Scream episode review — 2.5 — Dawn of the Dead
By: Patrick J Mullen
Tags: TV, MTV, Scream, Mystery, Horror

Original air date: June 28, 2016

Director: Oz Scott

Writer: Heath Corson

Rating: 4/10

Like the last episode, I’m going to applaud this one for doing something pretty different. But also like the last episode, it’s not very good. In fact, I think this is the worst episode so far.

The police show up at the school and everyone’s put in lockdown, with the police interviewing people semi-related to Jake one by one, keeping everyone else in the library. Or at least the couple dozen extras that they have. I don’t want to complain about this, and maybe it was indeed an after school thing that got shut down, but still, I think there were more than 30 students in attendance.

Anyways, Brooke is convinced Seth Branson has killed Jake in order to get at her or something.

And the entire time in the library, Audrey’s eyeing Stavo.

Then Emma finds Jake’s phone, believing someone had slipped it into her backpack at some point. You’d think she’d just go to the police at this point, and that at this point, her claims from the other night about an attacker would be taken seriously, but she acts a little illogically here.

And then things get a little weird. When Kieran learns that the police are checking lockers, he says he needs to get to his because he has something he doesn’t want the police to find, but he won’t tell Emma or anybody else what it is. So Noah helps him sneak out and get to his locker.

And he gets caught with a gun. He’s taken away to talk to the sheriff, who says he understands, and is willing to overlook it as long as he helps him out. He does so by telling him about Emma’s phone, so they talk to her, and she’s mad at him.

I honestly don’t really get what Emma’s on about here. To pre-emptively not to want to go to the police here is insane. You understand it a bit more after she actually talks to the sheriff and he’s only interested in her mental health history, but I don’t know why she thought that would be the case.

At any rate, she’s taken to talk to the psychology teacher, Kristen Lang (Austin Highsmith), and placed alone in an office, which she finds (after receiving a call from the killer) she’s locked in.

She screams when she sees the killer and shit, and she breaks the window to get out for some reason. And when she shows up bloody (from cuts on the broken glass), this doesn’t help her “I’m not insane” case, but she just claims it was a panic attack, not that she saw the killer and everything.

Meanwhile, Audrey starts basically a riot when she steals away Stavo’s iPad and shows the 20 or so extras the drawings he’s done, which leads a few people to start beating him (and also break the iPad).

But before that, she talks to Noah and accidentally reveals that she’s been getting calls from the killer, though she tries to insist she meant texts.

But it’s enough to convince Noah to snatch her phone when he gets the chance, and we end on the cliffhanger of him seeing the gif of her with Jake’s body. So that’s a pretty big bombshell. Obviously we as viewers mostly understand the context of that (not completely, because we still don’t really know what she was doing in contacting Piper), but he doesn’t, so that’s pretty great dramatic irony.

But this episode is bad. Character actions are wildly illogical — mainly with Emma, but honestly down to the Sheriff writing off Kieran bringing a gun to school. This is just wild stuff.