As this episode opens, a woman awakens alone in a room; she can’t remember her name or where she is. On the television screens she encounters, she finds a strange symbol being broadcast and this symbol seems to have deeply effected every person she encounters. The source of the mysterious signal is a television broadcast station called White Bear. But given the strange feeling of dread that name conjures up in our main character, what will she find there? Answers? More questions? Or both?
This episode is a good old-fashioned mystery thriller of the kind that really tickles my fancy. You know, like Lost or the X-Files or some of those great old Twilight Zones, like Five Characters in Search of an Exit, where there’s just a great, weird premise and you can’t even imagine what might be going on. Of course, the problem with these kinds of mysteries is that the solution is never as cool as the mystery. So I don’t entirely fault this episode for kind of whiffing on the big twist. It’s kind of what happens with stories like this and I will say that the first half of this episode is just brilliant, just really intense and cool and surprising. It’s worth pointing out again that this episode really hinges on that central lead performance and Lenora Crichlow delivers by just fully committing to an incredibly intense performance. As an actor, I can’t imagine how exhausting this role must have been; she’s never on screen without being right on the verge of a complete mental & emotional collapse and her performance sucked me right into the episode. Really great direction by Carl Tibbetts also amps up the intensity.
I’ve talked at length about my issues with the plot twist elsewhere, so suffice it to say at this point that the entire episode is predicated on the notion of subjecting a sociopath to emotional torture and I just kind of don’t think that’s a thing you can do. The notion that someone who was down to film a young girl being tortured and murdered probably isn’t going to go into the kind of intense collapse we see in this episode because some people are filming her. I mean, whether she remembers she’s a sociopath or not, she still is one.
Anyway, setting that aside, this is still a lot of fun. The first half is unrelenting and doesn’t let up on the tension and action and keeps you guessing until the big reveal. This is still an episode that, to me, isn’t entirely successful because of some of the issues I have with the twist, and also with the fact that the episode has to be substantially bulked up to even get close to the standard running time with a lot of scenes during the credits feeling like filler. But it’s still really, really fine television. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – a wild premise and an intense lead performance bring the mystery and the thrills for this action-packed episode; the twist is problematic, but the fun is in getting there. 3 ½ stars.