Dreams are playing more into the real world...
But very few of the connections make sense, or are handled with any sense of care, particularly Taka's.
Tess's storyline was completely random.
The show still seems insistent on creating several more questions with each passing episode but providing no answers.
Several more questions and a bizarre sex scene make for the worst episode of Falling Water so far.
Four episodes of a show is a notable point in its run. It’s the time when, generally, you can take a step back from a series and gauge how successful it’s been at achieving its goals. It’s why TV After Dark do the 4 Episode Challenge: if a series can’t get it together after that many episodes, it probably won’t ever. But before we take that step back after Falling Water’s fourth episode, let’s take a look at the episode itself.
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In “Castles Made of Sand”, Tess (Lizzie Brocheré) goes to visit ex-lover Javier (Thorsten Kaye) in the hospital, Burton (David Ajala) begins to come to terms with the fact that the Woman in Red (Anna Wood) exists only in his dreams, while Taka (Will Yun Lee) attempts to learn more about the cult and experiences an odd dream along the way.
Tess says goodbye to an old friend.
As “Castles Made of Sand” progressed, the question over who exactly the man in the hospital was and, by the end, that question still hadn’t been answered. (Only USA’s description for the hour clarifies a little more on who he was.) Javier, one of Tess’s ex-lovers, was in the hospital being treated for cancer, and he quickly succumbed to the illness, dying before the credits rolled. But that does little to shed light on why he matters to the story.
His request that he have one final dance with Tess was granted to him in their shared dream – though it was crudely interrupted – and while the negative side of that dream is presumably what the show wants us to focus on, there’s another variable at play here: dreams don’t work like that. Just because she lies on him while they sleep, that doesn’t mean they’ll have the same dream… does it?
“I’ll stay here as long as you do.” – Tess
And this is part of the problem. Falling Water has been so tight-lipped on the mechanics of any of the content it is supposedly exploring – at this point, exploring is probably a stretch; loosely referencing but having no idea what to do with any of it is a more accurate description – that it’s impossible to know whether it wants us to believe this to be possible, or whether it’s an indication that Tess may have such a strong hold over her dreams that she can control both her and others’ dreams.
Dreams are affecting the real world.
The show, however, would probably prefer audiences to take more of a note of the faceless men, and the fact that Tess managed to kill one of them. And, perhaps more importantly, the final shot of the hour sees a man lying dead in a dumpster with a wound very similar to that of the faceless man who took an axe to the chest. “Castles Made of Sand” was again peppered with moments of dreams affecting the real world, or occurring first in a character’s mind before transpiring in the real world. Last week, it was Burton who got to see this first hand.
Here, he was once again in on the act, but so too was Taka, plus the aforementioned dead body that was just for viewers. After seeing Woody (Kai Lennox) and the boy bouncing a ball between themselves in a dream, Burton then saw him bouncing a ball by himself in the office. Meanwhile, in a pair of scenes that can be added to the show’s long, long, long list of scenes that make no reasonable sense, Taka dreamed of a woman (Brooke Bloom), in a hotel room that he could see into and she knew he could see into, stripping mostly naked and masturbating for him; later, after meeting her in a café, she did the same in reality.
Other than perhaps to indicate to Taka that something odd was going on in his dreams, this serves no actual purpose. It feels gratuitous on every level, like the Falling Water team were jealous of the attention high-profile subscription cable series get for their frequent use of sex as scene filler. Either that or the writers were being unjustifiably lazy: Taka is a cop, so the connection didn’t need to be at all explicit and certainly not as explicit as this was.
Ultimately, the scene falls flat. Not only because it’s a complete mystery as to why this is what Falling Water chose to do when literally anything else would have worked fine as well, but because it’s impossible to know whether Taka’s somewhat open-mouthed reaction was in response to the randomly sexual nature of what he was seeing or if he’d actually made the connection between his dream and real life. (Yes, he only approached her in the café because he recognised her from the dream, but this is a whole different kettle of fish.)
The episode did also appear to indicate that the woman’s pleasure translated to Taka’s mother screaming. Again, this makes no sense, nor did they try to make any sense out of it.
It’s Groundhog Day on Falling Water.
Aside from seeing his dreams bleed through into reality, Burton got to experience a Groundhog Day-like scenario within his dreams. Each time he began dreaming, he’d be placed in the same room with the Woman in Red, who each time was typing at a typewriter, before announcing that she has a date. As the dreams went on, Burton’s behaviour evolved: he began by trying to get more from her, insistent that her being a figment of his dreams isn’t enough, but by the end, he essentially banished her.
Presumably, this isn’t the last we’ve seen of the Woman in Red, but it does speak to Burton’s ever-changing mentality towards her. Throughout the previous three episodes, we’ve seen him gradually come to terms with the idea that she may not be real; his dreams here only entertain that fact. While the show continues to refuse to clarify her state of existence, Burton has given up hoping that he isn’t just dreaming her.
Now that he’s come to terms with this, it’s likely a question of when, not if, Falling Water pulls the rug out from under him and gives him reason to doubt his change in belief.
Final Verdict: Another hour without answers and with more questions is probably the worst yet.
It’s tough to care about a series that so readily and criminally treats its audience as badly as Falling Water does. Answers seem like the pot at the end of the rainbow for this show, a reward that is only spoken of in very hypothetical terms, never to actually be explored. Instead, all it seems to care for is getting high on its own sense of confusion and misdirection.
Last week’s hour vaguely hinted at the idea of giving at least some answers to the thousands of questions raised by the series, but that hope was blown to smithereens here as the question count just increased. Fundamentally, the lack of answers is causing devastatingly bad structural and narrative problems, the show’s reluctance to give viewers anything forcing itself to tiptoe around any and all threads to the point where I’m not sure even the writers have a grasp on what is going on. This episode was probably the worst so far, and the show as a whole is a complete mess.
Questions and comments:
- I feel like I’ve seen the woman that walked into the hotel room at the end, but I don’t know where from.
- So, Andy (Lou Taylor Pucci) – who is no longer on Bill’s (Zak Orth) study – is a part of Ann-Marie Bowen’s (Melanie Nicholls-King) cult.
- Levon (Shiloh Fernandez) was back, and threatened Tess in a club restroom. I don’t know where they’re going to go with that.
- I haven’t commented on it much, if at all, in any of the previous reviews, but the acting on show here is so stale across the board.
Falling Water airs on Thursdays at 10/9c on USA Network.
Falling Water Review: 1×04 – “Castles Made of Sand”
Bradley Adams