote a song about.
Stegman barges right in just then and pulls "the world-famous Dr. Hook" from the room. "Looks like Dr. Hook is in trouble," Rickman voices over. "Looks like Dr. Hook is in trouble," Bad-alie says out loud. Sigh. There comes a level of creative power a person reaches when said person can write or create something and no one's allowed to tell him it might not be such a good idea. It's why Gangs of New York was overlong, comically bad trash. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to why this observation might be applicable here?
Druse kicks it séance-style in the solarium as Flute-y Tang: The Very Best Of Zamfir underscores the action on the soundtrack. She holds hands with a bunch of other crazies and tries to pull forth "a child…come to us and speak to us!" In increasingly quicker cuts, we're back outside Rickman's room, where Stegman shows Hook what he believes to be Druse's perfectly clear MRI. Hook, though, points to one shadowy corner of the picture and argues it could be "a UBO." A what? Oh, don't worry. They'll explain it to you if you give them time. Like, exactly three seconds, for example, as Stegman laughs derisively (and on this show, besides "crazily," is there really any other kind?) and shoots back, "Unidentified Bright Object! What's , giant alligators in the sewers?" Yes. His official diagnosis is the urban mythical condition known as "spiders in the beehive hairdo." Stegman walks away and tells Hook to join him, insisting, "I'll show you how we deal with the Mrs. Druses of the world in Boston." Hook begs off, saying that he's been on duty for the last sixteen hours, but Stegman really insists. They fight about the existence of UBOs, Stegman speeching, "Some people wish rain were beer. But it ain't." Who wishes that? Do people really talk like this? And could it really be that Stegman is on his way to catch Mrs. Druse right in the middle of her séance? But what about all of the warnings she was given? I say, WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE WARNINGS?
The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King is wheeled (when most of your stage directions occur in the passive voice, you've got yourself a shitty part, is what you've got) into Rickman's room. Bad-alie raises a protest that her husband was to have a private room for their strained, mind-melding identical dialogue to unfold in the privacy of them, the camera crew, and an ever-decreasing number of disenchanted television viewers, but the nurse apologizes and says it's just temporary. Quite a match. I think the hospital administrators were the same people who conducted the search that landed me with my freshman college roommate, ruining a solid fourth of what you think when you're fifty were the best four years of your life and landing me with an individual who, after convoluted stories and a dash of exaggerated collegiate histrionics, my friends and I nicknamed "Bloody Undies." I'm just saying, if these people think they have it tough... "Oh, man, you've got to be kidding me," Rickman voices over, opening his eyes while his wife's back is turned. Oy, the anteater is back, and Rickman's eyes swell with terror. Bad-alie notes this, and pulls the nurse away from her current case of attending to someone actively undergoing trauma to tell her that her husband has scaredy-eyes. The nurse says that he's fine and was probably just having a bad dream, and that Bad-alie should just talk to him to keep him connected. "That's what Hook said," Bad-alie tells her, and the nurse takes a moment to appreciate Hook, because she was ten in 1986 and who didn't think Blane was, like, totally dreamy? ["[raises hand] But I was thirteen, so what do I know?" -- Sars]
"Someone is coming," Druse says. "He seeks one in this circle. He's getting closer." Elevator doors open, and Stegman steps out as Druse predicts, "He's a pitiful, terrible man. He means me harm." Stegman bursts through the doors and meets Druse, whom he tells to come with him. WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE WARNINGS?
We're behind the eye of The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King. We discover him running down a hallway in a somewhat frightened fashion. Back in this world, Bad-alie turns around unconvincingly (natch) to note that The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King's heart rate has accelerated dangerously. The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King, meanwhile, runs past a bloodied Rickman hanging from a noose, who looks up and informs The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King, "You did this." Je t'accuse! He comes across the old man with the blocked colon, who yells something about The Emperor of Ice Cream. Bad-alie tells the nurse she thinks The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King is having a seizure, and back in the dreamscape, The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King comes across a young man in a Good Humor outfit who asks The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King, "Popsicle or Fudgicle?" Oh, man, I don't remember the last time I had a delicious Fudgicle. Pick that one! But The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King doesn't have too much time to reflect and consider whether he might prefer a snow cone or one of those delicious red, white, and blue rocket pop things that I so loved in the day, because just then the guy opens his mouth to reveal menacing fangs. Such are the abuses of creamy, chocolaty power for one who became Emperor so young. The anteater bares his teeth and takes a chunk out of The Guy Who Hit The Guy Who Isn't Stephen King's feeding tube, and just at that moment Bad-alie looks back at Rickman, who whispers, "I heard. A bell. Her name is Mary." He closes his eyes. I think the line I've always liked best is, "I hear the man say you want to see the others / A mermaid and a heart that says mother / But I don't know from maritime / And I never did hard time." Fun stuff. The song on the album, however, includes the lyrics, "I know this girl named Denise / She makes me weak at the knees / She drives a lavender Lexus / She lives in Queens but her dad lives in Texas." How can you not like this band?
Hook looks on as Stegman cross-examines Druse, circling her and asking, "So, you're kind of a spiritual guru to the terminal patients here?" He pronounces her admissions to the hospital "a sham," telling her that "this isn't a hotel." Hook tries to tell him that that's "enough," but Stegman shouts her down, showing her the clean MRI and telling Hook to discharge her in the "now" region of time. A sycophantic nurse with a head shaped like a pumpkin tells Hook to discharge Druse, and takes her leave. Hook apologizes to her, and she smiles and responds, "You know what they say. Sticks and stones." If only someone had thought to WARN her. Wait. Pause for comedy. She's not done. Haaaaang on. "Young man? Your fly is unzipped." Ah, the satisfying click of the perfect closing of a plot arc so broad and colorful it can practically be seen from space.
Now, because I've just met some of you recently, what you might not know about me is that I have a tremendous, reeking fear of late-breaking brand-new characters and locales. I get this sinking, swooning, wait-what-did-I-miss feeling, like when I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to the tune of four hundred pages in four hundred days, and I was rewarded with this Presidential Fiction Test with a chapter out of nowhere that begins, like, "Meanwhile, six thousands miles of New York in the frozen Yukon…" You just feel betrayed, is all. Which is why there's a certain encroaching concern regarding the woman who was briefly noted last week as Dr. Massingale, asking a man wheeling a cadaver, "Elmer, what is this?" Just then, in a shadowy corner, the two walk past He Drives With Enormous Horsepower (or, well, He Pushes With Enormous Broompower, as the case has more recently become), Massingale asking, "Who are you?" Why not start by asking who the hell "Elmer" is? He Pushes With Enormous Broompower says he's from the maintenance department, and that he's filling in. The scene will be a behind-the-scenes retrospective on the guy who founded the company that manufactures the brooms. And then we'll know everything about everyone.
Quickly losing interest in whether Pine-Sol or Pledge is best for the shine of the floors in the hospital basement, Massingale turns back to so-called Elmer (he's a doctor too, right? Is that Traff?) and pushes through what I think are the doors to the morgue, because there's a whole spread of food set up in what Elmer refers to as "Chez Morte." He takes off her lab coat and sits her down, ignoring the slab of former human on the gurney to them. Opera music plays in the background, and it's a really interesting lesson learning for those of you taking a foreign language course to hear the words to "Red Dragon Tattoo" in nineteenth-century French. Why? What other song could it be? He sits down across from her. Massingale notes that this is "insane," and he tells her that he's insane when it comes to her. She tries to tell him that he shouldn't be thinking in this way, but they are interrupted by champagne and food. Elmer toasts, "To the Traffs, who never give up." Massingale counters, "To the Massingales, who never give in." To the Blaus, who never thought they'd miss recapping reality shows, because they have a lot of strong choices for who they think should be eliminated.
Hook walks Druse to the elevator, during which time she tells him, "There is a little child not at rest. And they may hear her going down that elevator." Hook asks her if she means someone from Pete's (see how I incorporated the lingo, just like that?), and she stops him in front of the elevator, over-explaining, "This is a child that is not even alive. And I think you may find out. Because you're not as closed off as some… Things have changed here at Kingdom Hospital since the last time that I was here. And something has awakened. Something evil." They step into the elevator and -- no, really -- within seconds, they hear the sound of a child's voice indicating some sort of duress. Druse hits the emergency stop, and asks, "Is it the voice of a living child?" Hook hits the screen above the elevator and climbs on top of it. He crawls into the darkness, and the music indicates it's time to be afraid. He finds a doll on the elevator roof, and then further on, a little girl sitting alone in the rafters. He drops the doll. He sees the girl. She reaches out a hand. She mutters something akin to "haaaaaaaaaallll." Scary.