The Cutprice Guignol

As we head into the last few episodes of this season, we get to spend time with one of my favourite characters – even if it doesn’t make for one of my favourite episodes.

This episode kicks off with the chauffeur who originally drove them to the venue turning up once more after a car accident (and sporting what appears to be my cat Mia as a wig), leading to arguments between the group that drive the surviving women to drink white wine in a hotel room together and the men to, I don’t know, do whatever men do when they’re left alone together for twenty minutes or more. Start a podcast? I don’t know.

Anyway, this episode was a bit of a plod for me, if I’m being honest – the initial set-up with the two groups being split down gender lines and dealing with mounting tension and shifting relationships in various ways looked like an interesting place to start (especially considering the series’ preoccupation with true crime and the gender lines drawn in that as a genre) but Jailbait didn’t stick the landing for me on the execution. This far into a series set over such a short timeframe and in virtually a single location should really thrive on this character-driven stuff, but instead, it turns into a lot of telling and not showing. And what it’s telling isn’t even that engaging, at least to me – I am genuinely fascinated by how issues of gender play out against a genre fiction backdrop (in case you hadn’t noticed), but this episode doesn’t even have a whole lot to say beyond the standard “women bonding over men being bad”.

This episode serves as the send-off for Adrianna (Genevieve DeGraves), who’s been pretty much my favourite part of this ensemble since we arrived at Hell Motel a few weeks ago – but I have to admit, it came as a bit of a let-down for me. Adrianna, I think, is a character who’s almost too big and too interesting for a perma-dwindling ensemble like the one we see in the Slasherverse – a hybristophilic sexpot covering for harm done to her by seeking out the men who deliver that kind of harm, who finds comfort and even power in being the object of desire for someone at the bottom rungs of society’s morals.

The hints we got towards her past last week had me hopeful that she’d get a fuller arc before her death this season, but honestly, Jailbait doesn’t deliver on that the way I wanted it to. There’s a lot of not-terribly-effective shorthand here, from a bluntly-foreshadowing tarot reading to a white wine girl’s night gossip sesh to a bizarre conversation with a serial killer lover about “sexy little chipmunk ass” that I don’t entirely know what to make of – her eventual demise at the hands of the killer so blatantly spelled out it doesn’t have the impact it could.

There’s brief moments of what I really wanted from this plot – her confrontation with her serial killer lover Wyatt (Jefferson Brown, and don’t worry, we’ll get there) where he violently strangles her after she promises that she will never betray him as his previous victim did is such a rich scene to dig into in terms of how Adrianna protects herself and how it’s meaningless in the face of people with disdain for her very person. There’s a whole lot going on in her character – issues of sex, gender, power, death, violence, and fetish – that this eight episode series would have struggled to explore satisfyingly even if it had only been about her, and she’s just one aspect of a pretty large cast. DeGraves has been a consistent standout in this season for me, and I’m kind of sad to see her go out in an episode that leaves a whole lot of her character unanswered in a meaningful way.

But to get to the Wyatt of it all – Adrianna’s lover is none other than the original Druid from the Solstice season of Slasher, which is, on the surface, pretty cool. He’s always been a bit of a loose end in terms of the Slasherverse, simply arrested at the end of his plot instead of snuffed out, and this is a smart way to weave him back into the story in a way that makes sense and informs Adrianna’s character, too. Which leads me to further wonder why this isn’t part of the direct Slasher canon. There have been more explicit connections with earlier seasons than perhaps any other series of the show, and, while I think you could pretty much go into Hell Motel cold and mostly keep up with what’s going on, there are these easter eggs nestled in there for viewers that make the space between the two shows even weirder.

As a whole, Jailbait is an episode that doesn’t really excite me that much; there are flashes of something compelling here, but there’s just not enough time to get into the nitty-gritty of it, and that’s a real shame given the potential Adrianna’s character contained. As ever, I would love to hear what you made of it below – drop me a comment and let’s talk!

If you’d like to deep-dive Slasher with me again to compare against Hell Motel, check out my series here! If you’d like to support my blog and get access to exclusive content, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or if you’re interested in my fiction work, check out my short horror story collection!

(header image via Moviedelic)