"Eye" is another winner. It's probably the best of the show's three time-travel episodes, as it looks like the production staff put some money into the Civil War scenes. There are dozens--seemingly hundreds of soldiers--and explosions, and intrigue ahoy. It's probably a Canadian reenactment troupe, but it still looks good.
It's also the best of actor Tom McCamus' two appearances on the show. Rather than play the mildly conflicted man-turned-vampire of last season's "The Baron's Bride", McCamus plays Atticus Rook, a scheming antiques dealer who, like McCabe in "The Sweetest Sting" isn't just using a cursed antique to kill people and get something. But rather the antique is just the first step in his plan to bring back "mint" Confederate antiques from the Civil War and sell them in the present. Yeah, it's not a very well-thought out plot. But Rook is a Civil War picker, and it's later shown he's just trying to accumulate money to go/do something else.
McCamus is a sinister presence, looking like the Angel of Death with his black clothes and pale complexion. Like McCabe, he makes a nicely sinister presence after the show's earlier run of sympathetic villains. Bernard Behrens makes his third of three appearances on the show, and it's probably the best of them.
Ah, the 80s. Ryan says that no one thinks badly of the Confederacy. If only he has lived in 2020.
The shots of the lantern's one staring "eye" are well done, and give the episode an ominous touch.
At least the title makes sense, instead of being either a straight-out reference to the contents ("Cupid's Quiver", "The Pirate's Promise", "Wax Magic") or a joke/pun (""Root of All Evil", "Pipe Dream"). They do use it a bit too much throughout the episode "Eye of death, eye of death, eye of death!" We get it, thank you very much.
It's also funny how Jack and Micki say all of the pages of the reference book concerning Sharpsburg have been torn out. And then they start spouting facts about Sharpsburg from the book, like Ryan's presence there as a Yankee spy. There's even a photo of Ryan with Lee, which is pretty good given Rook took all of the pages out. Of the course, the photo in the book that doesn't see what we actually see later getting taken.
The episode is as close to the timey-wimey nature of time travel that the show ever got in its three time-travel jaunts. Micki is understandably confused (but she often is up to this point in the series), and Jack spells everything out for her because he's the all-knowing sage.
Speaking of Jack, I like the references to him and Rook at least knowing of each other. And having had an encounter "years ago". The show focused so much on Jack being the procurer of supernatural items, that it usually forgot that Jack is just was much a "picker" as Rook is. It gives Jack a little more gravitas to acknowledge that he has a backstory even if the production staff doesn't go into much detail with it. Nor should they have: Jack used to be a picker, he and Rook have heard of each other, that's it and on with the story. Having them be old rivals or some such would have been too much.
Overall, "Eye of Death" is a good example of what the series could do when it was operating on all cylinders. Which it often did during the second season. The time-travel concept (shown here in sepia tone for the past) is well done. There's just enough of the cousins having time traveled before, without them being experienced hands, that is tossed in.
I also sense a theme in the second season, that the trio doesn't usually know what the antique does. Last episode's transportable bee hive, they didn't know what it did. But there have been lots of episodes like that: they didn't know what the boutonniere or the handkerchief did for animating the ventriloquist dummy or the wax statue, either, or there was some writer misdirection at work. Jack makes a few too many intuitive leaps to determine what the magic lantern is for my tastes, all of which prove 100% right. But the trio make better detectives than undercover operatives, as they were often portrayed in season 1 ("Cupid's Quiver", "Root of All Evil").
I do have to downgrade the episode one point because of several sloppy errors. Detective Howard doesn't notice or even comment on the fact that earlier Jack said he was Atticus, when the detectives comes face-to-face with the real Atticus. McCamus and Wiggins look nothing alike. And Ryan says that his home is in Chicago, even though that contradicts several previous episodes.
Also, Rook seems awfully handy with breaking people's neck. It's not as easy as they make it look. Or so I've been told. :)
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
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