Monday, January 25, 2016

The Returned, Season 2, Episode 4: Virgil



Yet again we see that Milan is the worst man ever – and pretty much the demon that haunts everyone.  Think absolutely everyone in his town has been hurt by him at some point

This time we see the new mystery guy who has been hanging around with Camille. His name is Virgil and his parents handed him over to Milan to stop his pesky thieving. Milan does this by brutally and torturously murdering him (and further traumatising Serge so we can properly force the serial killer redemption. There’s this weird unwritten rule that the more tragedy you dump on a bad guy the more you make him a good person).

Milan also has a nasty habit of dropping people into a basement

Which is exactly where Serge dumps him for his inevitable resurrection. Every time he wakes up Serge shoots him again. I approve

Lucy has a more long term solution – she arrives and takes Milan off Serge’s hands. After “forgiving” him while he talks about how he “saved her” she clonks him on the head, chains him to something heavy and drops him in the lake. I don’t think that will hold him, sadly. Though it’s reaching a level of almost comedy that Milan is really this much of a bad guy – he needs a moustache to twirl.

Simon opts out of this whole Milan slaughter thing or even Lucy’s increasing cultyness. He’s more focused on his baby – which he has just kidnapped from Adele at Lucy’s ordering. Lucy then launches a time travel based soap opera by giving the baby to Simon’s own dead and returned parents to raise (they think the baby is Simon) to leave Simon all kinds of conflicted – especially since he hallucinates his father killing his mother and his parents saying all kinds of creepy culty things. Honestly it’s like they read an ominous cult hand book

This is causing Adele some problems with the authorities because no-one (except Alcide) believes her baby has been kidnapped by her undead lover. And given her odd behaviour, her desire to get rid of her child and her general unwillingness to name him or tolerate his presence she’s prime suspect in having done something nefarious.

Simon decides to bring the baby back to Adele and tell her to head for the hells because there’s a limit the creepiness he will tolerate, apparently. Hallucination murder zombie cult parents are across the line. He also helps Audrey back across the lake since Lena has told her that her parents are back looking for her – and believe in the Returned.


Another less than thrilling family reunion is happening with Lena, Claire and Camille. Claire is super happy to have Lena back, gets her medicines (and meets her mysterious helpful neighbours with his many zombie room-mates) and is all happy to be back together. Camille isn’t, being kind of bitter and nasty – she lashes out at Audrey and spends more time with Virgil. At least this helps her discover her woo-woo.

Yes, the undead have woo-woo. They can touch people and learn things for woo-woo reasons. I could live in hope that some of these woo-woo could be explained but it seems so very very very unlikely. We get random woo-woo but never ever do we get explanations, it’s a rule.

Virgil also champions the idea of kicking out all the living and staying well away from family – partly because of Lucy’s doctrine but also because his elderly parents committed suicide when he returned and went back to them.

And onwards to Julie who is always kind of outside the rest of the plot lines, like an extra hastily thrown in. She’s managed to survive her little dip, apparently swimming the lake. But looking through Victor’s ominous drawings she decides to go hunt down his missing elderly dad – she doesn’t find him but she does find a random elderly neighbour through random house breaking and is randomly invited to stay and randomly told some more of Milan’s life story.

Why all this would randomly happen is somewhat unexplained. Hence, random. I assume this happens because the script says so

This lady is actually the one person in the entire wold who quite liked Milan because after the big flood 35 years ago he acted as the police and authorities so kept order (by throwing people in basements and brutally murdering them). After the flood everyone wanted someone to blame so they decided it was Victor/Louis’s fault because he’s a creepy kid and apparently 1970s France is now the middle ages and we blame dams breaking on small children who draw creepy pictures. Apparently.

Pierre and Jerome, after a series of odd connections, also go to Louis/Victor’s old house to find his creepy drawings. Drawings that must have been 35 years old – yet seem to show a lot of what has happened to date.


Creepy Pierre also tried to keep Toni captive and torment him until he told them where the rest of the Returned people are (something he has no way of knowing anyway – short of unexplained woo-woo. So really on this show he has every chance of knowing). Serge arrives to free him – without murdering anyone at Ton’s insistence.