2x14 The Pest House
Millennium (1996)
2x14 The Pest House, written by Glen Morgan, James Wong and Michael R. Perry, directed by Allen Coulter.
We open with high school kids parked on a bridge at night, in the back seat. One is Brendan Fehr, age 21. After telling a spooky story he hears noises and gets out to investigate:
quote
Peter: He was parked on Copper Cove bridge with his girlfriend, Christy Morse, when the attack occurred at approximately 11:30 p.m. According to her statement, her boyfriend leaves the car and for her safety she locks herself inside.
Frank: And he doesn't return. She becomes afraid because she hears scratching on the outside of the car. She finally makes her escape. She discovers her boyfriend hanging upside down, dead. The cause of the scratching was his hands rubbing against the car as he swayed in the wind. It's an urban legend. None of it's true.
Peter: That's what I would have said except we have a real victim here.
That's an old one: I heard it in high school in a previous age of the world.
We think this may be an "urban legends" story, and they claim later killings do conform to that, but the pattern seems vague to me. We go to a local insane asylum where someone is psychically manipulating the inmates. Another bit of misdirection in who we suspect.
Notes:
"Pest House" is the kid's slang for an asylum for the criminally insane. I never heard that before in connection with mental illness.
Frank does not like being there at all.
The telepath is called "the devil".
Bodies stuffed overhead: no way, that's tiresome.
Melinda McGraw plays the doctor in charge; she was "Melissa Scully" in The X-Files.
She sees multiple faces when the killer advances on her in the last scene.
