'The River' Season 1, Episode 5 Recap - 'Peaches'

It's about damn time that Eloise Mumford got her moment in the spotlight on this show. The young actress did some fine work in the little that we saw of "Lone Star" in 2010, so I was excited to see that she was on "The River." But, this is an ensemble show, and if we focus on anyone, it's usually Lincoln or Tess.

But Lena is here to remind us in this episode that there were other crew members missing, including her dad. Russ Landry was Emmet's cameraman, and Lena actually gets a bit upset with the gang for focusing so much on Emmet with her father missing as well.

If you weren't in love with Lena yet, you surely are after this episode: it starts off with her in her extra-adorable glasses, and features a good amount of accordion-playing. She's a hipster nerd's dream girl. She also has a lovely interview with Clark about her dad, and it comes across as very honest and emotional, with some really nice, real moments in there. A great performance from Mumford that only gets better as the episode goes on... the next excellent little scene comes when Jonas shows Lena a rare video in which her dad stepped in front of the camera to give her, his "Peaches," a message.

The story of the week is this: the crew gets side-swiped in the night by an oncoming boat, running them aground and rendering the engine more or less useless. Fortunately, they are soon found by a small crew of environmentalists on their ship, the Exodus. They have the parts the Magus needs.

What the Magus has, though, is LIVING SOULS. Yep, as you might have guessed, these are no ordinary crew members: they're spirits on a ghost ship, doomed to sail on the Amazon until they can find four replacements. The first two are Lena and Jonas, who stumble onto the ship to find Russ chained up in the hold. Their happy father-daughter reunion is short-lived, though, as Kurt and Tess soon join, giving the spirits enough souls to replace them, come sunrise.

Fortunately, Lincoln rallies the troops and they storm the ship and burn the suckers with fire. But it turns out that Russ can't go back with Lena because he's already "one of them." Yet another fine performance from Mumford in that goodbye scene, which makes up for the iffy special effects with the fire, and Russ' overdramatic pose.

Don't look now, but this show is getting a lot better. It's clear from this episode that the balance will have to be between deeper looks into the characters (learning about AJ was fun a while back too) and the big scares. The tension was built well in this one, with some nifty camerawork and editing, not to mention a lot of darkness. Flashlights are scary.

A couple of fun moments this week as well, what with drunk AJ and Lena's shout-out to "The Blair Witch Project." A reference to the original found-footage horror film in a found-footage horror TV show. Meta.