'The River' Season 1, Episode 3 Recap - 'Los Ciegos'

If you happen to speak Spanish, then the title of this episode should give you a pretty good idea of the new terror that strikes the poor crew of the Magus this week.

If you don't speak Spanish, here's what happened: the continuing search for Emmet lead the group to a cave in the jungle. The cave was marked by "Los Murcegos," the guardian tribe of the forest that Jahel keeps warning everyone about. Despite the fact that she was totally right the last time in her warnings, nobody listens to her.

So everyone ventures inside, save AJ, who was once trapped in a mine collapse and now refuses to go underground ever again under any circumstances. Except for the circumstances later in the episode. We'll get to that.

While they're in there, the group comes across a corpse with no eyes and a whole lot of bats. After that, they're visited in the night ("Paranomal Activity" speedy-cam time!) by the Murcegos, who leave a bunch of creepy markings but not much else. But by morning, Emilio has been struck blind, and it quickly becomes apparent that the rest of the group is about to follow suit.

In the resulting staggering around and general panic, Kurt manages to accidently slice Clark right in the gut... but only after a blind Clark and Tess have a little moment on camera (and within earshot of Lincoln) that reveals that it was Clark whom Tess was with all that time. Sleeping with the producer? Scandal!

So Lincoln is left on the Magus with a blind Jahel, Emilio, Tess and Clark while Kurt, AJ and Lena head out in search of a particular root from a particular tree that will cure the blindness. Eventually everyone is struck blind except for AJ, who must then retreive the roots himself... from a very small tunnel underneath the tree.

Of course the tunnel collapses on him, but he is saved at the last moment by the Murcego, who have a change of heart when Clark takes the blame for desecrating their land and offering himself to save the crew. What a nice bunch of eyeless ghosts! All they wanted was a selfless apology.

It's clear from this third episode that "The River" is best taken in one-hour doses. The two-hour premiere was a lot to handle, and the second hour dragged quite a bit (and lost a lot of viewers as well). The pacing here is nice, AJ's tunnel collapse was pretty terrifying, and the blindness of the crew created a sort of claustrophobia that worked well.

However, it's still difficult to really get scared by this show with commercial interruptions and whatnot. Further, it seems that the "bad guy" will be changing each episode: the pilot had the former crew member as a demon, the second episode had a vengeful child's spirit, and this third episode has the ghostly Murcego tribe. What makes a villain in a horror movie scary is when we learn about their capabilities. This is especially true in "Paranormal Activity"... our demon is nothing more than some moving doors at first, but eventually becomes a very real threat.

Since our villain changes each week, we have to learn a new creature's capabilities each week, which means we're not afraid of them until we know how dangerous they are. For that reason, the Murcego were never all that scary. Camera tricks can have them appear in frame briefly for quick scares, but we never get any true terror out of them.

But "The River" is still a fun hour of TV to watch for now. The characters are clearly defined and their relationships to each other are starting to flesh out a bit as well. There are still some cool things happening with the cameras that make the show interesting stylistically. And I may never tire of hearing them go on a bleeped-out cursing tirade, like AJ did in this episode or like Lincoln did a week ago. If I was faced with creepy dolls or a collapsing tunnel under a tree, you can bet there'd be some bleeping from me as well.

What we may see going foward is Kurt as our throughline villain, with the spirit of the week filling in for the scares while Kurt provides the looming threat. Whether or not he can be villainous enough to be a bigger threat than eyeless ghosts remains to be seen.