Summary
Project Blue Book turns up the mystery in “The Flatwoods Monster”, providing another real-life case and some saucy subplots for good measure.
This recap of Project Blue Book Season 1 Episode 2, “The Flatwoods Monster”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Aliens certainly seem to be a hot topic on network television at the moment, and if you have to choose just one show about extraterrestrials for your Tuesday night viewing, History’s Project Blue Book is still your best option, even with Roswell, New Mexico now adding a spicy romantic twist to the subject. “The Flatwoods Monster” delves into another real-life case of the secretive U.S. Air Force project, and provides a fair helping of eerie mystery along with some presumably made-up subplots to keep things juicy.
Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey) and Dr. Hynek (Aiden Gillen) are lured to rural West Virginia after a fireball crashes into the woods, leaving behind suspicious metal parts, a lot of radioactivity, and a looming tree-like alien who is witnessed by a woman named Sarah and her children, their burned faces lending credence to a tale that the tight-lipped townsfolk are eager to believe.
Naturally, Quinn and Hynek are there to debunk the sightings, but they need to do so in a way that doesn’t aggravate the locals and it’s easier said than done when another woman, Evelyn, also saw not only the creature but the mysterious man in black who is leaving Hynek cryptic clues about his investigations. And shortly after revealing what she knows she’s pitched from a window to her death – but by whom?
There’s a mundane scientific explanation for the monster, one involving a meteorite and an owl, but is that really an explanation? Or is it just a convenient rationalising of unexplainable phenomena that the U.S. government is eager to cover up? Hynek wants to believe the former; the truth, we can hope, is probably the latter.
Either way there’s a lot of unexplained s**t in “The Flatwoods Monster”, even far away from the case. Hynek’s wife, Mimi (Laura Mennell), is still being gradually seduced by her new pal Susie Miller (Ksenia Solo), a Russian spy with an as yet unknown agenda. (Beyond, you know, the Russians just wanting to know everything.) It adds a layer of personal strife to an obviously embellished nugget of real-life history, but it’s still puzzling why Susie is taking the seductive route to achieve her aims. Is there something in Mimi’s past that we’re yet to learn about? Or do the show’s creators just assume that its audience will be more enthralled by some girl-on-girl tension? That’s one mystery I think we probably know the answer to.
