TV Review: ‘FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, Season 1 Episode 3: MISTRESS’

There’s a pattern starting to emerge in these episodes.

We keep starting in flashback mode and Mistress is no different. Seth is in prison and he’s fighting a big, hulking guy who keeps throwing out insults, they’re just aimed at Seth. Not directly. Instead, the palooka is making fun of Richie, which only serves to enrage Seth and give him what he needs to keep fighting. Interspersed with the fight scenes is the more interesting piece of this flashback, which is Carlos visiting Seth and giving him the lowdown on El Rey. Carlos makes it sound like gangster’s paradise and even tells Seth it’s for “eternity.” Foreshadowing only works when the audience has no idea what’s coming, and in this case, it’s merely cute.

What’s not cute, however, is once we’re back in the current time, we found Carlos on the sour end of a double cross. But this Carlos, with his preternatural abilities turns the tables by vamping out. After killing one of his attackers, he’s interrupted by a phone call. It’s none other than our newly minted not-as-tough Seth, asking (almost begging) for help. This time, Carlos assures Seth that there will be help across the border (at night, of course) and he turns to deal with the second attacker. He once again vamps out and the last shot we see is of his fangs. They’re definitely trying to establish the vampires early on, which is a good thing.

The episode separates the Gecko boys as they’ve reached the hotel where they will eventually run into the Fullers. They pull the bank teller out of the trunk (another homage shot to the movie) and Seth leaves to get food. We get to see the inside of a Big Kahuna Burger restaurant. Can you believe they have a Special Agent Utah meal? I half expected Seth to say, “Give me two!” He didn’t, and instead makes eye contact with a woman sitting in a booth. He takes her into the bathroom for some sink sex and we find out this is his ex-wife. After, they sit down at the booth and Seth tries to pay her off with $4 million in bearer bonds. Of course, Seth is only trying to protect her as the heat level is way too high on them right now. She reacts poorly, saying they’re partners and she loves him. She doesn’t want to be paid off like a whore.

Seth attempts to explain about their past, how Richie became so smart by figuring out ways to keep their father from kicking Seth’s ass. This wasn’t unexpected; I mean, c’mon, how often are criminals not beat on, molested, or otherwise mistreated as kids? The writers take it a step further into the non-creative realm by having had Richie save Seth’s life from a fire. So now Seth owes Richie, even to the point of Seth’s own detriment.

Back at the hotel, Richie’s left alone with the bank teller. Those of you who’ve seen the movie know the outcome of this situation, but the episode does a fine job of addressing the why with the new mythology. He’s ranting about how smart he is, how good he is, which sounds a lot like sibling jealousy to me. Richie and the bank teller make uneasy friends as she helps clean his hand wound, but he’s still plagued by voices and visions, most of which revolve around seeing the bank teller posing in sexy clothes and pouty lips on the hotel bed. This works in the show since they changed the bank teller to a young, cute MILF instead of the older, dumpy teller from the movie. Every so often he sees Santanico instead, and she keeps telling him to free her. During Richie’s final vision, a snake slithers down his throat, and while he’s convulsing, the teller gets Richie’s gun. As he comes out of the vision, she points it at him and pulls the trigger. Empty chamber. Again and again she tries, all empty. In the movie, he does tell Seth the teller tries to escape. Now we know he wasn’t lying, except that part of the conversation was omitted from the episode.

Meanwhile, the Fullers are still on the road. Jacob is letting Scott drive the Winnebago and it breaks down, steam erupting from the engine. As luck would have it, they break down right in front of a bar. This is lucky because Jacob thought it’d be a good idea to go on a long ass road trip in a used Winnebago without tools. Jacob heads into the bar to ask for help and when the bartender asks him if he’d like something, he looks longingly at the whiskey she’s pouring, but shakes his head no. In the background you can see a familiar Ranger hat…

Jacob finds a friendly barfly to help him fix the Winnebago, only the block is still too hot and Jacob burns himself. He screams “Goddammit” over and over while he beats the bumper with the wrench. A little melodramatic, but they’re trying to pound the point home: Jacob has lost his faith and he blames God for the death of his wife. The barfly suggests letting the engine cool and they head back inside where Jacob succumbs to his temptation to drink.

Kate eventually finds her father in the bar, more than a little drunk. He brushes off her attempts to help him and she leaves, returning to the Winnebago’s cargo area. I’m not sure what she was searching for (do they have a miracle cure for drunkenness where the tools should have been?) but what she finds rocks her world. It hearkens back to a conversation in episode two about the night their mom was killed. Jacob shut the door on it, saying he’s said all he was going to say. This, of course, tweaked Kate’s ass, and was what drove her to try and run off with her dead boyfriend. Jacob refuses to speak about the night for good reason, since what Kate finds is a police report detailing the DUI and his charge for vehicular manslaughter. This is a departure from the movie in a big way, since Jacob wasn’t even in the car the night his wife died. It’s true that he felt responsible since he never fixed the brakes, but this is a whole new level of guilt.

Kate, on the other hand, wants to know more and is standing behind the Winnebago on her phone, lying through her teeth to get more information about the accident and impending court case. Jacob, still drunk, gets behind the wheel and backs up, knocking Kate over. Once they establish she’s fine, she holds out her hand and tells her father she’s driving. At that point, most teenagers might have shamed their father, screaming about how his drunkenness killed their mother. But not Kate… she remains calm, saving that little tidbit of information for a much more gut-wrenching moment in a future episode.

The episode also introduces us to Professor Tanner, played by Jake Busey. Gonzalez meets up with him at the same bar where Jacob is soliciting help for his broken radiator hose. The Professor is an expert in ancient symbols and thus Gonzalez is picking his brain over the Cartel Killer’s eye symbol. Gonzalez shows the Professor Richie’s knife. The Professor seems almost aroused as he fondles it and explains that it’s a tool used in ritual sacrifice and, by all accounts, shouldn’t exist. It was used by worshippers of the “vision serpent.” Did your light bulb just flip on?

The Professor goes on to explain that the Mistress, wanted for her beauty, was transformed by the Serpent God into a powerful demi-goddess. She was thrown into a pit of snakes and consumed, turned into a “mistress of the night.” More light bulbs?

There’s a fun scene where the Professor tries to steal the knife from Gonzalez using Jedi mind tricks (watch the hand motions) and Gonzalez replies with “You going to tell me it belongs in a museum?” To which the Professor says, “It belongs to the Nine Lords of the Night.”

Naturally, we cut back to Carlos and nine men, presumably the Lords of the Night. Carlos presents them with a gift, which is a cargo truck full of half-naked women. Carlos calls this a sample of things to come, which leads me to believe we’ll be seeing the story possibly tie-in with the very real and disturbing issue of human trafficking. The fangs come out…

The last thing the Professor imparts to Gonzalez is a story about brothers, summoned to the underworld to trick the gods, to beat them at their own game.

The episode ends with Seth hugging it out after finding the teller’s disemboweled and eyeless corpse in the hotel room. The movie scene was far more powerful than it is here, which is a bit depressing. That scene showed Seth’s desperation, his tenuous grip on how much more he could let Richie get away with. In this scene, it was more about Richie and it’s going to be okay.

This episode was the weakest so far, but it started tying the threads together. Let’s see what next week has up its sleeve, shall we?