Crossing the Veil

**Supervising Producers**

* Jared Parsons
* Hernany Perla

***Crossing the Veil*** is the third episode of the first season of *Stereoscope* and the third episode overall. It was developed by Jasmine Johnson, directed by Lena Tsodykovskaya, and released by Crypt TV. It stars Bree Winslow, Prema Cruz, Brian White, Blaine Maye, and Jason Liles.

The episode was released on September 4th, 2020.

## Summary

A family should never keep secrets. Can the divide between Callie and Rae be healed?

## Plot

A young man is hiding in the pantry of a house, badly beaten and covered in blood. He sees the reflection of the black monster in the oven door, and tries to keep quiet as it looks for him. When he believes it's gone, he takes out a first-aid kit and starts bandaging up his leg. He hears the monster come back, and hold his breath as it almost opens the door, but runs back outside. When he's absolutely sure that the monster is gone, the man runs out of the pantry and out of the house. It is revealed that this is a flashback to the beginning of the first episode -- as the man goes outside, he sees Lewis running from the monster and fall on the ground. Lewis takes out the disk from the stereoscope, causing the monster to disappear. Lewis looks over at the man as he dies, and the man looks behind him to see Rachel's car pulling into the driveway.

Back in the present, Rae runs into the bathroom, still reeling from what she'd seen. She initially believes that she forgot to take her medicine that day, only to realize that she, in fact, remembered, and sits down on the edge of the bathtub. Upstairs, Callie gets up from the floor, also still in shock from what she had seen. She remembers the times she previously saw the monster -- which were only when she looked through the scope. She goes back to her room and opens her father's journal, flipping through it until she finds a page about the monster. She finds a page talking about how the monster, dubbed "Reek", is connected to the scope, as it showed up whenever her father used it.

That night, Callie wakes up when she hears something pounding at the front door. She goes downstairs, and as she approaches the front door, sees lights flickering, and a shadow moving around. She opens the door ad finds her mother outside testing new motion-sensor lights... at 2:00 AM. Rachel sees the watch that Callie's wearing and asks her where she got it, to which Callie says that she found it with her father's things. She asks if she can keep the watch, and her mother allows it, saying that the watch couldn't have belonged to her father, as he was allergic to silver. Rachel then tells Callie that she can talk to her about her father -- they just can't dwell on the past, as life is about moving forward, not backwards.

The next morning, Rachel is talking to her doctor about her medication, though she is having some trouble as the reception isn't very good. Her doctor tells her that hallucinations aren't a side-effect of the medication she's taking and asks her if she's been hallucinating. Rachel, hesitant to tell her doctor about what she saw, tells him that she read a blog post about someone who had taken the medication and seen things after he'd taken it. Rachel's doctor asks her if she's been hallucinating, saying that she should come up for a session just to be safe, and Rachel uses the bad reception as an excuse to hang up on him.

Meanwhile, Callie has gone into the wilderness upon following directions from her father's journal, and arrives at a storage shed. She goes into the back of the shed and finds a sheet of paper with a triangle on it taped to the wall. She reaches over and pulls back the wall, revealing a secret room. She then thinks back to a time when her father told her about the possibility of parallel worlds, using a folded-up sheet of paper as an example. Callie asks if he thinks he'd be able to travel to another world one day, and her father says that he'd settle for seeing them, but one day they would be. Callie says that she'd be too scared to see another world, and her father reassures her by quoting Rumi; "The cave you fear the most hides the treasures you seek." He tells her to keep loving science, because it's pretty cool.

Callie sets her bag down on the table and takes out the stereoscope, this time choosing to view Picture 2. However, she doesn't see any visible changes this time. Back at the house, Rae tells herself to get it together, and starts to shuffle a deck of tarot cards as a means of calming herself down. In the living room, unknown to her, a shimmer appears in the air, and a bony, clawed hand reaches out through the light. Her eyes closed, Rae asks if she is okay, and if there is anything in the house. She shuffles the deck and draws a card -- The Empress. Somewhat relieved, she draws another card to answer her second question -- and, to her horror, she has drawn The Devil.

In the shed, Callie looks through her father's journal and finds another page about The Reek. Her father has written -- "Am I able to walk through the veil? What happens when the veil doesn't exist anymore?". She then sees a bug crawling on the floor and goes to get the scope. She looks at the bug through the scope, and when she flips the switch, the bug vanishes. Back in the house, Rachel hears her gong being struck, but there is nobody there to have done that. In the shed, Callie hears a thud and gets up to investigate. Rachel, likewise, gets up to see if there's anyone else in the house after taking a knife. Callie looks around the corner and sees the man from the beginning of the episode, who calls into the shed that he knows she's there. Back at the house, Rachel is attacked by The Reek, who has manifested into the house. Callie tries to hide from the man as Rachel runs from the monster. Callie suddenly flips the scope off, which causes the monster to disappear before it can attack Rachel. Once it disappears, Rachel has a breakdown, crying as she tells herself over and over that what she saw wasn't real.

In the shed, the man calls to Callie once again, saying that he knows she's been using the scope, but it's going to get her killed. As Callie gathers her bag and looks around the corner again, she sees that the man is brandishing an axe.

## Continuity

### Revelations

 This episode reveals that our dimension's version of Lewis may not be the one we saw die in the beginning of the series, as Callie and Rae were pulling up to the house after Drew watched him die, having already knew of his death.

## Trivia

* The line about hallucinating when taking medication could be a reference to the 2019 short film *Dream Screechers*, which depicted a monster that attacked people who had taken an anti-anxiety medication.
* The tarot card Rae draws in response to her respective questions, "Am I okay" and "Is there anything in this house?", are The Empress and The Devil.
	+ The Empress card represents the creation of life, romance, art, or business. It can also represent the birth of an idea before it is ready to be fully born, and the need to be receptive to change; in Rae's case, she has not adjusted very well to her husband's death and needs to change something about herself, but she must be willing to take that chance.
	+ The Devil card represents living in fear and/or being caged by an overabundance of luxury -- Rae is likely afraid of how things are going to change now that her husband is gone and feels trapped by everything that is going on. Additionally, the card implies that discretion should be used in personal and business matters, highlighting Rae's quickly-deteriorating relationship with her daughter.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1  Crypt TV. "STEREOSCOPE Episode 3 | Crossing The Veil." Facebook Watch, Crypt TV; September 4th, 2020.
2. ↑ *Dream Screechers* (dir. Jake Hammond; September 20th, 2019)