“Camera Wheelbarrow Tiger Pillow” – aired on October 1, 2019
Written by: Chris Dingess & Lindsey Allen
Directed by: J. Miller Tobin
Grade: 5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
The episode begins with a shot of Jo’s house, eerily similar to that of Norman Bates house from Psycho (1960). Jo wakes up at 3:10 AM, the same time as when the plane crashed to start “Pilot.” She checks on Piper who appears to be asleep with her back turned to Jo, but we know better, thanks to the camera angle from the other side. Piper’s eyes are wide open, further making us question who she is and what she is thinking, thus continuing to build on the momentum of last week’s ending. In other news, I am throwing a champagne party in the name of the first individual to spot her asleep in a scene, any scene!
Piper shows up at Jo’s bedroom door seconds later, claiming that she saw someone outside. Jo checks but sees nobody, although we, the viewers, once again know better. There is a shadowy figure lurking in the dark. And this pattern seems to be the underlying theme of “Camera Wheelbarrow Tiger Pillow,” which is to cast further doubt on Piper’s identity and endgame. It works, and it is indubitably meant to work. You can tell by the hashtag #WhoIsPiper trending on social media and happily used by the show’s official twitter account and the cast to harp on the uncertainty. Later, for example, we see Piper checking her skin behind the ear from where she took the chip out at the end of “Pilot” and cover it quickly with her hair when Jo shows up, which confirms once again that she is well aware of the chip and knowingly keeping quiet about it. Plus, what ‘normal’ child never sleeps, right?
Meanwhile, what really works in “Camera Wheelbarrow Tiger Pillow” from a mystery-drama perspective is something larger than just the questions surrounding Piper.
In my review of the series’ opener last week, I expressed some mild apprehension, worrying that Emergence may rely heavily on a plot-driven narrative and not balance out the accompanying (and necessary) character development. This hour puts those concerns to rest, at least temporarily. It is filled with well-measured, character-building scenes which, in turn, enhance the two action scenes that come late in the episode. That’s right, there are no action scenes in the first half of the hour. When is the last time an episode of a TV show centered on a paranormal mystery did not try to overload your senses with zip-zap twisters and in-your-face shockers for more than half of its run time and still succeeded? This outing not only does that but executes it with great dexterity. Thanks to quality character moments early in the episode, when the action does finally come about, it achieves the targeted impact because the set of circumstances creating it, had been founded on narratives that had suitable time to breathe and grow.
Chris arrives at the house to install security cameras. Jo, the smart cookie that she is – and I adore the fact that the showrunners don’t attempt to blast that fact all over the screen like many other dramas do with theirs, proving that heroes often behave like your ordinary, every-day adult –, notes that NTSB does not have its own trucking equipment and wants to know whom they hired locally to haul away the debris from the plane wreckage.
Alex stops by the house to pick Mia up but wants to know what is going on once he sees Chris and the surveillance equipment. He is worried (rightly so, from his perspective) that Piper is bringing danger into their lives. Piper hears Alex’s concerns from the stairway, which agitates her, and nails begin drilling to the wall next to her from the other side (at least it sounds like it) causing dents. The outing offers no follow-up to this scene. It is simply there, geared toward shining the spotlight on the episode’s underlying theme that I mentioned above. Just how far do Piper’s psychic powers go?
They – meaning, the murky entity behind the clean-up efforts is – hired a guy named Youssef (Laith Nakhli) to haul away the debris. Jo arrives at his site to question him, only to find Benny a step ahead of her. Benny’s role as the convenient investigator who is somehow privy to information and can thus facilitate plot advancement intermittently, carries over from “Pilot.” When asked how he knew about Youssef, his casual response is, “just being great at my job,” which is a synonym for “I have my sources,” another emblematic response given by such characters. It’s fine for now, but I’ll reiterate what I said last week. I hope Owain Yeoman’s role as Benny goes beyond that limited and cliché scope at some point in the near future.
According to Youssef, some government agent offered a substantial sum of money in the middle of the night to do the job which consisted of cleaning the debris and dumping it six miles out in the ocean. Having known Youssef for a while, Jo correctly guesses that he must have kept something to himself to sell later for more money. That something is an air-band radio with an electric quality. Jo places her phone near it and a frequency appears that Benny defines as a “phantom frequency,” one that drug cartels use to communicate “right under DEA’s nose.” Benny is just a fountain information, I tell ya’. Credit an assist to his stats for keeping the story moving forward, and please let him know about it, because he certainly feels underappreciated: “Spent seven months living in the jungle for that story. Didn’t even get nominated.” Yes, he also provides the occasional comic relief, and that is not meant as a complaint. Yeoman’s line deliveries are terrific.
Benny’s “sources” do not, after all, have answers to everything and we owe a debt of gratitude to the mysterious magnetic card for that. Benny hands it back over to Jo because they could not help him identify its origins or purpose. He also informs Jo of the pressure that his bosses are putting on him to come out with a story soon, not that Jo cares. I literally chortled at Jo’s delivery of, “Probably not, though,” with her head tilted and left eyebrow raised.
The figure lurking in the shadows outside Jo’s house has somehow entered the morgue and places something (never mind how he got in there or what that something is) in the mouth of the fake parents’ corpses which causes them to liquefy into a goo of blood, rendering impossible the autopsies that Jo desperately wanted done. Ptolemy Slocum is a stellar casting choice to play the bad guy here, with plenty of previous experience in such roles, notably as the repulsive Sylvester in Westworld. “Camera Wheelbarrow Tiger Pillow” can only benefit from his talent, and milks it to no end.
In her bedroom, Piper reflexively jots down the command “Don’t” a bunch of times in her memory journal, given to her earlier by Dr. Abby, during a brief and scary vision of a surgeon with a bloody cutter. She hastily rips the pages off the journal and stashes them away, another scene designed to increase the ambiguity surrounding her character, an effect further amplified when Jo notices the ripped-off edges in the journal although she just heard Piper lie to her about not having written anything yet.
While at the house, Abby informs Ed that the servers at the hospital had a meltdown and they lost all data. Included in that data is information on Piper. It is part of the second ongoing theme of the hour, which revolves around the unknown bad guys, represented here by Slocum’s character, trying to clean up the mess that can lead to the uncovering of the mystery behind the plane crash and all things related to Piper.
Eventually, we get to a wonderful scene featuring a one-on-one dialogue between Jo and Ed. Jo feels uneasy about Piper perhaps not saying anything on purpose because she is too comfortable with them and does not wish to be sent away. Ed, the mensch dad that he is, first eases Jo’s worries using humor, “Maybe we should get rid of her,” then calmly reminds her that considering what Piper had been through, it would not be unusual for her to want to remain with them.
Side note: Clancy Brown is delightful as Jo’s dad, and the dialogues between the two, and the ones with either of them and Piper, are Emergence‘s golden moments so far, as far as I am concerned. “Pilot”‘s best character-building scene was the conversation between Jo and Piper, and in “Camera Wheelbarrow Tiger Pillow,” the most notable scenes, in my opinion, are also the tête-à-têtes between these three, consisting of the one above, the one with Ed and Piper in the upstairs bedroom, and the one toward the end between Jo and Piper.
Later, the mysterious card, oddly left on the kitchen island, lights up in the middle of the night – please don’t ask why Jo would leave such a capital piece of evidence downstairs by itself through the night. Piper the insomniac goes down to grab it and the card jumps out at her hand as she stretches it out. Piper appears to have some type of magnetic quality or superpower, one that seems to freak her out too as she hurries back upstairs with the card.
In the first episode, showrunners established the milieu in which Emergence operates, meaning the town of Southold, the main characters and their occupations, Jo’s household, etc. This episode, for its part, is squarely centered on the enigmatic Piper. The writing room has managed to carry out this structure so far without any otiose scenes or extravagant drama, which points to five-star planning on their part so far. I have some nascent concerns about creating too many additional mysteries without offering any resolutions to previous ones, but I am more than willing to show restraint in any criticism of that particularity until at least five episodes into the series.
After Benny calls Jo in panic mode to inform her that “they” broke into his hotel room, the episode’s pace picks up. A well-directed action scene accompanied by an apposite score ensues, in which the bad guy enters the house after easily getting past the gullible Chris outside, pretending to be a real-estate agent interested in the house. Surprisingly, he is not there for the magnetic card, but for Piper’s behind-the-ear chip instead. His hand-held detector tells him that it’s located in the pipes below the faucet in the bathroom. Once he collects it, he notices Piper who has been hiding in the laundry closet. She begins screaming in terror, causing objects to shake and move all around them, and light bulbs to blow out. Jo arrives in her police vehicle with the siren on and Ed runs upstairs with a baseball bat, the latter probably presenting the scarier prospect for the bad guy, I’d venture to say. Never mind though, because he is long gone through a window by the time they arrive and find Piper still safe in the closet.
Good-ole dad and ex-husband Alex (or are they just separated?) arrives with his bag, planning to stay with them “until things die down.” In one of the more touching moments of the outing, Jo’s objection is nipped in the butt when Alex interrupts her to say, in the sincerest possible tone, “Everyone I love is in this house.”
Jo is convinced that the bad guys are on a quest to get rid of everything associated with Piper, which means that they will also find the SUV driven by the fake parents, now sitting at the Southold Police Impound. The vehicle has turned into a virtual magnet, pulling anything metal toward itself. Jo observes all kinds of objects floating inside the car. Speaking of which, why is it that only the SUV’s back-seat portion resembles a 19th-century mystery-shop filled with gravity-defying metallic paraphernalia floating around while nothing abnormal appears in the front-seat part? Or, am I nit-picking?
The bad guy shows up at the compound with a tow truck. He is undoubtedly the second most resourceful character in the episode, right behind Benny by a sliver. Jo and Chris confront him in a kooky action scene with the vehicle’s magnetic force playing a major role in the tussle. First, the bad guy’s gun sticks to the side of the car. Later, Chris shoots at him at close range only to watch the bullet curve toward the car once it leaves the barrel. Finally, Jo lets a sledghammer go that she was holding in her hand because she knows that, thanks to her Pythagoras-like angle calculation, the sledgehammer will get pulled toward the SUV and slam into the bad guy’s head on the way, breaking his face. What surprised me the most here is that, while the overall sequence pushes far the boundaries of plausibility even by the standards of paranormal fiction, it is so creatively written and deftly executed that I found myself bewildered and saying “Wow,” rather than irked and exclaiming “Oh come on now.”
Jo decides that it’s time to have a frank discussion with Piper and learn what she knows. Piper admits that weird things happen when she gets scared and fears that she caused the plane to crash. She comes across genuinely distraught when she adds, “something is wrong with me.” She also returns the magnetic card to Jo who thought that the bad guy had taken it. This poses two questions: (1) Did the bad guy even know about the card? (2) When will Piper tell Jo about the chip, if she ever does?
Over a glass of wine on the couch, Jo tells Alex of her decision to control the narrative from this point forward. She is sick and tired of “their” relentless pursuit of Piper and of their way of operating from the shadows. No more namby-pambying. She wants to put the spotlight on them, and who to better use for that purpose than our witty investigator Benny, the all-purpose character of the show so far.
Benny is game for it, naturally, and his interest is further piqued when he learns of Piper. Jo wants him to publish a story on her, except that Jo decides what details to include in the story, which means, no mention of the plane crash or how special Piper is. Jo sums it up with, “Ordinary girl meets extraordinary tragedy.” This conversation between Benny and Jo is cleverly edited with rotating shots of Chris and Yousef dumping the SUV out in the ocean and the badly smashed cranial unit of the bad guy laying unconscious in the hospital bed, hooked to machines. The episode ends with a glitch appearing in those machines as the air-band radio in Jo’s car turns itself on. Compared to today’s outré cliffhangers, this is a tame closing shot, and personally, I would like to thank episode writers Chris Dingess and Lindsey Allen for not only putting forth a first-rate episode but also for avoiding the annoyingly overused eleventh-hour shocker for the sole purpose of creating the whaaateffect, the kind that unduly takes attention away from the rest of the episode. “Camera Wheelbarrow Tiger Pillow” is a conclusive example of a how an outing can be just as memorable without the need for a shocking cliffhanger to end it.
Last-minute thoughts:
– Director J. Miller Tobin is also a co-executive producer of Emergence.
– In case you are wondering if the bad guy had a name, he did not. None was given to him in the credits either. Perhaps, the actor Ptolemy Slocum’s name in the credits is enough to designate the bad guy in the script. I sure would want his name there if I wrote and directed an episode with a notable bad character in the script!
– The episode’s funniest sequence occurs when Jo asks Piper if she knows what the card is but finds Mia and Ed offering pieces of their mind instead. Mia first guesses it’s a “phone-charging thingy,” then a “hotel-room key,” and Ed tops it all with his windshield-ice-scraper one because he saw it being used on Shark Tank. Jo’s sarcasm is off the charts when she replies, “Ok, so helpful. Thank you. All of you. Really.”
– Nice plug-in for Shark Tank by the way, another ABC show, though I am very unlikely to venture into the reality-show domain any time soon. Forever, for that matter.
– I felt bad for Chris in the scene at the precinct when he repeatedly tries to get Jo’s attention while she, in return, barely acknowledges him as she is leaving the precinct. I am not sure what purpose that interpersonal dynamic was meant to serve. Was it to show that Jo does not regard Chris highly or value his input? Or was he being tapped as a patsy to elevate Jo’s status/image? It’s true that he is less seasoned an officer than Jo is, but I certainly don’t get the impression that Jo disrespects him.
– Piper says her favorite color is green. Is that important? I don’t know, but I thought I’d go on record as having mentioned it.
Until the next episode…
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