1.3 Wanna Play A Game? No secret being kept from Emma is more pivotal than what Maggie, Emma’s mom, has kept buried for two decades. We’ve known since day one that she has a dark history with Brandon James, the killer in a string of gruesome teen murders back in her high school days. As Brandon’s obsession–and who ultimately helped to bring him down, though not intentionally–she is inescapably tied to the current revival of his original rampage. It’s a connection that Emma does not fully make until she overhears Maggie confessing all of this, as well as an implication that there’s even more in her past she’d rather not get into, to the sheriff. After doing her own digging courtesy of the sheriff’s enigmatic son, Kieran, she learns that Maggie is the “Daisy” of Brandon’s James’s fixation. Besides plunging her into a serious bout of emo, this revelation establishes for her that she’s not just another potential victim. She’s at the very centre of the killer’s plans. Sadly, Riley is this week’s victim of the rock-and-hard-place situation in which the killer puts Emma. The “good girl” in the “good girl or bad girl” choice Emma has to make, she’s the one Emma reaches first and whom Emma thinks she can protect by telling her to stay put, thus defaulting her to death. This does not come as a shock, as compared to “bad girl” Brooke, she’s the less interesting and more disposable. Still, she was an adorable part of a quirky couple with Noah, and her death scene as she video chats with him, staring up at “their stars,” is endearingly overplayed. Riley does, incidentally, subvert a horror trope when she is called away to her doom before she and Noah can “do the deed,” as it were. Frankly, I wanted it to be Will this episode. I got my hopes up during the first of two lingering shots of the menacingly spiraling blades of the tractor he’s riding. It’s too soon for him, though, now that we know about his sketchy surreptitious dealings with slimy Jake and, previously, Tyler (RIP). I hope their story gets more compelling, as I really don’t care about either of them, but admittedly I’m a bit too bloodthirsty in these types of plots. We do know now, at least, that the guys have their own sordid secret; we just don’t know what, if anything, it has to do with the murders. Read Holly’s review of the previous episode, Hello Emma, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
