Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 27 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT We Have Always Lived In The Mortuary
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 10.22.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Caleb and Miranda hang around staring at the graveyard until the next day, and then head back to the funeral home/mansion, where they are "greeted" by a very unfriendly and widow's-peaked Uncle Raymond Collins -- hilarious, possibly an actual dracula, and kinda hot under the ghoul makeup he's working -- who is a funeral director by day, saboteur and stabber by night, and interested in their bullshit never.
They try to tell him about the mysterious gravestones, but he just calls them pretty little liars and jerkoffs and tells them to get the eff out of Ravenswood because of all the secrets and dangers which are there. The Grunwald, his babysitter even though he is a grownup dracula boy, pretends to toe the line, but secretly she cannot wait to blow his spot up and tell them all kinds of shit.
By the time Caleb thinks to take pictures of the gravestones and prove they are real, it is too late: They have turned into other gravestones that are not nearly so magical. He heads into town to find obituaries for himself and Miranda from their previous deaths, but the dour newspaper guy seems like a dracula also. His daughter Remy is the opposite: She is flawless in every single way, and rules so hard. She is like what Maya was supposed to be, only good at it. Like imagine if Aria just actually focused her powers for good, instead of on begging to get slapped forever.
Anyway, Remy and Caleb form a bond out of being cool kids in a drag of a town, and before you know it, they're having coffee and she's explaining to him about how the town is known for being super spooky and haunted, and also one time it flooded and that was real weird for some reason, but no matter what, Ravenswood just keeps going because you can't kill it, because it is unkillable and unholy and under at least one deadly Curse.
The other two out of the five, I'm not so sold on. One of them is the Constantly Crying Cousin from the PLL Halloween Special, and he's okay I guess, but his sister is just awful. (Their cousin Princess Girl is nowhere to be found, but maybe we can start a petition for her to come cheer them up or something.) Their names are Luke and Olivia, and their main deal is bitching.
They are the formerly popular, currently outcast, kids of a lady who is believed to have stabbed her husband to death, by everybody but her kids. Or at least, we learn, by dumb old Olivia. Luke's pretty sure she did it. We meet her briefly, and she does seem a little high-strung, but I guess having to wipe the "Black Widow" graffiti off your husband's tombstone every day might do that.
Olivia's main people are Tess, her best friend who might be secretly mean, and Dillon, her boyfriend who is also the hottest guy on the show by like a quarter mile. But they can't save her from getting a slushy cup full of blood to the face during Ravenswood's rinky-dink Founder's Day Parade, of which I guess she was elected queen before the whole murder thing happened. Luke feels bad for her, but not as bad as she does!
Luke is also one of the other things Remy's dad is weird about, because they are in True Love but her dad is not having it, I guess maybe because of the murdering that may run in their family. Remy's dad is more sympathetic than he seems, though, because also his wife has just miraculously returned from Afghanistan and is super PTSD about it, for reasons that are important to the story.
Anyway, after a very loud Miranda fight in a room full of coffins, Uncle Collins eventually softens toward her and Caleb. They have a nice dinner with the Grunwald, which includes him giving Miranda a photo album all about her dead mom, which also contains a letter about what it was like to be accidentally knocked up with Miranda. (I think that Miranda is the key here and that she is psychic and maybe there are no demons or weirdness: Just her, making the Curse come true with her ESP. Or maybe in fact this show is not magical at all, and everything that happens in the entire show is just Miranda acting out for attention. That would rule.)
While she is reading that, Caleb takes off all his clothes and slides into a nice warm bath, but is immediately murdered by a shower curtain. (Of all the mysteries of Ravenswood, this one puzzles me the most: Why would a bathtub that explicitly has no showering capability -- the subject of the Grunwald's funniest line of the entire episode -- need a shower curtain? That is some belt-and-suspenders stuff right there.)
This jibes with Miranda's constant claims of seeing wet demon people lurking around the house and leaving wet puddles of demon ectoplasm and throwing hairbrushes short distances, but Caleb doesn't even think to mention that he was nearly murdered in the bathtub until they're already at the Parade. And even then, he thinks it was Uncle Collins anyway, because the Grunwald would never do that. He spots Remy, and decides that they should get her to talk to them about obituaries some more before they get the hell out of his freaky town.
There is something about how every time a soldier survives miraculously and comes back to Ravenswood, five teenagers die. I don't get any of that part, or why they would be the same teenagers that randomly turn into other teenagers when you're not looking, but my secret greatest hope is that it's like A and the A-Team and Redcoat and the B-Team and Dr. Wren Kingston and it never, ever matters to what is actually going on with the Curse, even on like the most basic level.
So then Uncle Collins goes goblining around their area, and Remy decides it's time to get out of the spooky basement where the obituaries are. On the way home, they pick up Luke (who is crying, because he is literally always crying) and Olivia (bitching) and then they are five teenagers who are about to die because of the Curse. But even though they were just talking about that -- for a really long time; like, not just in passing did they discuss this -- they just blithely drive onto this bridge. Where there is a scary wet demon girl, who scares Miranda into jerking the wheel and sending them all to a watery grave.
And that is the end of this show!
Next Week: Just kidding, they're aren't really dead. Maybe one of them is dead. If one of them is dead, I very much hope that it is Olivia. No offense, I just honestly and sincerely wish her ill.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Last night, Caleb came to Ravenswood to save Hanna and her sisters from a gas-masked monster -- but by the time he showed up, shit was mostly over, so then she asked him to just ... not come home. Ever. They love each other a whole lot and they sure are cute together, but this rando Miranda they'd just met really plucked ol' Hanna's heartstrings, for some reason. Or maybe it was the freaky-deaky tombstones in the graveyard where Ravenswood likes to hold their parties, which seem to be mostly for kids. Two of those kids? Miranda and Caleb. So either they're dead and don't know it, or they are clones, or the whole thing is a Vampire Diaries-style meditation on our shared legacy after the American Reconstruction, or maybe just war generally. Whatever turns out to be going on, I guess it's good thing he stuck around or he would have no idea he was a dead person!
GRAVEYARD
Miranda: "I can't believe we've been standing here all night!"
Caleb: "I guess I just need time to process."
Miranda: "But why?"
Caleb: "Why am I dead? Or why am I alive?"
Miranda: "No, why are we still standing here?"
Caleb: "I just wish this town had a website. I bet these are Questions that are Frequently Asked."
Miranda: "Maybe it's just coincidence that we're both randomly here and randomly dead."
Caleb: "I am from Rosewood, where everything except The Grunwald has a rational explanation. There may be the occasional hyperadrenalized superstate, there are digital simulacrum environments and metric tons of snakes out of nowhere, and Spencer Hastings exists there, but at least there's not actual ghost-magic."
Miranda: "You're a Man of Science and you'll be dead by tomorrow."
Caleb: "That may be. Right now I just want breakfast."
Miranda: "Fine. Let's go hassle my uncle. I'm sure he's a totally normal guy."
"I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it," the old saying goes. And it's true, for what it's worth. But in Ravenswood, where there are no colors, what you risk missing is shit like raven weathervanes winging to follow you down the street despite the lack of a breeze, or random statues bleeding from the eyes at you.