�We may not enjoy living together, but dying together isn’t going to solve anything.� - Helen Cooper, Night of the Living Dead

By Lisa Fary

Wanna be an oddity? Bring a comic book to a bar.

I was at a teaching conference last week, so I missed The Middleman. I made up for it by settling down at the hotel lounge with a trade of Planetary and an overpriced glass of chardonnay.  Luckily, “The Ectoplasmic Panhellenic Investigation” waited patiently on my DVR until such time as I watched it this weekend, bookended by Mad Max and Repo Man.  (Teaching conferences make me want to bathe in geek to get off the sanctimony.  Max Rockatansky’s brand of justice is good for that.)

“The Ectoplasmic Panhellenic Investigation” brings Wendy Watson and the Middleman in conflict with ghosts at a sorority house.  But first, it brings them into conflict with a frat boy in drag and Tyler, episode three’s cutest pirate-themed bus boy suffering from two-day amnesia, who I will totally date vicariously through Wendy.

Tyler is starting to piece together his missing two days, which leads him to the Middleman’s HQ and then to Wendy’s apartment to find the pirate-themed waitress of his dreams. . . Lacey Thornfield.

I felt Wendy’s pain and wanted to dropkick Lacey’s head for her.  Wendy, however, is a stand-up gal and instead doing what I would do in the same situation (blurt out, “Lacey Thornfield is dead! Date me!”), she sends him up to meet Lacey and gives them her blessing.  They’ll need that blessing because they’re going to a vegan restaurant for dinner.

But, even a vegan restaurant pales in comparison to the horrors of a sorority house.  Ida has intercepted a 911 call from the aforementioned frat boy in drag, in which he screams like a girl about being attacked by ghosts while raiding the sorority house.  Upon further investigation, it’s discovered that the frat boy had some part of his brain removed that allows him to hear and see dead people.

The Middleman can’t effectively infiltrate the sorority, so Wendy is sent in undercover, impersonating an out-of-state sister.  What she finds aren’t your traditional ghosts, even by Middleman standards - the house is being haunted by ghosts of the living.  Ghosts of the living that were created by the sorority’s resident mad scientist, Eleanor.

Eleanor, the mildly awkward sister who I initially took as a grudging legacy pledge, is a physics genius with a plan.  She’s built a quantum processor which allows her science nerd friends to take over the bodies of the sorority’s officers, shoving the sorority souls aside and creating ghosts of the living.  Their grand plan is to throw a party so debauched that the sorority loses its charter.

If only Eleanor had used her skills for good.  She and her friends took over a sorority when they could have taken over and reprogrammed the Sci Fi Channel.  Those girls show a stunning lack of vision for evil geniuses.

Before the Middleman can stop Eleanor, she takes over his body.  Matt Keeslar spends the rest of the episode acting like a teenage girl trapped inside a man’s body and is brilliant at it.

“The Ectoplasmic Panhellenic Investigation” was the best and funniest episode of the season.  It’s been pretty good so far, but in this episode the cast is more comfortable with their roles, seem to be having more fun with them, and have mastered the Gilmore Girls beat.  This is the kind of episode that makes me hope The Middleman gets a second season.

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Lisa Fary’s 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. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.