Moonlight"Episodes 5, 6 & 7"
Original Air Dates: 2007
Jon Gus - TwoCents Staff Writer
We've had a few weeks of Moonlight come and go and Jon Gus recaps the past three in a long recap.
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Moonlight
ReplyDelete"Episodes 5, 6 & 7"
Original Air Dates: 2007
Jon Gus - TwoCents Staff Writer
Moonlight #5 “Arrested Development” – update brief
In this episode, Mick and Beth track down a 200 year old pubescent vampire who is preying on call girls. He finds the girls online, draws them out to a public place, and ends up killing them when they dismiss him as a young kid.
Brought into the fray from different sides, Mick and Beth team up again to hunt down this vampire and stop him – Mick employed by a missing girl’s parents and Beth by the story of the preyed-upon call girls.
They end up tracking down the young vampire, who had been suffering from acne over the past two centuries (yeah, I’d be a little disgruntled, too), on the Santa Monica pier right before he’s about to kill the missing girl. The confront the vampire and a fight ensues on the rollercoaster track above. Mick narrowly misses being taken out by a rollercoaster car, turns the tables on the young looking but older vampire, pinning him in a last second. The rollercoaster car makes a second round on the track decapitating the pubescent vampire.
As the story wraps up, Beth steals a quick kiss from Mick’s lips, freezing him where he stood. Earlier she had asked him how sex works between vampires or between vampires and humans. Mick largely dismisses the question, but then revisits it in his mind as he watches Beth walk briskly away from the kiss with a large smile on her face…and his.
A great angle on vampires in this one, with the young pimple-faced antagonist shaking it up in LA. There was an old black & white picture of him on a front porch in what looks like the 1800’s with a bevy of prostitutes, which stayed with me. Without directly stating it, we assume he was turned by these vampire prostitutes as a young boy and has been wandering the world ever since. Some might think that an agonizing fate for a young boy. Even if they were older, most wouldn’t want to live forever for fear of going mad. I wouldn’t mind walking this world for a couple hundred years. As long as I didn’t have to put up with acne. Oh, and as long as I had some cool other vampire friends around to pass the time with.
Moonlight #6 “B.C.” – update brief
In this episode, a new drug is causing deaths in LA. Recording a fluff piece for a new clothing line, a model drops dead from undetermined causes. Beth picks up the scene from the models friend which leads her to a new club with an exclusive VIP room. Little did she know, the club was being run by a very old vampire named Lola who was dealing out a deadly mixture of vampire blood and silver. Coincidentally, Josef asks Mick to track down a former vampire lover of his who had disappeared with $1 million of his money – named Lola. Lola had been immobilizing vampires with the silver she had purchased to drain their blood and deal out this new drug, called Black Crystal.
Mick meets up with Beth in the middle of the night at the morg (again) and they pursue Lola together. At the club, Beth obtains some black crystal and is seduced by some of the words Lola says to Mick about turning Beth into a vampire.
Putting together her story, Beth becomes curious and tastes the drug which gives her some of the feelings of being a vampire. She immediately dressed up in the skimpiest thing she can and heads to Mick’s apartment, under the influence and intending to seduce Mick. She comes on pretty strong, but Mick resists, and holds her in the shower to sober her up.
The next night, Mick infiltrates the warehouse where the drug was being manufactured, faces a very wiley and impossibly quick Lola, but vanquishes her into a vat of her own silver solution before blowing up the factory. The ensuing fire destroys any evidence of the vampires within from the police about to raid the warehouse.
Another good episode. Mick and Beth get impossibly close before they pull away at the last moment. Seems Beth is doing everything in her power to consciously seduce Mick. My only qualm was the part about the silver. I always thought it was used to put down a werewolves, but I didn’t think it had much of an effect on vampires. Nonetheless, I really liked this one as it added some intriguing information about vampires (Josef first met Lola hundreds of years back when she was putting together a pirate army) and all of the history they would have witnessed. Before Mick puts them down…
Moonlight #7 “The Ringer” – Update Brief
The tension in this episode of Moonlight tonight was perfect. The catalyst? Coraline. Mick’s ex, or so we’re led to think, shows up and really shakes things up.
Mick visits the scene of a building fire in downtown LA and bumps into Beth, who’s there covering the fire (with a different cameraman). Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a photographer shooting the fire who’s the spitting image of Coraline. He stares in disbelieve and Beth’s jealousy becomes palpable. Here’s a quick recap:
• Coraline, who’s now known as Morgan, has been shooting pictures for Beth for a while now. In one of the shots of the fire, Mick and Beth spot the image of a man assaulting a woman – in mostly the same way Mick dispatched Coraline. And the woman in the picture has a tattoo on her shoulder, just like Coraline.
• Mick is absolutely convinced it’s Coraline and that somehow she’s setting him up by re-enacting the manner in which Mick murdered her, but there’s one big problem with the theory, aside from the fact the Mick killed her 20 some-odd years ago. Mick’s infallible nose is telling him that this Morgan girl is human, not vampire.
• The day after the fire, Morgan/Coraline stops by Beth’s office at Buzzwire to tell her that her place had been broken into the middle of the night and that the intruder stole her expensive cameras, and nothing else.
• Beth is convinced that Morgan has caught Mick’s eye and becomes wide-eyed with jealousy. Nonetheless, she recommends Mick as a private eye to help her track down her stolen cameras.
• Mick visits Morgan’s place and grabs a set of conveniently placed finger prints. She mentions that she likes decorating with 50’s style. Strangely, the prints lead to a guy who’s been legally dead for 3 weeks.
• Mick pays a visit to the home of the thief (which appears to be located on Wisteria Lane) with Josef and the two leap up to the roof to enter. Within, Mick finds a copy of the same book he saw in Morgan’s place (referencing reincarnation) that contains a key to the thief’s safe. In the safe Mick finds Morgan’s cameras.
• Mick asks Josef to be present at his apartment when he invites Morgan over to give her back her cameras. He wants Josef to see how much she looks, talks and moves exactly like Coraline. And when Josef sees her, he’s stymied as well. But Josef can’t except that it’s Coraline because she smells human.
• Coraline, er, Morgan then proposes that she and Mick take a drive to the Hollywood cemetery that night to look for the thief’s funeral urn (he was cremated) to see if it produces any leads. Morgan distracts the guard, and Mick slips into the mausoleum only to find an empty slot where the urn should be. Leaving the mausoleum Mick is attacked by the thief (also the man in the picture Morgan took of the burning building) and the two struggle out onto the lawn. The thief’s obviously a vampire given the way he fights off Mick, who vamps out fangs, eyes, and all just as Morgan runs up and sees him. Confused, Mick runs after the fleeing Morgan to explain but makes it worse, traumatizing her in the process. He rips her shirt to look for a tattoo that Coraline had on her shoulder, but doesn’t find it. Morgan runs away.
• Mick gives a lose explanation to Beth about Morgan’s resemblance to his ex-wife, but neglects to mention how Coraline was the one that abducted her when she was young. Most likely saving that fact for a better moment. He does, however, mention that he killed his ex-wife, which makes Beth squirm a bit. This kind of chills the flirting and jealousy we saw earlier in the episode.
• In the last scene, we see Morgan at home. She sits in front of a mirror and removes the make-up covering a tattoo of the fleur-de-lis.
I thought this was such a good episode because of the great tension that Coraline created. Kept me glued from scene one and I couldn’t completely figure out if it was Coraline until the last frame. She presents such a great ying to Beth’s yang and Mick is completely taken with her, even given everything she had put him through. The flashbacks to the 40’s were fantastic – the scenery and folks in the background were mostly black and white, but Coraline’s red dress, the candles and Mick’s clothes were in full color; the music created a sweet ambiance (soft samba and Louis Jordan’s Ain’t That Just Like A Woman); and the slight blur gave it the subtle feel of a nostalgic memory. And Coraline looked faultlessly alluring in her 40’s hair and dresses. Hopefully we’ll get more flashbacks from this back story.
The use of the fleur-de-lis? A clear reference to Dumas’s Milady de Winter, the femme fetale who was expelled in the past by Athos of Musketeer fame, but returned to the story to cause a ton of trouble. Milady of course also had a tattoo of the fleur-de-lis. Cheers to the writers!