Oct 01 2009
FEAR ITSELF, “COMMUNITY”
When I first started scanning the episode descriptions of “Fear Itself”, I almost instantly gravitated towards Community so imagine my surprise when it started airing and I realized that I’ve seen it before. Oh well, go figure.
The episode follows a young married couple played by Shiri Appleby and Brandon Routh. Appleby wants a child, but not in the big city where they live so they start looking at houses in the suburbs. They find one in a gated community that they love and decide right away to put in an offer. The community has its own schools, restaurants, stores, basically everything you need.
Routh starts feeling uncomfortable when he turns the television and finds his neighbors on television, just as the husband catches his wife cheating. The couple come before the community board and he refuses to pick a punishment for the wife, stating that the couple needed to find a solution on their own. The next day he finds the wife in town being pelted with fruit and wearing a pig mask, but she won’t let him help her.
Things get even worse when Appleby turns up pregnant and wants nothing more than to raise her kids there. A few days later they see the same wife running in fear from something, right before she’s hit by a car. Despite what they saw, the police claim that she was drunk and committed suicide. Appleby finally agrees to leave, but they learn that the contract they signed won’t let them leave.
Instead they bring in a friend to pose as Appleby and escape town with the real Appleby hiding with the friend’s husband. Routh and the friend are caught and he manages to escape, but when he runs out, he finds Appleby and his friend waiting for him. The episode ends with Appleby showing off a house to a new couple and waving to her husband upstairs. The camera pans back to reveal him sitting in the room alone, his legs now missing…
TRIVIA
Directed by Mary Harron, who also directed American Psycho.
Surprisingly enough, Community wasn’t too bad for the first episode of Fear, Itself I watched this time around. I went into it liking Appleby and disliking Routh and found that switched by the end. It was a little too “made for television” for me, but not that bad.
