Dead of Summer Season 1 Episode 2, “Barney Rubble Eyes”: Recap

Dead of Summer "Barney Rubble Eyes" recap and what it sets up

Dead of Summer, Freeform's supernatural horror series set at Camp Stillwater in 1989, had one more job to do in its second episode: explain a little of what the premiere left unexplained. "Barney Rubble Eyes" explains a little, makes the camp's problems more specific and leaves the viewer slightly less confused and slightly more intrigued. The operative word is slightly.

The series was created by Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis and Ian Goldberg and premiered on June 28, 2016. Ten episodes aired through August 30, 2016, and Freeform canceled the show on November 8, 2016, which makes this early hour part of a single-season story. The episode was directed by Ron Underwood and written by Goldberg. It aired on July 5, 2016, a week after the premiere.

The cast has Elizabeth Mitchell as camp director Deb Carpenter, Elizabeth Lail as Amy, Amber Coney as Cricket, Alberto Frezza as Deputy Garrett, Eli Goree as Joel, Mark Indelicato as Blair, Ronen Rubinstein as Alex, Paulina Singer as Jessie and Zelda Williams as Drew. This episode is built around Alex, the counselor who is the camp's preppy, blackmailing wannabe sociopath.

Alex's backstory: from Alexi to Alex

The hour opens with Alex at a piano, or Alexi, as he was once called. His family emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, leaving his grandfather behind. The grandfather's parting advice is that when you want something, you take it. In the US, Alexi's father finds work at a dry cleaner whose owner hates Communists, tells everyone about the American Dream and insists that the boy adopt an American name. That is how Alexi became Alex, and the story is strong enough to explain why he steals, schemes and sizes up other people as targets.

It is a useful sketch, and it is the strongest part of the episode, because it makes a character who would otherwise be only a bully into someone the show can use later.

The first day of camp goes wrong

Cut to 1989, and the campers arrive. The counselors, known to the show as the Stillwater Eight, run icebreakers and bonding games, but nobody pays much attention to the kids. Alex leaves Blotter alone with their bunk to go flirt with Amy, which mostly means insulting one of his own campers and accusing Amy of being a Communist sympathizer. Blotter, meanwhile, buys drugs from a tall, sketchy man in the woods, on the first day with campers after three days of nothing to do.

That night, during guard duty, which the counselors treat as a chance to goof off, one of the campers, a boy named Anton, disappears. Alex finds him in the arts cabin, drawing rocks and a tall man, and Anton passes on a message from the tall man: find him or someone will die.

Deb finds out and tells the counselors that anything else will cost someone a job. Blotter plans a raid on Cricket's bunk after lights out, Alex takes Amy to a creepy cabin, and Anton wanders off again. The question of how many bunks Camp Stillwater actually has, who looks after the campers when the counselors are elsewhere and why two counselors share cabin ten is never answered.

Acid, a skeleton and a firing

After the group finds Anton, Deb says that someone will be fired. Alex responds by dosing Blotter's baby bottle with acid so that Blotter takes the fall. Blotter trips, heads for the rock formation and digs up a skeleton. When he brings Deb and Alex back, the skeleton is gone. Deb sees that he is high and fires him.

The best scene of the hour is brief. Drew sits down opposite Blair in an empty cabin and beckons with a finger, and Blair leans in for a kiss. Drew puts headphones on Blair's head instead, takes them off a few seconds later and says to say goodbye to Blotter for him. It is funny, cruel and well played, and it shows how much more interesting the series gets when Drew is on screen.

Blotter says his goodbyes the next morning and, instead of a farewell to Alex, tells Amy exactly how bad a person Alex is. That leaves seven counselors. As Blotter walks out, he sees the tall man, and the final scene reveals that the dealer who sold him drugs also took the human remains Blotter dug up.

Who plays whom at Camp Stillwater

The love pyramid at Camp Stillwater after episode 2

• Alex wants Amy, and Cricket is in love with Alex.
• Blotter is in love with Cricket.
• Garrett is flirting with Amy, and Jessie is in love with Garrett.
• Amy mostly wants to go with the flow, and now dislikes Alex.
• Drew and Blair, and Deb and Joel, sit safely on the outskirts.

Barney Rubble Eyes review: what works and what does not

The strongest case for the episode is the soundtrack. During the guard scene, 10,000 Maniacs' "Trouble Me" plays in the background, a 1989 song that fits the year, and the scene is the reviewer's favorite of the hour. It says something about the show that a pop song carried the best scene.

The weak case is the mystery. The central trouble with Dead of Summer at this point is that the audience has little reason to care about the mystery. Anton is at the center of the supernatural business this week, but he is a character the show has barely introduced, and his visions of dead people do not yet feel attached to anything. The most intriguing development, the dealer stealing the remains, comes in the last scene.

The series also invites small, distracting questions. The counselors' bet of fifty dollars on who will first hook up with his crush sounds like a lot for teenagers in 1989; adjusted for inflation, it comes to nearly a hundred dollars in 2016 money. Joel and his camcorder are already wearing thin in the second episode. And any viewer who has worked at a camp will find the supervision implausible, so the recommended approach is to stop watching it as a camp show and watch it as a horror anthology with a summer setting.

One structural habit is worth noting: the hour opens with a flashback to a counselor's youth, again at a piano, which suggests a series-wide device. That device is a good idea in principle, since it gives each of the Stillwater Eight a past before they face the camp's trouble. The risk is that eight origin stories in a ten-episode season leave little room for the main plot, and the second hour already shows how thin the central story is when it has to share space with Alex's biography.

The tonal balance is the other open question. The series plays camp-counselor comedy, teen romance and supernatural dread in the same scene, and the episode lurches between them: a drug deal, a prank, a missing child, a skeleton, a joke about a baby bottle. When it works, as in the headphone scene, it is wicked. When it does not, the stakes feel arbitrary, and a missing boy is treated about as seriously as a raid on a rival bunk.

Verdict: a patchy but watchable hour. It sketches Alex's origins well, gives Drew a standout moment and sets up the tall man as a recurring threat, but it asks the viewer to trust that the mystery will pay off. Viewers who liked the premiere should stay; those who did not will find little here to change their minds.

Sources

• Dead of Summer (TV series), Wikipedia — cast, premise and episode details