A young guy purchases a pair of psychedelic-looking joke glasses from a magic shop that he happens to accidentally enchant after reading a passage at random from a book and sprinkling white powder all over them, and then the phony glasses have the added effect of revealing sinister dark figures everywhere that no one else can see...and the can also see them back! So I like how this episode begins, it's interesting to see Gary and Kristen somewhere away from the campsite for a minute, the original members of the Midnight Society played off each other so well and naturally that it's kind of too bad that we didn't get to see more of them than we did. Except for Eric though, as a character he always sucked! It's a good first appearance of silly Sardo and his hazardous magical merchandise. The recurring character was always a lot of fun, but I slightly prefer Dr Vink, because Sardo only created dangerous situations by accident by selling magical items that turned out to be real, Vink brought the danger on purpose, the scariest thing about Sardo is his hair! It was really cool and I suppose forward at the time to make the starring couple an interracial one, although a part of me wonders if it was so that the plot element of the shadowy garbed figures didn't come off as possibly having an overly racial undertone.. In any case though they worked well together, and the episode has a lot of great snappy lines in it. The characters look so goofy and odd that I can't help but laugh during the trademark extreme scream close ups when they're wearing the funky glasses! She only sees the scary figures when she puts on the glasses, and she keeps putting them on over and over again, the story does kind of have an easy solution that's right in your face the whole time! Um, I really fail to get the confusing and completely out of nowhere ending where it flashes to an alternate world which is sort of evil and our heroes are trapped forever in a crystal ball?! It's quite a deep concept that they tried to convey but it's so wonky and weirdly out of place that I definitely wouldn't have grasped it as a kid! It's a bit of a non-ending to me.. I think it's a very hokey conclusion to a mostly zany episode, a much more plausible twist would be if the guy had actually sprinkled the glasses with coke! Not an absolute favourite of mine but is still a fun and entertaining tale in a wonderful series that still most definitely has the magic x. "I've got a parallel dimension in my house!"
