Boy, 11.22.63 is going to have a hard time topping “The Kill Floor.” Not only is it a ballsy move to deviate from your main story in only your second episode, but to top it off, “The Kill Floor” was brilliantly written, directed, and acted. It’s a slam-dunk from top to bottom, and moved 11.22.63 off of the watch-list of only Stephen King fans. This is a riveting episode, tense and spooky, that makes the show appointment television.
This episode just exceeds expectations on so many levels. On its surface, it’s structured like an episode of Quantum Leap written by Stephen King: Jake Epping, dismayed by how impossible his mission to stop JFK’s assassination seems, takes a detour into Holden, KY to prevent the murder of Harry Dunning’s family at the hands of his father Frank. (Harry is first seen being tormented by psychopathic bullies, a King standby.) This means that “The Kill Floor” is more or less a standalone episode, and if this show were on a different channel – like CBS, which so badly bungled Under the Dome – we’d get one of these every few weeks.
But man, what a standalone episode. It’s the performances that really make “The Kill Floor” such a good hour of television. James Franco continues to prove how well-suited he is to the role of Jake Epping. His classic Hollywood good looks make him look right at home in the ’60s – there’s a reason he’s played both James Dean and Allen Ginsberg – and more than that, 11.22.63 is a great reminder that when given the right material, James Franco is a damn good actor.
The real revelation here, though, might be Josh Duhamel (Franco is great, but he’s an Oscar nominee; his greatness is more of a welcome gift than a surprise). At first it induces a bit of cognitive dissonance to hear a menacing music sting followed by the visage of Tad Hamilton himself, but Duhamel takes the role of Frank Dunning and runs with it. Frank is one of King’s patented psychopaths – here’s where I’d list more, but it’d take the rest of this review – and Duhamel plunges into the role with aplomb. He’s equally charming and menacing, even though he’s a frightening, vile presence, I found myself thinking that Frank Dunning is exactly the kind of guy that other men seek approval from. It’s a remarkably nuanced performance, and shows a range that I wasn’t aware that Duhamel possessed (maybe I’m biased because he’s been in three Transformers movies). But he’s the MVP of the episode, and handily steals the show from Franco, no slouch himself.
A lot of credit for “The Kill Floor”‘s success is due to director Frederick E.O. Toye (Revolution, The Good Wife), who, speaking frankly, directs the shit out of this episode. He structures it like a thriller, and the tension is ever-present until it builds to almost unbearable heights in the episode’s climax. The confrontation between Jake and Frank is brutal, bloody, and inelegant, and Frank wielding a sledgehammer draws obvious visual comparisons to Jack Torrance and his axe in The Shining.
Jake finally kills Frank by strangling him, and it’s not pretty. It’s disturbingly intimate, and Toye and Franco do a great job of showing you just how hard this is for Jake. Even though it could be seen as a dry run for what he came to do to Lee Harvey Oswald. As Arliss Price, whose house Jake boards in, says: “The last thing you can say about killing a man is that it’s brave.”
“The Kill Floor” was a ballsy adventure story, admirably self-contained, and on top of that it was a riveting thriller. There’s no way to say this without sounding hyperbolic, but here we go: TV doesn’t get much better than this.
A Few Thoughts
- Nice foreshadowing: the voting registration booth that young Harry runs by. A clever way to keep JFK involved in the story, necessary because this episode didn’t say his name once
- “Every writer needs a great chapter one, am I right?” Duhamel sold the hell out of lines like this
- The motif of Jake reciting Harry’s essay from memory was great
- “Are you a Communist, Mr. Amberson? Aren’t most writers Communist?” No one tell Edna Price about Hail, Caesar!, she’ll think it’s a documentary
- “No matter what this looks like, I didn’t do a bad thing.”
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