POST: 'Simon Says' - accidents don't exist
What's it about?
Remember than one time you got to talk to dead people? Yeah me either.
What'd I experience?
Brian Murray. I’d never had the opportunity to see any of his work before, which now having seen him live blows my mind. He was so interesting to look at. I know I got a little weird on my observing, when I started looking at the way he moved his fingers, but I couldn’t help myself for some weird reason. That bio really got me fan-girling just at the mention that he was South African and had performed pretty much anything Shakespeare has ever written. Just a really cool dude.
The storyline itself was completely unexpected for me. I have zero recollection of the description for this show being paranormal, so I was just a little thrown off when a guy got possessed by some medieval soul. It’s a weird story. So many feelings.
Brian Murray’s character, Williston, is some sort of spiritual psychologist who has taken in James, a man apparently capable of some really creepy mind-fuck future seeing… stuff. The tension between them is clear as soon as James confronts Williston of having cancelled his college enrollment, which Williston did in order to have James pursue a career in... reading minds? Like I said this story is weird, even after watching the end it’s not really clear what the hell exactly James does with his ‘power’. Add on the unexpected appointment that Williston just throws James into, you have a clusterfu*k of weird sh*t happening. And this is coming from a girl who has witnessed ‘religious possessions’, which will always just look like the people tv evangelist’s hire for their midnight infomercials.
When Annie shows up in place of her aunt there is an eery feeling that somehow she was always meant to be in that room in that moment with Williston, James and soon enough Simon. Annie comes under the impression that she has attended the session complete my chance, but like any disturbed ghost thing, Simon doesn’t disappoint when he says accidents don’t exist. Throughout the multiple encounters Annie and Williston entertain during James’ possession, it started preparing me for some deep existential explanation for destiny and fate. But it all amounted to some bizarre simplification about souls always being destined to meet over and over as they reincarnate. Which makes me feel even weirder, when I realized that James' little crush on Annie is disturbing, because of some Oedipus Rex past they had in another life.
Williston himself had been pretty much the same father figure to James, simply under a different name. Having been so taken by Brian Murray, I was glad that in some sense he was the evil demi-god that had essentially exploited Simon's medium abilities. Making me reminisce about my past encounters with very obviously staged religious ‘possessions’ was likely not what Simon Says was going for, but in some sense it gave me a behind the scenes look at how to perfectly execute a convincingly disturbing one.