[The Collector's Room]

One with episode 2 and its first episode - Wordplay

"A salesman at a medical firm finds everyone around him undergoing a linguistic transformation."

An interesting tale this one. A hard working salesman is trying his best to learn about the new product range they are selling so he can keep up. He spends most of his nights trying to learn these new words but unfortunately they're not sinking in. What’s strange however is that everyone around him is starting to use different words in place of old ones. He speaks to his neighbour who describes his dog as an "encyclopaedia dog" and later a co-worker starts calling lunch "dinosaur". This all escalates and escalates until the entire world around him is using a completely different words for every word in our language. The episode ends when our salesman is looking at a children’s book on first words - he has to learn about the new language everyone speaks so he can keep up.

So, it actually has a nice ending when you write it down on paper. It's the story of one man who is so focused on one task that the whole world has moved around him without him even noticing. Language has changed drastically over the last few years and you only have to look at Joe Cornish's Attack The Block to see how the "youth of today" are communicating with each other - almost as if that is the next stage in English Evolution. If you're not keeping up, you could get left behind.

However, Wes Craven doesn't play that story out the way it's written down. Whether that was a problem at script stage or Craven was pushed for time, but the episode doesn't tell the full story. We never saw our salesman struggle in the world he did understand to truly follow him to a world he doesn't. What's also striking about the episode that it doesn't have an opening narration when it really could have benefited from one. It does have a closing narration, but it's one that doesn't clear or resolve any issues.

It's a shame, as this could have been a great story.