From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series – Episode Five Review

After the action packed finale of Let’s Get Ramblin’, From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series slows down the pace somewhat as we’re given a part of the story that should have been tense, but ends up being more convoluted than it needed to be. Like last week’s episode, Self Contained isn’t bad, but it’s not the dizzying heights of greatness we had in episodes two and three.

The Gecko Brothers are finally reaching the border having escaped Ranger Frederico and the Fuller family are co-operating against their will. However, with their names plastered on TV around the country and their names being talked about on the radio, they’re going to need a lot of luck in order to get into El Ray.

Just as the series has been thus far, Self Contained takes a short portion of the original movie and stretches it out over a 45 minute timeframe. But unlike previous episodes, Self Contained doesn’t quite succeed. In last week’s episode review, praise was given to Marcel Rodriguez for crafting a script that expanded the movie’s plot without feeling padded, but Matt Morgan and Ian Sobel have somehow missed the boat. They’ve got all the characters right and the dialogue is great, but there are unnecessary additions to the story which feel like contrivances to fill out the runtime. Did we really need the scene with Jacob knocking out another driver, forcing Scott to drive the vehicle in front? It feels as though the pair thought this would ramp up the tension, but it just feels lazy and forced.

One element that does work however is taking something that was essentially a joke from the original movie and expanding it into a genuine part of the plot. The gag from From Dusk Till Dawn was that Cheech Marin (of Cheech and Chong fame) played several parts in the movie including the border patrol agent and the mysterious Carlos. But because Carlos has been given a much bigger role in the series, they turn the gag of Marin playing both characters into a plot point. Carlos needs the Gecko Brothers to get across the border, so he uses his as-of-yet-unexplained snake shape shifting powers to take the form of the border patrol agent to help move the RV along. It’s a clever way of nodding to the 1996 movie without overly stating it’s an homage.

Criticisms have been thrown at Madison Davenport and Brandon Soo Hoo for being bland/uninteresting characters, but they seem to be coming into their own. Davenport’s Kate is still incredibly whiney, but her motivations are becoming clearer and it should lead to interesting dynamics as we reach the final half of the series. Scott on the other hand was never a very defined character to begin with so Soo Hoo had a clean slate to play with. Unfortunately he’s been held back by dreadful characterisation that exemplifies the media’s portrayal of “geek culture”, but in Self Contained, he’s not hampered by this writing to a show-stopping degree and instead becomes a badass with valid points. He does have an anti-bullying speech that is a little on the nose, but he handles himself quite well.

Despite the criticisms laid out in the above paragraphs, Self Contained is another good episode of what has been a great show. The acting is solid, the dialogue is beautiful in that Tarantino way of writing and the final moments of the episode have brought us to our final resting place – The Titty Twister. Some might claim it’s taken us a long time to get to this point, but From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series is about to get really interesting…

Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.