'Moonlight' Return of the living undead

On tonight's Moonlight, we saw a much darker Mick than we have experienced before. Well, to be perfectly honest, we saw a much more mentally unhinged Mick than we have seen before, and he was not in the mood for any light banter. I missed the witticisms, but I have to admit that it made for a much more intense episode.

The intensity begins when Mick shows up at a large building fire, already suspecting arson, and comes face to face with a news photographer who is a dead ringer for his ex-wife, Coraline. The one he killed. In a fire. Seeing her apparent identical twin more than throws him for a loop, and even after she tells him that she doesn't know him and that he name is Morgan, and even though he can tell she is not a vampire, he is still spooked. So much so that he goes to Josef, who reminds him that he killed his ex-wife several decades ago. Conveniently enough, Morgan works with Beth, and when she comes in to work the next day with a bandaged arm and a tale of someone breaking into her home to steal her cameras, Beth is all ears. Morgan admits she attacked the thief but that he stabbed her with a letter opener and managed to get away with her cameras, then she asks if Beth thinks Mick could help.

Beth brings Morgan to see Mich and they conjecture that since the thief went after the cameras and not the jewelry or cash, that it may have been the arsonist trying to make off with vital evidence. Luckily, Morgan had already downloaded the images onto a flash drive. They all have a look at the images from the building fire and are startled to see a horror story tableau in one window: a man with a choke hold on a woman in the middle of all the flames. In just the manner that Mick killed Coraline. This sends Mick right back to Josef, admitting that he never saw Coraline's ashes. Josef tells him he needs to move on.

Instead, Mick goes to the burned remains of the building to see if he can find a body.  Buried under rubble, just where he expected her to be, he finds the woman's remains. He alerts the police and then goes to Morgan's home to dust for prints. He lifts a set handily enough and has a brief and uncomfortable conversation with Morgan before leaving abruptly.He goes to Beth, to get more dirt on Morgan. Beth pouts that she is unused to getting grilled about a girl he's interested in and Mick chides her for being jealous, before Morgan shows up to interrupt them. Looking at the photos again, they notice in another shot that the murdered woman had a tattoo on her shoulder. Just where Coraline had one. Mick bounces right back to Josef, who looks at the photo and declares it doesn't look like a Fleur de lis, like Coraline had, but rather like a dog smoking a cigar. I had pegged it as a swallow, myself. More interesting is the fact that the set of fingerprints Mick lifted belonged to Hank Mattola. A man who had been died of pancreatitis nearly a month before the break-in. He was only mostly dead? Josef agrees to go to Mattola's house to check it out.

While Mick is crazed with the idea that Coraline and Mattola are in league together, Josef just wants to go back home. At least, he does until they find Morgan's cameras in a safe in the dead man's closet. Then Josef decides he wants to get a look at Morgan for himself. They call on her to show her they retrieved her cameras. Josef is just as amazed as Mick was, but even more amazed is Morgan. Not only at the return of her equipment, but also at the news that the man who she identified as the thief in photos had been dead for 3 weeks before breaking into her house. She immediately wants to investigate that little fact and implores them to stay on the case. As they leave, Mick is infuriated, ranting to Josef "Can you believe her nerve?" while Josef tries to remind him that Morgan isn't Coraline. This is where Mick appears to devolve into full on crazy. He's convinced that she is Coraline, that she found a cure for vampirism and is setting all this up as an elaborate mind game to torment Mick and keep him from being happy. When Josef tells him he won;t be happy until he stops hating what he is, I have to agree.

Instead, Mick decides to check out the cemetery where Mattola's cremated remains allegedly are stored and Morgan comes with. They have a brief conversation about his involvement with Beth, which Mick denies. Morgan coyly tells him that Beth is interested in him and that the fact that she has a boyfriend wouldn't matter a whit before she takes off to try and charm the night guards into letting them in. Mick finds his own way in, of course, and searching the mausoleum, finds Mattola's interment space empty. Which makes perfect sense when a few minutes later, Mattola jumps him from behind and starts beating him with a crowbar.  Their battle is brutal looking and it is clear that Mattola is one of the undead. Mick manages to get the upper hand and sink his fangs into his foe, but is interrupted by Morgan. Who sees him in full vampire effect and freaks out, giving Mattola the opportunity to escape.

She runs and Mick gives chase, finally catching up to her and demanding that she reveal how she has accomplished all this and accusing her of trying to kill him to get back for him killing her. It's only too easy to imagine how deranged he would sound to anyone who doesn't know his story. It only gets worse when he tears her shirt from her shoulder, demanding to know where her tattoo is. There is no tattoo and when he grabs her bandaged arm and feels blood, he demands to know how she is still bleeding, why she hasn't heeled yet, he seems certifiably insane. Morgan runs away and Mick runs to Beth. He admits that he's been obsessing because Morgan is his ex-wife doppelganger and more so because the entire murder they are investigating is identical to how he killed her. He asks her if she ever met Morgan before, alluding to the fact that Coraline kidnapped Beth as a child and it was Mick who saved her before killing Coraline, but Beth remembers none of it. He states that he now knows Morgan is not Coraline and that he had acted just as crazy as he had when they were together. Indeed, the flashbacks scattered throughout the episode showcased a love affair that was marked for it's intensity, such as when the human Mick through a chair through a plate glass window to deliver a kiss to Coraline.

This is where I would expect to see the comforting relationship between Mick and Beth return, but this episode was apparently not going to deliver that. You know how in cheesy horror movies, there is always that moment where everyone thinks the homicidal maniac is dead and then all of the sudden his hands comes from nowhere to grab the surviving coed just as the orchestra apparently suffers a mass seizure and the entire audience jumps in the chairs? We get the cerebral equivalent of that as we are treated to Morgan pulling down her clothing from her shoulder and taking a cotton pad to wipe away some make up and reveal a Fleur de lis tattoo.

Did you gasp when you saw that, because I sure did. How could the possibly explain a cure for vampirism? What other havoc will Coraline wreck in Mick's life?  Will she go after Beth again? When will she finally reveal herself?

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