"Face of Evil" is a bad episode. It's a sequel to a so-so first season episode: "Vanity's Mirror". And it states what has been clear for a while: the curses transmute to best suit their owner's desires and evil intentions
So the idea of a model using the compact to kill her rivals, rather than making people fall in love with her (a trope that was already overdone on the series: thanks, "Cupid's Quiver"!) isn't a bad one. The problem is that if feels like the production crew is checking off the boxes to make a sequel.
The first eight minutes feature "flashbacks" by Joanne as she walks through a cemetery. Some of them are flashbacks to events that Joanne wasn't even present for. None of them portray Helen any more sympathetically than she was presented in "Vanity's Mirror". We even get the scenes of Helen having Greg string up Joanne to apparently die by hanging. That'd be a deal breaker for me as far as sympathy for my deceased siblings, but men are from Mars, women are from some planet where sibling murder is okay, I guess.
And we keep getting the flashbacks throughout the episode, and they come across more as padding for a bone-bare plot. Joanne sees Tabitha with the compact, and has a flashback to... Helen with the compact, preparing for the prom. Apropos of nothing.
All the flashbacks show is how much Helen was scum. Director William Fruet tries his best with the clips, but all they show is that Helen was a stone-cold killer even without the compact.
Once the flashbacks are over, we get to the "meat" of the episode. We find out that Joanne was the woman who picked up the compact at the end of "Vanity's Mirror". Model Tabitha is aging and knows it. She gets hold of the compact and discovers that she can use it to exact revenge on everyone she thinks is in her way.
Tabitha isn't that interesting a bad guy: neither as sympathetic as Janos in "Symphony" or Pratt in "Master of Disguise". Or as villainous as McCabe or Rook. She's an unfortunate throwback to the first season villains. It doesn't help that the production staff have a weird idea of media. The scenes with the 80s models being photographed are laughably bad and overproduced. Or maybe that's what they did in the 80s and now it just looks laughably bad and dated.
It doesn't help that the scenes of Emery snapping photos of first Sandy and Kamichi, and then just Kamichi, go on seemingly forever. Shots of someone taking photo shots of someone else are just not exciting. And just pad the already padded episode out further. Not to mention have Barry Greene as Emery acting like he's having an orgasm.
The plot is kind of eh, too. Yes, it's a commentary on how you have to kill to stay on top: they've already done that in flicks like 'Valley of the Dolls'. The show itself has done that before, and there's nothing new here. The people Tabitha kills are either personality-less cyphers like Sterling, or scumbuckets like Emery.
The episode lacks any sense of time. They're filming a boxing ring shoot and Sandy is burned. But then later... that night, they're apparently also filming a shoot on a runway set. What happened to the ring? It's staged like it's the same night, but that doesn't make much sense. The whole thing leaves the episode adrift in time.
Laura Robinson as Tabitha doesn't have anything to do, because her character is so underwritten. She's the model who has reached the peak of her career and it's all downhill from there. She hams it up so badly, she goes to evil so readily, and the theme is so tropish, that there's none of the middle-aged angst that we saw in "Pipe Dream" or "The Sweetest Sting". Tabitha is a model at the top, and kills people to stay there. It's not a particularly sympathetic role as written, so there's nothing that Robinson can do with it.
Gwendoline Pacey as Joanne is... okay. She doesn't have any more to do than she did in "Vanity's Mirror", and turns against the cousins when she doesn't accept when they say that Tabitha might have the compact. Her look of shocked realization when she finally puts two and two together, isn't very convincing. And we see it over and over again.
As for the regulars, none of them are portrayed very well. Jack, who is out of commission due to a cold, is portrayed as a needy child. Micki and Ryan don't have anything to do.
Hey, it's Sandrine Holt from the first season of nu-MacGyver!
Overall, "Face" is a misstep for the second season. It has the stink of the first season on it, and not the good episodes, But the poor-to-mediocre episodes, including... well, "Vanity's Mirror". Which I suppose isn't surprising given it's a sequel. Nothing good ever comes from a bad beginning, and "Vanity's Mirror" was at best a distaff remake of "Cupid's Quiver". "Face" makes no effort to overcome that, or blend into the second season. The ending, where Tabitha ages to death, is practically the same as "A Cup of Time". The episode isn't horrifying, or intriguing, or scary. It just... is.
Built that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
So the idea of a model using the compact to kill her rivals, rather than making people fall in love with her (a trope that was already overdone on the series: thanks, "Cupid's Quiver"!) isn't a bad one. The problem is that if feels like the production crew is checking off the boxes to make a sequel.
The first eight minutes feature "flashbacks" by Joanne as she walks through a cemetery. Some of them are flashbacks to events that Joanne wasn't even present for. None of them portray Helen any more sympathetically than she was presented in "Vanity's Mirror". We even get the scenes of Helen having Greg string up Joanne to apparently die by hanging. That'd be a deal breaker for me as far as sympathy for my deceased siblings, but men are from Mars, women are from some planet where sibling murder is okay, I guess.
And we keep getting the flashbacks throughout the episode, and they come across more as padding for a bone-bare plot. Joanne sees Tabitha with the compact, and has a flashback to... Helen with the compact, preparing for the prom. Apropos of nothing.
All the flashbacks show is how much Helen was scum. Director William Fruet tries his best with the clips, but all they show is that Helen was a stone-cold killer even without the compact.
Once the flashbacks are over, we get to the "meat" of the episode. We find out that Joanne was the woman who picked up the compact at the end of "Vanity's Mirror". Model Tabitha is aging and knows it. She gets hold of the compact and discovers that she can use it to exact revenge on everyone she thinks is in her way.
Tabitha isn't that interesting a bad guy: neither as sympathetic as Janos in "Symphony" or Pratt in "Master of Disguise". Or as villainous as McCabe or Rook. She's an unfortunate throwback to the first season villains. It doesn't help that the production staff have a weird idea of media. The scenes with the 80s models being photographed are laughably bad and overproduced. Or maybe that's what they did in the 80s and now it just looks laughably bad and dated.
It doesn't help that the scenes of Emery snapping photos of first Sandy and Kamichi, and then just Kamichi, go on seemingly forever. Shots of someone taking photo shots of someone else are just not exciting. And just pad the already padded episode out further. Not to mention have Barry Greene as Emery acting like he's having an orgasm.
The plot is kind of eh, too. Yes, it's a commentary on how you have to kill to stay on top: they've already done that in flicks like 'Valley of the Dolls'. The show itself has done that before, and there's nothing new here. The people Tabitha kills are either personality-less cyphers like Sterling, or scumbuckets like Emery.
The episode lacks any sense of time. They're filming a boxing ring shoot and Sandy is burned. But then later... that night, they're apparently also filming a shoot on a runway set. What happened to the ring? It's staged like it's the same night, but that doesn't make much sense. The whole thing leaves the episode adrift in time.
Laura Robinson as Tabitha doesn't have anything to do, because her character is so underwritten. She's the model who has reached the peak of her career and it's all downhill from there. She hams it up so badly, she goes to evil so readily, and the theme is so tropish, that there's none of the middle-aged angst that we saw in "Pipe Dream" or "The Sweetest Sting". Tabitha is a model at the top, and kills people to stay there. It's not a particularly sympathetic role as written, so there's nothing that Robinson can do with it.
Gwendoline Pacey as Joanne is... okay. She doesn't have any more to do than she did in "Vanity's Mirror", and turns against the cousins when she doesn't accept when they say that Tabitha might have the compact. Her look of shocked realization when she finally puts two and two together, isn't very convincing. And we see it over and over again.
As for the regulars, none of them are portrayed very well. Jack, who is out of commission due to a cold, is portrayed as a needy child. Micki and Ryan don't have anything to do.
Hey, it's Sandrine Holt from the first season of nu-MacGyver!
Overall, "Face" is a misstep for the second season. It has the stink of the first season on it, and not the good episodes, But the poor-to-mediocre episodes, including... well, "Vanity's Mirror". Which I suppose isn't surprising given it's a sequel. Nothing good ever comes from a bad beginning, and "Vanity's Mirror" was at best a distaff remake of "Cupid's Quiver". "Face" makes no effort to overcome that, or blend into the second season. The ending, where Tabitha ages to death, is practically the same as "A Cup of Time". The episode isn't horrifying, or intriguing, or scary. It just... is.
Built that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
