Main cast: Marina Kotovnikov (Charlotte Kemp), Robert Margolis (William), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Jeffrey Fine
Charlotte Kemp walks down a pier, contemplating suicide after having her heart broken once again. Naturally, she slips instead of jumping, and ends up screaming for help. Can this wretch do anything right? The beacon of the lighthouse, Point Hope, shines in her eyes as she sinks under the water…
Oh no, she doesn’t die. She comes to in a bed, tended to by William, who claims that he is “here” to “take care” of her. Charlotte becomes alarmed by this, because the lighthouse has been shut down for years, and he knows her name when she has never given it to him. He also locks her inside the room, all the while saying that she just has to be patient. Soon, he claims, all her questions will be answered. Understandably, she’s all to hell with this nonsense, and wants to be let out.
Point Hope is basically another soap opera kind of paranormal episode, with lots of melodramatic, anguished exposition and denouncements in the script. Unfortunately, Marina Kotovnikov utters all her lines in a monotone throughout the entire episode, without even a hint of emotion displayed. Charlotte is supposed to go through a gamut of emotions here, but Ms Kotovnikov acts like she’s reading aloud the lines from her script for the first time, and English isn’t a language she is familiar with.
Robert Margolis is just as bad, but given what his character is supposed to be, I suppose he has an excuse that isn’t “I needed this job to pay the bills, even if I resented the hell out of it!”.
Because Charlotte and William are the only characters in this episode, the whole thing is akin to two robots badly impersonating human beings for the entire runtime. They should have had the twist be that these two are mechanical constructs; that would have explained the complete absence of acting ability here. No, the script wants to aim for feels and what not instead. With the two actors they have cast in the lead roles, they never had a chance to begin with.
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