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I Know What You Did Last Summer Recap: I Am You

I Know What You Did Last Summer

A Gorilla Head Will Not Do
Season 1 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating 2 stars

I Know What You Did Last Summer

A Gorilla Head Will Not Do
Season 1 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating 2 stars
Photo: Amazon Prime Video

The first two episodes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, for all their flaws, had a fairly strong central focus to them. But “A Gorilla Head Will Not Do” strikes me as the first episode of the show that feels especially messy and unstable; a few hours after my first watch, I couldn’t remember what exactly happened before the last ten minutes.

Let’s talk about the Alison stuff first, because as it is becoming a pattern, it’s the most interesting. With the video of Johnny’s decapitation being sent from Alison’s phone, everyone assumes she survived and has been stalking them. But Alison knows that none of their rationales for Alison being the killer make sense because she’s Alison, and the one who they hit last summer was Lennon. So she sets out to finally identify the person who’s been texting her and following her in their black pickup truck.

Oh, also, during all this, she accidentally finds a sex tape her dad and Lyla made and has to grapple with her dad dating someone. This subplot doesn’t really mesh tonally with everything else, but it’s not bad, and it ends with a nice father-daughter conversation in which Bruce assures Alison they’re in this together, that he would never blow her cover to Lyla.

But back to the stalker stuff. Eventually, Alison tracks the likely killer to the Snak ’N Stuff, where she finds Dale. She manages to escape before he can hurt her and meets everyone at the cave. (The episode weirdly denies us any fight with Dale, probably because listening to him would help clarify what’s happening here. We just see Alison throw something at him; then it jumps to her at the cave.) There, Dylan reveals Riley’s secret that she thought she saw Alison take a breath before they left her last summer. Alison insists that it can’t be Alison (meaning, privately, that it can’t be Lennon), that Dale must be the stalker.

Of course, before long, Dale is dead, and so we’re denied any further explanation of the obsession he apparently had with Lennon. We’re also denied the actual scene of the murder, and the episode even skips past the gang finding his dead body, instead just showing them running back into the parking lot and commenting on it. Like a number of scenes this episode, the banter here shoots for dark comedy, but most of it feels a bit forced, never truly campy and fun the way it should be.

We do see Dale eventually, a plastic tube of Blue Crush slushy shoved down his throat. And so the main suspect, once again, becomes Lennon (or, to everyone else, Alison). The final scene provides the biggest evidence yet for Lennon being our killer: a text to Alison with photos of the cuts she made on her thigh and a video of her and Dylan having sex at the party last summer.

It’s a fun moment, but I’m not so sure these clues are pointing to a reveal as simple as Lennon still being alive; it just feels like such a potential red herring. I do kind of hope the show actually goes there, though, even if it’s predictable. Madison Iseman’s performance has been the highlight of the series so far, so it’d be fun to see her in more scenes with herself. And despite the shaky foundation of the Alison-Lennon conflict we’ve seen, there’s an inherent hook to a girl being haunted by the twin sister she killed and impersonated. The glimpses we’ve seen of Lennon have already painted her as unstable and cruel, especially with the reveal of this sex tape, so the prospect of her as a villain is immediately more interesting than most of the other options.

“A Gorilla Head Will Not Do” may end on an exciting cliffhanger, but the episode preceding it is riddled with cringe trying-too-hard teen dialogue, frustrating information gaps that muddle the narrative instead of streamlining it, and weird subplots. It feels more like a collection of scenes than a coherent episode of television, particularly because the development of the side characters is still so weak.

For example, we get to see Dylan’s perspective from that fateful party on graduation night last year. But none of it adds much insight about him at all because they’re mostly just repeating what we’ve already seen from slightly different camera angles. We already know he’s guilty about sleeping with Lennon, which informs his guilt about “Alison” dying. All we learn here is that he and Riley almost hooked up in the bouncy house and that when Dylan stopped, Riley told him Alison was never going to fuck him.

We’re also introduced to a couple of new characters, including Coach Craft’s ex-wife Kelly and Doug, a cop Lyla works with who seems intended as a dopey comic relief character. The scenes of Lyla actually doing police work and investigating Kelly are mostly boring so far, though, because we didn’t know her before this episode, and we never got to know her husband, either.

Like a lot of “A Gorilla Head Will Not Do,” it feels like a distraction. Hopefully, future installments will return to the focus of the flawed but decent first two episodes.

Some Other Stuff They Did Last Summer

• Yet another instance of Margot calling something “ugly of you.” This time she’s referring to Riley talking about Johnny’s head being chopped off.

• There’s a weird background line while Alison is at the restaurant when some guy says, “He and Johnny were so sweet together. And they waited till Johnny turned 18.” Again … why?

• Easily the most intentionally funny line of the episode is when Alison greets her dad with, “Don’t worry, I know the rules. Live the rest of my life as my sister and use a condom.” It reminds me of the great line from the movie when Ben tells Julie, “Kids like you should be out having fun. Drinking, partying, running people over, getting away with murder … things like that.”

• There’s something actually kind of fitting and poignant about the exasperated way Margot tells Alison, “Do not die. I mean it.” But then she ruins it: “I will have a literal Trisha Paytas breakdown if you do.”

• Okay, I don’t like Doug much yet, but it’s pretty funny that the taxidermist responded to his search for Johnny’s head with, “What kind of human head?” Again, it’s a good joke that would feel a bit more natural in a show that took itself less seriously.

I Know What You Did Last Summer Recap: I Am You