*Spoilers Ahead*
After a disappointing visit to the bookstore, Ash and friends are on the road again as they head out to see Pablo’s uncle, or brujo as he refers to him, and try and suss out some idea of what to do now.
A large part of this episode focuses on the psyche of Ash as he takes a trip, with the help of ayahuasca, through his mindscape and it’s interesting to see the show trade in gore for psychedelia. It immediately establishes the episode as unique and creates a fun way at examining our guarded lead. Freed from having to keep up his hyper-masculine personality, Ash reveals himself to be a little bit more romantic than you’d assume. His inner peace is, oddly enough, Jacksonville, Florida, a place he always wanted to visit with his girlfriend, Linda, but never got the chance after that fateful night in the cabin.
While Ash is finding himself, Pablo is attempting to build him a new hand and Kelly is suffering from possession by Eligos, the demon from the bookstore. It’s nice of the show to make sense of the seemingly anti-climatic way Eligos was defeated last week by revealing that he has simply taken a new task to destroying Ash and his pals.
Eligos doesn’t wait either. Immediately setting out to destroy Ash by entering his mind and ruining his peace. Ash, with the help of his bearded dragon, Eli, who talks of course, manages to stand up to Eligos. Unfortunately for Ash it also means that in the physical plane he is choking Kelly to death. Ash is subdued by Pablo and things don’t look so hot with Eligos still around. While I’m happy the show has taken to making Eligos a threat I’m hoping he doesn’t stay in control of Kelly for too long, I already miss her snarky responses.
Elsewhere, as I predicted, Ruby shows up to save Amanda from the Deadite that was intent on killing her last week. She reveals herself to be the daughter of Professor Knowby, who is seeking out Ash for killing her family, which is technically true but they were Deadites so it was a bit of a free pass. While Amanda still is the weakest link among the main cast sticking her with Ruby should provide a nice dynamic for her to work off of and it works better than having two disparate people chasing Ash.
The direction also steps back up this week after faltering a little. From the madcap collection of clips from the 70s/80s that starts Ash’s trip to the look and feel of his version of Jacksonville the show proves it isn’t just intense action that can set it apart from the rest of the television landscape.
Ash is incapacitated, Eligos still roams and the dead continue to grow, things aren’t looking great for Ash and the crew and that’s before you count the people chasing them. It’s a long road to Jacksonville and it only seems longer now.
Bits ‘n Pieces
- We finally get to see The Force this week and it’s just as crazy and terrifying as you’d imagine.
- Ruby has Ash’s possessed hand with her and not just that, it’s still moving after all these years!
- “When evil shows up, it blows up.”
- “The city so nice, they named it Jacksonville.”
Jesse Swanson is a would-be writer, podcaster and funny guy who covers TV shows of all shapes and sizes. You can find him on Twitter @JesseSwanson