“Dead of Summer,” Episode 1.06 – “The Dharma Bums”
[WARNING: ALL MAJOR EPISODE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!]
INTRO: We start with a flashback to the Summer of 1970, Camp Stillwater is having a costume party. A young Deb and her boyfriend sneak away from the party, look up at constellations and bury a time capsule nearby. The duo end up breaking up, since Keith wants to travel the world and Deb wants to stay put to help the less fortunate. It’s an amicable break up and they promise to keep in contact. In the present day, Cricket’s parents arrive to take her belongs from camp, it appears to be the day just after The Tall Man murdered her with a bear trap. Deb is talking to the camp and says the police have ruled Cricket’s death as an accident (again) and that all activities are suspended for now. Deb goes back into her cabin and discovers muddy foot prints leading to the closet. She follows them and Keith jumps out, the actor portraying him now being Dylan Neal from Chupacabra Terror, Ice Road Terror and Prom Night 3. They’re happy to be reunited again.
SQUASHED: Everyone, campers included, are grieving the untimely loss of Cricket. Jessie asks Drew if he made up with Blaire yet, but they haven’t. A few of the campers are uncertain about Cricket’s “accidental death” and decide the best way to contact her lies in a dirty old basement. Alex and Blaire break in and go through the boxes until they find the old spirit board and they tell the other counselors that they’ll be contacting Cricket’s spirit after lights out. Half of the counselors wish to help, the other half are against the idea because it seems demonic. At Deb’s cabin, she’s feeling guilty for Cricket’s death, thinking if she payed more attention to things around camp she could have prevented it somehow. Keith comforts her in a very loving way until she kicks him out and we’re treated to another flashback of Deb, this time when she’s fresh out of college. She has a stand outside a huge law firm and is collect signatures for a petition against some sort of law. A guy, Fred (Jesse Hutch from Freddy vs Jason, Joy Ride 3 and The Tooth Fairy), stops to chastise her, but they end up flirting instead. Although Keith still sends her poems, letters and his published photography books, she falls for Fred and they end up getting engaged.
The Hopping Diner: Towny is talking with his mom at her restaurant, and she’s warning him that snooping around all these odd occurrences won’t bring his father back. He brings up the button he found in the cabin in the woods, stating that his father must have left it there knowing he’d find it eventually. When his mom is still uncertain, he shows her a file room number he found in the box and his mother knows what it’s a combination to. Towny goes into his father’s old files and discovers a very ominous letter with a more detailed map of camp that contains a pentagram representing points of navigation. In another flashback, Deb, just a few years ago, runs into Keith in the middle of the street. They go out for dinner and talk about their past love and go back to dig up the time capsule. She falls in love with him again and leaves Fred while Keith struggles with his career.
This Will Go Well: Blaire is collecting supplies around camp to hold the seance because apparently occult practices were super common in the 1980s. As he’s grabbing supplies, Deb catches him in the act and they get into a heated argument, with Blaire accusing Deb of not caring that Cricket died and saying she’s the worst camp leader ever and doesn’t know what she’s doing. Blaire is being so mean, in fact, that Alex has to step in to defend her. After lights out, the counselors all meet in the common cabin as Blaire sets up for the ritual, though half of the campers are still unsure if they want to go along with this. Almost immediately the seance goes badly and Amy becomes possessed by Cricket, although Cricket is friendly, it’s Hell on Amy as she does the traditional flailing and back breaking thematics. Joel gets the whole thing on camera because it’s suddenly working again. Cricket, through Amy, tells the group that she was pushed onto the bear trap, it was NOT an accident.
From Bad to Worse: Suddenly, The Tall Man takes over Amy and starts ordering the counselors to kill Amy again. When no one listens, possessed Amy grabs a knife and tries to stab herself but Joel and the others disarm her. Blaire prays over the spirit half until it randomly breaks in half and the seance is brought to an abrupt halt. Jessie, however, was possessed and no one noticed. She’s coming out of the trance now, but she’s drawing something on a piece of paper – the same devil navigation that Sheriff Towny found in his father’s files. Deb, having heard the commotion, is livid and breaks up the night’s morbid festivities. Outside, Jessie runs into Towny and they go over notes, coming to the conclusion that something very bad and something very evil is happening at Camp Stillwater.
One Last Surprise: Keith goes to visit Deb and tells her that he’s leaving. She’s reluctant to say anything, but eventually she chases after him, begging him not to leave again. In the last flashback, Deb, just a few years ago again, goes to visit Keith in a hotel room. There, she finds him dead of a heroin overdose, surrounded by the love letters she sent him years ago. This means that Deb is either hallucinating, as the counselors did, or Keith is a ghost. It turns out that Keith is a good ghost and he says that Deb can’t go with him to the other side because she’s needed at camp. He says that Deb wasn’t able to save Cricket, but the other counselors are going to need her… and maybe she can save their lives. With that, he disappears into the fog at the end of the pier on the lake.
END: The next morning, Deb assembles the counselors and the campers and apologizes for being so closed off to them in the middle of her grief. They hold a visual in her memory and bury a new time capsule, so they’ll always have a place to go to remember Cricket’s last summer at Camp Stillwater. Blaire and Drew finally make up. Meanwhile, Towny and Jessie are searching for clues and dig up a skull on one of the points of the Devil navigation. They realize the skull is at one point, Cricket died at another point, the groundskeeper was found at another, and that means there must be someone else at another point. They hurry off, but the body has already been moved – much to their surprise and the bikers’ surprise, although blood still remains at the spot. At one of the other points, one of the cult members wearing the ram’s head throws Blotter’s decapitated head into the mud and starts reburying it.
