Moonlight: What’s Left Behind
By Lisa Fary
It was a compelling opening for Moonlight this week, with a girl banging on a hotel room door and blood flowing under the door and onto her shoes. “Moonlight’s stepped up this week!” I said to John. Then I realized we were watching the last minute of Ghost Whisperer. Stupid Tivo.
Moonlight’s actual opening scene was ripped from my childhood nightmares - the nightmares that made me set up a perimeter around my bed, like the kid in this episode. Unlike this kid, we didn’t have an attic in our house, for which I was grateful. Without an attic, I never had to worry about an attack from above, although it happened in my dreams all the time.
Dad, if you’re reading, that’s why I could always sit still in school. It wasn’t because I was a good kid - I was freaking tired from not sleeping.
This kid Jacob, though, lives in a turn of the century Victorian house with secret entrances and an attic. He gets snatched from his bed through the ceiling.
Having left her job at BuzzWire, Beth needs a reason to be on the show and to work Mick’s cases, so the Shaggy DA offers her work as a civilian investigator on the Attic Snatcher case. When they pull up, Mick is standing across the street - in full “aren’t I mysterious and sexy?” mode - staring at the house and having a WWII era flashback. His best friend lived in that house back then, and at some point, Mick banged his best friend’s wife.
So the guy living in the old house might be Mick’s son, and the missing kid might be Mick’s grandson.
In the end, it all turned out OK. Mick didn’t really betray his friend because, as he explains, everyone thought the best friend died in WWII. Even though a baby was born seven months after the best friend came home instead of nine months after, and there was talk that the baby was the biggest premie anyone had ever seen, that giant premie wasn’t Mick’s progeny.
Of course, we have to sit through an hour of speculation, sepia-toned flashbacks, and meaningful looks before it’s resolved.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Mick had maliciously nailed his best friend’s wife and fathered a baby? Does the vampirism have to be Mick’s only flaw? I get the feeling that some writers are overcompensating for the blood drinking thing by making Mick eternally good, without realizing that eternally good is eternally boring.
Now that the non-drama of Mick’s imaginary son is out of the way, we can get to the case of the Attic Snatcher. Newly minted civilian investigator Beth remembers that she covered two similar kidnappings the previous year for BuzzWire. The other kidnappings also happened in turn of the century Victorians shortly after renovations. Beth thinks hard. . . Jacob’s house was renovated last year! It must be the same guy!
Jacob’s dad hands over all of the contracting paperwork to the police, which seems to lead them nowhere. However, after some careful probing by Mick, Dad remembers a metalworker who liked to work at night and, miraculously, remembers the guy’s name. Dad couldn’t remember anything for the cops, insisted that there were so many workers going in and out that he couldn’t keep track. But, Dad pulls a name and a trade out of his ass in sixty seconds for Mick.
Armed with a name, Mick tracks the guy down to a dilapidated Victorian house surrounded by vacant lots down by the freeway. The houses belonging to those lots may have been torn down, but their basements are still in the ground. Mick follows the guy down into one of the abandoned basements and confronts him. The guy swears he’s helping Jacob get over his fear of the dark, and when Jacob is no longer a dark fearing wussy boy, he can go home.
Mick thinks he can reason with the guy and steps too close - the guy shoots himself in the head without giving up Jacob and giving no indication to where he’s hidden. Mick turns on the vamp hearing and listens for Jacob’s heartbeat, which is coming from behind newly built brick wall.
Yep. The kid was walled up in the basement. Has someone in the writers’ room been reading Edgar Allen Poe?
The kid gets rescued, Mick learns he doesn’t have a son and is reassured that he isn’t a bad guy, blah, blah, blah. Back at Jacob’s house, the little boy points to a photo on the wall and says, “Look! It’s Mick!” Dad takes the photo down - and there is Mick circa 1942.
Surprisingly, Dad doesn’t explain it away as a guy who just looks like Mick. It’s all over his face - Dad doesn’t know how, but the guy in the photo and the guy who saved the kid are the same. Of course, it helps that Mick’s name is on the back of the picture.
Everything is pointing toward Mick being discovered in the season finale on May 16th: the blackmailing paparazzo last week, the WWII photo this week, and the woman in the season finale promo saying, “I’ll give up every vampire in Los Angeles.”
I’m hoping Mick’s vampiric secret does get found out and he has to start over somewhere else. That would bring a new dynamic to Moonlight. CBS could even turn Moonlight into a franchise like CSI. Or it could go in the direction of The Incredible Hulk or The Fugitive with Mick on the run, helping new people in a new town every week, while being pursued by the authorities.
Apparently, CBS took another option: they’ve canceled the show.
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Lisa Fary is a graduate of the creative writing program at Florida State University and holds an advanced degree in Special Education. Her early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl.
