Summary
Episode 3, “Summer School”, plays on the innocence of children, in a slightly disturbing but otherwise lackluster chapter.
This recap of Black Summer Episode 3, “Summer School” contains spoilers. You can read the recap of the previous episode by clicking these words.
Episode 3, “Summer School”, follows the route of Rose (Jaime King), Spears, Ryan and Lance; again like the previous episodes, Black Summer, so far, has offered no story progression to truly grasp at, apart from survival, which is typical for the zombie genre. “Summer School” is slightly more interesting because the survivors believe they have found refuge, only to unearth the most disturbing situation.
It all starts when they find an abandoned school, and Spears points out that it’s way too big. He’s right, the last thing you need in a situation like an apocalypse is a building with the lack of resources to manage it. Still, the characters decide to stay the night.
The next morning, they hear footsteps, prompting Rose to wake up Ryan. Eventually, they see a child in the distance, who keeps on running away from them. It was dumbfoundingly apparent that the entire set up was a trap. The children were making distant noises to distract the characters. Ryan ends up taken hostage by the children.
After many scenes where Rose and Spears appear to be unable to deal with their environment, they end up in a face-off with the children. Spears, in a moment of high emotions, starts suggesting he is going to shoot them, but Rose sees the wrongs of killing a kid and manages to calm him down. They make a deal, but Ryan misunderstands the logistics of the agreement and is shot dead by one of the kids, and quickly turns into a zombie.
After evading danger from zombie Ryan, the group manages to escape the school. “Summer School” was a fast-paced chapter, but the use of splitting up the episode with sub-title screens makes me wonder if the creators of Black Summer think they are smarter than they are. Black Summer is hardly groundbreaking drama up until this point.
You can read the recap of episode 4 by clicking these words.
