The Cutprice Guignol

Last week was found footage horror, this week, escape rooms – Inside No. 9, with these Ferrero Rocher niche horror sub-genres that I happen to have a silly soft spot for, you are really spoiling me!

It’s a simple and scrumptious set-up for this week’s episode of Inside No. 9, as two teenage girls Amy (Maddie Evans) and Milli (Kalli Tant) and their mum (Katherine Kelly) humour their mystery-loving family patriarch Jason (Steve Pemberton) with a trip to an escape room, The Killer’s Lair.

And it starts out fun enough, with Reece Shearsmith dicking around with a mini-torch and the set-up of the room as a serial killer’s gruesome, gory lair. Soon, though, the episode gets bogged down with TV’s worst exposition device, a teenager in a bad mood grumbling meta-textually about their family’s problems just to make sure we’re all caught up and on the same page – it’s downright clunky writing, despite solid performances from the whole cast, a limited and tropey take on a father-daughter relationship that fails to put any stock in the audience’s ability to read into the silence as much as the dialogue.

I’ve written before about how much I love Inside No. 9’s ability to craft well-rounded characters in such a short space of time, and that, for me, is almost completely lacking here; it’s just a collection of tropes wandering around a confined space, tripping over one another, occasionally spouting off their character backstory like we’re in the middle of Dungeons and Dragons character creation sheet.

Of course, that’s just the set-up, and it wouldn’t be Inside No. 9 without a twist, right? Well, as it turns out, we’re not in The Killer’s Lair escape room. No, we’re actually in Jason’s head, as he lays in a hospital bed in a coma, moments away from having his life support turned off.

And, I hate to say it, but this twist is just lame to me. It’s such an obvious trope that it’s become a sort of meme unto itself, a go-to for the lazy screenwriter with no other way to end the story. I’m not saying Inside No. 9 has to be relentlessly brutal to be good, but this feels downright toothless. If you’re going to do the “it was all a dream” trope, then, at this point, it better be downright perfect, and this just…isn’t.

Aside from a couple of decent moments (Jason’s hand matching a print on the wall next to the words “No Escape”, for example), the escape room storyline wasn’t that interesting in the first place, nor did it make great use of the fact that this was a a purely imaginary setting to go all-out with the symbolism and style as I would have loved to see. Building really strong and specific connections between this family unit might have helped drive home the emotional point, but when these characters feel so generic, it’s hard to really care that much.

It’s not that I don’t think this twist can be done well, or even that Inside No. 9 isn’t a show that could pull it off (The Twelve Days of Christine, for example, is an episode that handled a similar premise far better than this one did) – but that CTRL/ALT/ESCAPE just isn’t a good version of this story. The twist, for me, just doesn’t serve to recontextualize what came before in an interesting way. It’s a shame, because I think the escape room premise is a really rich one, but what it turned into here left me wishing I had left this particular puzzle un-solved.

What did you think of this episode? Let me know in the comments below!

If you liked this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of my Inside No. 9 reviews. I’d also love it if you would check out my horrible short story collection, and, if you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

(header image via BBC)