Well, this week’s episode marked a first for the show, no one died.
I suspected Scream couldn’t keep up with this trend. According to IMDB there are only ten episodes in the season. Had they chose to continue to kill a person every episode, last night would have put the body count to four and left six more guaranteed victims. By my count, if the show continued in this direction, we would have quickly ran out of any characters, I can only imagine, an audience would care about. Of the core group, we really only have Emma, Noah and Audrey acting as characters we are meant to connect with. Will and Jake are total heels, it’s clear that Brooke’s classmates hate her and want her killed, and Kieran is so inconsequential he didn’t even appear in this episode.
This doesn’t mean the episode was bad; in fact, it might have been the most illuminating episode yet. In it, we were allowed to see the human side of some characters we haven’t been exposed to before.
Brooke might finally have proven she isn’t just a self-serving asshole like she’s been portrayed in the past episodes. She finally begins to realize her actions have consequences when she chooses to meet up with her English professor rather than stay at the police station with Riley. This causes her to partially blame herself for Riley’s murder. It’s a good moment for some character development as she ultimately concludes that she needs to change for the better. Unfortunately, her admission that she ditched Riley to “answer to a booty call to a guy who didn’t even show,” still leads me to believe these kids need an illustration complete with graphs and statistics to explain to them how this killer operates. Let’s try and forget that this is yet another example of these kids trusting their phones when Noah has pointed out that the killer only operates on social media and text. Does it really never occur to her that she may have been lured away from the station to make Riley an easier target and that’s why no one showed up? Furthermore, Emma makes no attempt to let Brooke know that she received a text from the killer clearly pointing out that the killer intended her to be a potential victim.
Personally I think this might be a set up for the next big death. What better way to rile the audience than to cut off Brooke in the moment of optimistic change?
The death of Riley has also begun to create some shifting of alliances. Emma seems much more at home with Audrey and Noah than her old clique. All three now have a reason to take action and find the killer as he has managed to take something from all of them. This newly formed tripod reminded me of the gang from Scooby-Doo as they were working together while searching out the killer’s lair.
In the lair we discover more about the whole picture and how everyone’s side stories seem intertwined.
The killer is in possession of Nina’s laptop that just so happens to have the evidence Will and Jake have been worried about. It is also the same location that Brandon James had his surgery and where the mask was created.
This evidence leads to the big reveal in the end; that the computer has video of Emma having sex for the first time along with the names of others whose videos were lost to an incomplete download. Since this is also the same thing Will and Jake were worried about getting out, it would appear they were filming people’s sex lives with the intent to blackmail them later on.
I may be wrong, but this new reveal seems to exonerate Will and Jake from the murders. So far, the only thing they seem interested in is the money these videos were connected to. From what we’ve seen this killer seems far more interested in messing with Emma’s life than money.
I’d also like to note that the introduction of these videos goes back to the subtext that Scream started with; that cyber bullying is destructive. If it’s true that Will and Jake filmed Emma’s first time along with other students sexual encounters for the intention of extorting money, then it shows just how devastating the results of cyber bullying can be on young teens and the extent victims will go to avoid it.
