Summary
“The Rise of the Fakeer” explains the unpleasant backstory of the Fakeer and how it all relates to the present-day haunting of Bardez Villa in the penultimate episode.
This recap of Typewriter Season 1, Episode 4, “The Rise of the Fakeer”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Like the previous episode, Typewriter Episode 4 begins with a flashback, but this time to the 80s, at which time a grown-up Bali, aka the Fakeer, is a mass murderer wanted by the police. He has a wife and child but isn’t with them; he’s instead hiding out in a house with a Manson-style cult, including a young child. After a chance encounter with a police officer, “The Rise of the Fakeer” pulls a bait-and-switch, revealing that Fakeer’s “family” are invisible to all but him. Whether they’re ghosts or figments of his imagination isn’t clear, though his powers are very real so you have to suspect the former. Either way, when the police arrive to arrest him, he unleashes the full extent of his power, killing many of them before he’s finally subdued. His wife reveals the key to dulling his power: Obscuring his eyes, his “windows to the soul”.
After his arrest, the local police find the bodies of his cult in the basement. And props should be given to Typewriter Season 1, Episode 4 for its economy of storytelling in this opening sequence.
There’s discontent among the Ghost Club in “The Rise of the Fakeer”. Nick is annoyed that Sam made accusations against his mother, which is fair enough, but he also says something hurtful about Sam’s parentage, which isn’t. Short of mates, Nick goes to sit in Amit Roy’s classroom, revealing altogether too much about his family history. The rift between the kids is partially healed, though, once Anya asks Gablu if he’d like to join her band.
Sam, meanwhile, goes to see Moses in Typewriter Episode 4, ostensibly to retrieve her book. Moses isn’t interested in being her friend, but in his dismissal of the book, he accidentally gives away a little too much. He’s also having flashbacks of someone, presumably the Fakeer, being hung. At the same time, Jenny manages to track down her old nanny, Sara, and Sara and Moses begin telling the same story in interlaced scenes.
Here’s the story as relayed in Typewriter Season 1, Episode 4. Madhav was a great writer of ghost stories, but he was struggling with writer’s block and couldn’t come up with any of his own. As a result, he found himself drawn to the story of Fakeer reported in the papers. As he began to tell that story, he also began to visit the Fakeer, blindfolded and already sentenced to death, in prison. And the Fakeer began making requests in exchange for more of the story to tell.
The first request was for a small piece of wood; as he shares the story of his life he carves the wood with his thumbnails. The next request is a child. Madhav attempts to take Jenny, but her mother, Carol, forbids it, threatening to kill herself if he does so. The Fakeer reiterates some of the lore we have already heard; that if a person dies an unnatural death, their soul is stuck in an object or tries to return to its own body on the third day after its death. On a blood moon night, if you sacrifice an innocent you’ll become immortal, and so on.
“The Rise of the Fakeer” highlights how Madhav, in his dismissal of Fakeer, played right into his hands. The Fakeer’s body ends up at Bardez Villa. His carved wooden figurine ends up in the possession of Moses. After being executed, the Fakeer briefly revives for long enough to kill one of the guards, resulting in Moses being shot in the leg (that explains the limp.) The scandal — including the Fakeer’s wife and child requesting his body be returned — was enough to ruin Madhav’s reputation and personal life. Carol apparently committed suicide, throwing herself from the attic window, but Ravi receives evidence in the present day that she must have been pushed.
Now Sameera has been armed with the full story, the Ghost Club decide it’s their responsibility to thwart whatever is planned for the blood moon. They also manage to finally meet Doctor Spirit in Typewriter Episode 4, but he’s a bit underwhelming. Could the celebrity expert in paranormal phenomena be a charlatan? Never!
In the final sequence of Typewriter Season 1, Episode 5, Jenny is confronted by her own doppelganger in the middle of the night. She believes the encounter to be a dream, but her other self, who claims to be the version of her she has always wanted to be, and that they have been together since childhood, leaves Jenny “something to remember her by” by biting her lip. When Jenny wakes, she tastes the blood in her mouth.
