The Fades, Episode Five - An Episode Review

The penultimate episode of this story, and boy does it deliver. This time we see the 'missing persons' situation as it really is: huge, and growing. The police are struggling to cope, so open a missing persons centre in the school that Paul attends.

Unfortunately, the Fades are smart, or at least Mr Psycho Fade John is. He and his girlfriend Natalie are targeting the school and using their positions as 'volounteers' to harvest the living to bring back the dead.

Of course Paul, Mac, Paul's sister Anna, Paul's girlfriend Jay and Paul's Mum just have to go along and see if they can help out, which predictably ends up in someone being captured by hungry zombie people and lots of daring deeds of derring-do on Paul's behalf. Typical.

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This is the best episode so far. Very tense throughout, there isn't a moment where it's relaxed. Mac is being his usual self and spouting rubbish about Star Wars and The Matrix Trilogy, but that doesn't even take the edge off the atmosphere. We get to see more of Paul's sister Anna and less of practically everyone else but Paul. To my amazement, Paul is still wearing the same horrible clothes after five weeks. Yuk.

Over the past two weeks, I've seen a definite change in Neil, the most prominent of the Angelics. Unfortunately, this change is not a good change. Neil now seems intent on destroying the Fades completely, i.e. wiping them from existence. Paul doesn't hold with this.

Back to Paul now. He spends most of the episode prancing about trying to tell his family just what the hell is going on, with limited success. By limited success, I mean that he manages to freak out his mother and sister and convince Mac that zombies are real. The problem for me is not this prancing about, but that the prancing mainly consists of hiding. What I want to say to Paul is: "You've returned from the dead! You're an Angelic, gifted with amazing powers! Use them, for Pete's sake!"
Luckily for us, he does. But it's a little bit late for some people.

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I shall give this episode an eight 'n' a quarter out of ten. The action is good, with some pretty nicely done fight scenes, and the atmosphere is fantastic. By far the best thing about this episode is the setting: Using a school building as a killing ground is definitely a good idea. Sufficiently chilling to be scary, possibly even terrifying, without being totally out-there-among-the-stars sort of weird. It's not laughable at any point, unless you are a sadistic pyschopath who enjoys seeing people clobbered to death with a two-by-four.

Here's the iPlayer link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01630j7/The_Fades_Episode_5/

Watch out for the boiler room...