Desert in, Episodes Five & Six (2021)

Rargh!  Let's DO THIS THING!

Episode Five, "I Miss You more than I Remember You"

Wang Lu

Man, this one is VERY short--just twelve minutes not counting the credits.  I feel somehow cheated.  

Apparently, Federico was supposed to be surveying Ion to see if he's a threat (a threat of what? Wholly unclear.)  Kind of into Ion at this point he lies (is it a lie?  I'm just going by the plot description) and says nah, he's fine.  There is apparently some connection between this betrayal (is it a betrayal?), causing the inn's neon sign to go out.  Meanwhile, Sunny is having problems with her memory.  We learn that Federico is actually her brother (or maybe we learned it earlier and I was too dumb to pick up on it), and when he comes in she doesn't recognize him.

This was fine, I liked it, but I really AM irked by the length.  Is this really going to be long enough to pay off in a satisfying way?  Well, we'll find out next week.

Episode Six, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"

Shelley Washington

Well okay, this one is more than fifteen minutes, so an improvement.  This is a dumb thing to be keeping track of.  I will say I want to read the novel that this title comes from; it seems cool to me.  But will I?  Maybe!

Okay, so apparently Sunny forgetting her brother wasn't a momentary thing, as he's trying to convince her of it as this starts.  He declares that this is "your wife. You know what she is.  She erased your memory of me."  Considering that they apparently work together, I have no idea what the utility of this would be.  At any rate, he asks her to go into the pool, which apparently has some sort of psychic power or something.  Then he, with Ion,  takes her to Room 8, a darkroom, where we see numerous pictures from the characters' lives (we actually saw Cass in here at the start of the previous episode).  Ion plays a VHS tape which is...well, hard to describe: it seems like old-timey commercials, only with characters from the series, including Derek, the old guy from episode three who died.  She sees that SOMETHING is up.  She does go to the pool, and we get a lot of fragmentary images that, again, are hard to make sense of, but for sure create a sense of unease.  At the end, we get narration of how she first met Cass: apparently they were both repressed, closeted housewives until something or other happened.

Really, I like this a lot.  Very intriguing story.  But again, I just can't help feeling very dubious about it ending well.  Maybe I'm just a cynic!  I look forward to finding out, at any rate.