Behind Her Eyes: Ending Pulled Out of Fantastical Hat

There's a fundamental guiding principle about mystery/science fiction hybrids that I've heard endorsed by many on science fiction convention panels over the years, including me, that you shouldn't mix protocols, because your readers and viewers won't like it.  Here's a hypothetical example: a murdered body is found in a room with the doors and windows locked from the inside and completely intact.  The world in which that body is found is ours, in 2021.  You can't solve the crime by suddenly, at the end of the story, have the murderer beaming in from the outside. 

Now I'm telling you this because, although Behind Her Eyes doesn't quite do that, it comes close, too close, and I was irritated by the ending.   It spoiled an otherwise suave, tense, stylish six-part mini-series that just showed up a few nights ago on Netflix.

The set-up is: David is unhappily married to Adele, starts an affair with Louise (whom he meets in a bar and they kiss before they both realize that Louise is working in David's new office), and Adele, not knowing about David and Louise, becomes close friends with Louise.  There's also another character, Rob, who was friends with Adele and David a decade ago, and one of the two may have murdered.  That's a pretty strong and intriguing set-up, and the story is very well played by Eve Hewson as Adele, Simona Brown as Louise, and Tom Bateman as David -- especially Hewson and Brown, who are riveting and exceptional in every scene.   The dialogue is snappy, too, with Louise tossing off lines like "you washed me away" after David takes a shower after he makes love to Louise.

But the plot is good, too, up to but not including the end.   All three major characters -- David, Louise, and Adele -- are occasional liars, and one is very likely a murderer.  It's never clear who is taking advantage of whom, until it all comes to a head and is spelled out at the very end.  

[Spoilers ahead.]

It turns out that Rob mastered the ability, at least ten years ago, to swap his consciousness with someone else.  He does this with Adele, who doesn't like her consciousness inside Rob, and when "he" says so, Rob inside Adele kills Adele inside Rob.   Something similar happens at the end, after six episodes in which the only inkling of such abilities are ephemeral whisps in air when the characters are sleeping and talk of lucid dreams.

Which to me was a rabbit out a hat, a beaming in to solve a murder, in a story that deserved a less fantastical ending.

Into the Dark: The Body: The Hitman and the Supernatural

I said in my review last week of Into the Dark's current episode, "The Current Occupant," that I'd be going back and coming back to review all the earlier episodes, so here's my review of "The Body," the very first episode in this Hulu series.

The story is about a hitman, on Halloween, so it has a supernatural element, which doesn't become fully apparent until the end.   The ending thus becomes something of a twist, and it's a pretty good one.  Our hitman is apparently invincible, but it turns out this invincibility applies only to human antagonists.

[spoilers follow]

He, our hitman, named Wilkes, is also impervious to women and romance.  Beautiful, resourceful Maggie would love to be in bed Wilkes, but he says no to that, even as he begins to increasingly rely on her in his increasingly complicated and difficult attempt to deliver a dead body he was contracted to kill.  Indeed, he's so determined that there be no "we" - he and Maggie - that he kills her as soon as he realizes he's become too dependent upon her, and may be finding her erotic appeal too hard to resist.

Here, a question arises about Maggie.  Why does she continue to work with and do her best to help Wilkes, after she realizes he's a killer?   The non-supernatural answer is she's just so stimulated, mentally and physically, by Wilkes and what he does.  But the twist at the end offers a much better answer: she's some kind of supernatural being who feeds on the energy of death.

That's completely appropriate for Halloween, and I sort of half-expected a twist along those lines, because ... when Wilkes kills her, he doesn't chop off her head or blow her to bits.   The Levinson principle when it comes to whether a character is really dead on television is that the head has to be separated from the body, or the body completely destroyed.   Maggie suffered neither.

But the 90-minutes was still well worth viewing, lifted by the excellent acting of Rebecca Rittenhouse as Maggie, and Tom Bateman (whom I also just started watching in Beecham House) as Wilkes.  And I'll be back soon with a review of another episode from Into the Dark.

See also:  The Current Occupant