These two episodes felt like Zacks time to get a little development as we get a bit of a look at his childhood. I will admit that this series has a particular problem with showing it’s villains as any villain shown so far has been quite one dimensional. Now I hear that later episodes will address this with the floor masters at least but Zack’s guardians in is flashback were equally cartoonishly evil. The idea is solid however in that Zack his averation towards being treated like a tool do to his caretakers making him bury the dead bodies of other children at the home. Zack did seem unaware of what it was he was buring and upon discovering a skull in the ground he copped on to just what his caretakers were making him do. I don’t like that he got the idea to kill them from a slasher flick playing on tv as well, it seems to be reinforcing that notion of violet media creating serial killers. Still it does explain to a degree why Zack acts like a slasher villain and you can say that it was far from the only factor in his decision. So Rachels gave of making Zack relive his childhood and having Rachel unwittingly torment him by telling him what to do was a delightful bit of psychological torture.
The death of Cathy was certainly satisfying. Not because she was any kind of interesting character or anything like that but more due to not having to listen to her annoying laugh or voice anymore. She certainly was hateable so I suppose it worked to a degree. She certainly knew how to press Zacks buttons with how she pushed him to take a drug to push him berserk enough to kill Rachel. Only to have him attack himself to stop himself, pissing off Rachel as she wanted to be the one to punish him. Her end was certainly cathartic in getting wounded by criminals and then shot death by her own judgment miniguns. So with Zack mortally wounded it looks like he’s out of the story for a while with a priest like character taking his place. To save Zack Rachel must descend the floors again and revisit each one. Which in turn does look to be a descend into a darker mindset as she is not allowing anything to get in the way of saving Zack.
The third episode is the most emotion we have gotten out of Rachel since episode one. I particularly like that the more we delve into Rachel, the more messed up she becomes. The hallucinations she experienced during the episode really painting her quite differently from her initial appearance. In particular it’s worth nothing that Rachel broke when she heard her parents were dead and originally it was through that was a driving factor towards her deathwish. However in this episode she has a hallucination of her parents which painted them in less favorable light and she got out of it by cutting open the painting they came out of. Heavily suggesting that the one who killed her parents was Rachel herself. In fact there have been several hints towards Rachel being quite unhinged, seeing as she keeps a gun in her purse and the look she gave the “Zombies” when she activated the miniguns to mow them down. Not to mention that to ascend a floor she had to take their nameplates and place one in the shute, throwing away the sinner. Rachel threw away her name plate without telling Zack, labeling herself as the sinner. Which you really have to consider, what did Rachel do that she considers herself worse than a serial killer?
