Smile
Written By: Mike Scannell
Combat photographer James Harris (Matthew James Downden) and his wife Sarah (Lucie Guest) exit the Photojournalism Association Humanitarian Awards, where James has just won such an award for a particularly awe-inspiring photo. As James takes the time to sign some autographs for a bunch of fans, Sarah calls their son Max (Max Archibald), currently at home watching a movie with his friends, to check in on him. After the call, Sarah offers to take James to an expensive restaurant, one of their favorite places, for a celebratory dinner. After the Harrises are walked to their table, they reminisce to each other about a previous trip in their relationship when they had sex in the bathroom, planning to do the same thing in the coat room. After they finish eating and prepare to head out, a man in a black hoodie (Roberto Lanzas) walks up to them and tells them to smile, snapping a photo of them with a Polaroid before suddenly disappearing. When they look at the resultant photo, the photographer's vantage point is from across the street instead of right beside them.
James and Sarah leave the restaurant, the former rather uneasy about their souvenir photo. Before they go home, James decides to try an experiment and steps where he believes the photo was taken. Once there, he and Sarah find a second photo, showing them in their current location from further down the road and reading "I SEE YOU". As James continues growing paranoid, Sarah tries explaining this set of circumstances as street magic and wants to go home, while James hopes to figure out what exactly is going on. The pair move to the spot where James presumes the second photo was taken, only to find another photo that reads "SAVE ME", just as James also notices a street sign for San Miguel. This next photo leads to a graveyard, where he spots a tombstone with a Bible verse written on it. This prompts James to realize what might actually be happening.
A traumatic flashback shows James in San Miguel, Buenos Aires, caught in the midst of a firefight between unknown parties. James soon spots a middle-aged father (Mateo Deuma) and his young son, both wounded, struggling to swim across a river, the father using all of his energy to keep the boy’s head above water and begging James for help. Rather than brave the hail of bullets to rescue them, James whips out his camera and takes pictures of their agony. By the time he looks back, the father and his son vanish beneath the surface. The photograph of their dying struggles is what nabbed James his award in the first place.
James reveals the truth to Sarah for the first time, to which she tries to console him, telling him that it wasn't his fault and he would've died himself if he tried to save them. James and Sarah then find another photo, this one being a closeup of Max's face with the word "PRAY" written underneath him. The pair race home to find Max seemingly unharmed. Suddenly, the house begins violently shaking, cracking the picture frames on the wall and shutting off the power. The mysterious photographer's Polaroid suddenly appears mounted on a tripod behind them, taking another photograph. Sarah frantically calls the police, but James urges her to hang up after viewing the photo. James begins to look for Max, only to see a young boy face down in the pool. Thinking this to be Max, James jumps in to save him, but the body disappears. As he leaves, Sarah slowly picks up the photo, screaming in horror at what it depicts.
Everytime he looks around the pool, the disoriented James finds Max calling out to him from a different location around the pool, seemingly teleporting. After some frantic searching, James finds Max standing outside the pool, who transforms into a silhouetted creature, and then into the reanimated, waterlogged corpse of the man James let drown in San Miguel. James pulls the revenant's bloated body into the pool and holds it under the water, hoping to drown it a second time. Sarah screams for James to stop, and as he slowly comes back to his senses, James takes another look at what he just drowned, seeing Max under the water's surface. As Sarah cries, the photographer's voice tells James to "smile" as one last picture is taken by the Polaroid: the shell-shocked James holding his son's lifeless body in the pool.
This episode provides examples of:
- Affectionate Nickname: Sarah is fond of calling Max "Pooh Bear", even though he says he's not a baby.
- Ambiguously Human: The photographer's pictures show James and Sarah from yards away, and he's capable of disappearing when no one looks at him, hinting that he's something more than a man.
- Ambiguous Situation: Was the supernatural photographer real? And if so, is he the undead man from San Miguel out for revenge on James? Or did James just go mad from being reminded of his trauma and drown his own son?
- As the Good Book Says...: In the cemetery, James finds a tombstone with Daniel 8:16 ("And I heard a man's voice call out from the banks of the river: 'Gabriel, show this man the meaning of his vision.'") written on it, hinting of his experience in San Miguel and how he let a young boy and his father drown to capture his perfect, award-winning photographs.
- Blinding Camera Flash: The photographer's camera produces them, temporarily blinding James and Sarah. The viewer gets hit with it too, a wave of red coloration blanketing the screen when a photo is taken.
- Bystander Syndrome: In San Miguel, James got a look at a man and his son trying to cross a river while severely wounded. Instead of trying to save them, he just took pictures of them as they struggled and let them drown, their depiction in said photo nabbing him a Photojournalism Humanitarian Award.
- Call-Back: James' house has Lorna's painting from the previous episode, Twenty Minutes with Cassandra, on the wall.
- Dark and Troubled Past: James' trip to Buenos Aires, where he let that boy and his father drown to gain fame and publicity.
- Downer Ending: The mysterious photographer, likely the spirit of the dead South American father, tricks James into drowning his son while his wife can only watch.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: When James sees Max apparently face down in the pool, attentive viewers can tell it's not him, as he's wearing the clothes the boy from San Miguel wore.
- Have I Mentioned I Am Sexually Active Today?: Sarah acts pretty damn horny in the first part of the episode, having gotten a reservation at the fancy restaurant she and James celebrate in by blowing the owner. She also reminisces on the last time they went here, where they got busy in the bathroom, and is hoping that this time they can do it in the coat room or storage closet.
- Insistent Terminology: In the beginning, James clarifies to Sarah that what he won is not an award, but an honor.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: Before James looks at the third photograph, Sarah tries to prove that this whole thing is just a prank by taking her shoes off, thinking that she won't be barefoot in the photo. James instantly shows her the photo, which has her holding up her shoes from another faraway distance.
- The Killer in Me: Driven mad by the increase in photos and supernatural phenomena, James tries to drown what he thinks is the zombified corpse of the man he watched die in San Miguel, only to discover that he actually drowned Max.
- Laser-Guided Karma: For letting that father and his son die, James is put through an agonizing process where he learns firsthand just what it's like to lose his child.
- Magical Camera: The photographer's Polaroid, which deploys photos of James and Sarah from distances away that seemingly tell the future.
- Mind Screw: The episode goes hard and heavy on it, with the photographer, their future-telling photographs, the teleporting camera, and the hallucinations at the very end.
- Mythology Gag:
- The "Father's Day" ashtray can be glimpsed on a shelf in the Harris' living room, only staying on screen for a second before James and Sarah get home.
- A waterlogged revenant once again harasses a main character, just as they did in "Something to Tide You Over".
- Nothing Is Scarier: All over the place in this episode:
- For starters, what the hell is the deal with that photographer? He's able to disappear, has a magic camera set up to show pictures of the immediate future, and is apparently capable of shapeshifting. Whatever he is, he dupes James into drowning his son, and he's most likely still at large.
- When he's not on screen, you get the sense that he's still there, lurking in the background, as evidenced by the photos James and Sarah find of themselves, taken from a vantage point of several meters away. And we have no idea what he originally had planned for Max, as the only photo he had of him was him looking concerned with the word "PRAY" underneath him.
- On that note, it's also horrific to think about James' flashback to the conflict in San Miguel. We never know who's shooting at who, and what for. All we know is that it raised hell on the citizens of the area.
- Just before "Max" turns into the revenant father from San Miguel, he turns into some pitch-black, glowing-eyed thing that tries to reach out to him.
- Offing the Offspring: James accidentally drowns Max when he sees him as the reanimated corpse of the South American father.
- P.O.V. Cam: There's a brief glimpse from Sarah's POV as she races down the stairs looking for Max, and one from James' POV when he learns he just drowned Max.
- Sadistic Choice: James had one in San Miguel: risk his life to save the father and his son, or let them drown so he could capture his dream photo. He chose the latter, and he pays dearly for it years later.
- Sex for Services: Sarah tells her husband that she got a reservation at their favorite fancy restaurant primarily by blowing the owner.
- Shout-Out:
- The episode's supernatural element is a camera that produces pictures that tell horrible futures, just like the camera from Say Cheese and Die!.
- Sarah is said to have met James when she worked for Vanity Fair, having published his award-winning photo in the magazine.
- Sarah's nickname for Max, "Pooh Bear", likely references the dog of the same name belonging to the kooky farmer in Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
- The Spook: The photographer who first takes James and Sarah's photo and disappears. He's not seen again for the rest of the episode, but the photographs the couple find hint that he's watching them, his camera is set up in the Harris' living room, and he appears to turn into Max and the reanimated father from San Miguel.
- Spooky Photographs: The photos James and Sarah find around town and in the graveyard, which show them apparently being stalked by the photographer from yards away.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: At the end, James hallucinates Max as the zombified father from San Miguel he let drown, and wrestles him into the pool to drown him again. Just as he succeeds, it's revealed that James drowned the real Max, as the photographer's final picture shows him holding his dead son in the pool.
- Trauma Button: James grows nervous when he sees the street sign for San Miguel and Daniel 8:16 written on a tombstone, reminding him about his decision not to save the father and his son.
- Unreliable Expositor: After the San Miguel flashback, Sarah comforts James by telling him that it wasn't his fault and there was nothing he could do. While the first part is mostly true, the second part is not, since James clearly had the opportunity to save the father and his son, but chose not to.
- Would Hurt a Child: Thanks to his growing insanity, James drowns Max in the pool, thinking he was the undead father he let drown.
