“Night of Desirable Objects” presents us with a monster-of-the-week scenario although it thankfully touches on the mythology enough to maintain forward momentum. This mostly comes in the form of Olivia struggling to recover from her trauma. Last week she couldn’t load a gun, now she’s quite trigger happy. More interesting than her small case of PTSD is her occasional ability to focus on infinitesimal sounds like the flutter of a fly, the arguments of neighbors or distant traffic. Is this a new ability emerging or just a temporary biological side effect of traveling between universes?
There’s also some action involving faux-Charlie with him visiting the secret backroom to speak to the other world via that fantastic typewriter and mirror combination. He’s instructed to help her remember in order to figure out what she knows, although you have to wonder how important that information really is when the villains were fully prepared to kill her in the previous episode without retrieving it. But like Mulder before her, the nature of the show requires the bad guys to have reasons for keeping the protagonist alive.
The actual monster-of-the-week case is straight out of The X-files but it’s well directed by Brad Anderson, who I wish could somehow conquer space and time to be able to direct every episode. It also helps that we get a well-acted and interesting piece of character work by John Savage as the former doctor who helped create the creature. In fact, he’s so good that it’s a damned shame he really only got two scenes. I would have loved to see him get a longer arc that was related to the mythology. It’d have been fun to see him and John Noble go toe-to-toe in a few scenes. Alas, it was nice to see him for the two scenes he had. This serves as yet another reason why I need to rewatch Carnivàle sooner rather than later.
The scene with Walter trying to recreate Olivia’s experience with frogs was sort of amusing, in as far as it involved actually tossing frogs around and was perhaps a nod to Back to the Future. On the other hand, there wasn’t really any indication that Walter was doing anything more than tossing frogs around. Surely he understands that there was more to Olivia’s world-swapping than just speed and an abrupt stop. I would have appreciated a little more sci-fi technical mumbo jumbo from Walter as he postulates on the details of her adventure.
Another plus to the episode was that Meghan Markle did get to utter a single word as Agent Jessup. Of course, her as yet unexplained fascination with anything and everything of a religious nature lead her to an important clue. I don’t think that could have been any more contrived. I am really, really dreading to see where this religious, or more specifically Christian, stuff is heading.
Also, did the creature somehow fill in all the holes he was making to pull down his victims? That’s quite a feat, especially do it so quickly while other people are nearby.
