Scream
Season 2 Episode 9 “The Orphanage”
Directed by Gil Kenan
Written by Leigh Janiak
Created by Jill E. Blotevogel, Jay Beattie, Dan Dworkin
Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Bex Taylor-Klaus, John Karna, Amadeus Serafini, Carlson Young, Tracy Middendorf, Kiana Lede, Austin Highsmith, Billy Campo, Sean Grandillo, Santiago Segura, Anthony Ruivivar
MTV
Air date: Tuesday, July 26, 2016, 10pm

Last week, Emma (Willa Fitzgerald) nearly shot Kieran (Amadeus Serafini), but alas the killer’s plan backfired. Brooke (Carlson Young), my new favorite character (#brookeforfinalgirl), drunkenly told the town of Lakewood off for staging its yearly carnival in the middle of another run of murders, particularly so far, her boyfriend Jake (Tom Maden) and ex-lover and teacher Seth Branson (Bobby Campo). The killer is tormenting Audrey (Bex Taylor-Klaus) into confessing her secret tie-in with Piper to Emma, and Audrey is so stressed she is accidentally making herself the third wheel in Noah (John Karna) and Zoe’s (Kiana Lede) blossoming relationship. Thankfully for Noah, it hasn’t fully blossomed yet, because otherwise that would be instant death… you know if this show is still following Scream rules. It’s hard to tell since there have been 3 murders in 8 episodes and we still don’t know much about the actual story. We do know that the town elders are hiding something, so maybe it comes out tonight…

Spoilers below.

Brooke wakes up hungover with Gustavo (Santiago Segura) next to her. Before he sneaks back out the window, he takes one of her lipsticks… this after a bedside conversation about his creepiness. At school, Audrey tries to apologize to Emma, but Emma is pissed. Like shove a girl into a locker pissed. She goes to get her stuff from her locker and there’s a strand of hair with an audio tape attached with “Play Me” written in lipstick on her mirror. Audrey is angry at Noah, and thinks he may have sent the audio to Emma, or someone in his room… someone like Zoe.

The tape is one of Ms. Lang’s (Austin Highsmith). On the tape she calls Emma “unstable and violent, but she needs her.” For what we don’t know. We find out more about Gustavo, and why he comes off as creepy. In Phoenix, he accidentally shot and killed his friend, which probably started his curiosity with the morbid. Emma and Kieran show up to the hospital to see Ms. Lang, and the sight of Emma causes her to panic and need medical attention. Noah, Audrey and Zoe are again, an unhappy threesome, this time trying to figure out how Noah was hacked, and who is sending his files to Emma. Turns out the email is traced back to Zoe but Noah defends her anyway… thinking with the wrong head again, Noah!!!

Noah and Zoe “celebrate” his faith in her in a ridiculously over the top sex scene. “Virgin? Seriously where did you learn to do that?” she asks. “Phantasm 2. It’s a terrible movie, but one hell of a sex scene.” I’ve seen it… he’s right. On the down side, Noah is probably on the termination list. In fact, he figures out the killer has been listening in the whole time through the camera he took from Jake’s storage locker.

Kieran and Emma breaks into Ms. Lang’s house, and find that Lang and Piper Shaw (Amelia Rose Blaire), season 1’s killer were childhood friends from Blessed Sisters’ Children’s Home… a notorious orphanage that used to be an asylum, fresh with a lobotomy lab. The killer tells Audrey to go find Noah at the Face The Mask party… turns out, that just so happens to be at the blessed Sisters’ Children’s Home. AND it turns out Emma and Audrey are throwing the party, unbeknownst to them. Haley Myers (Mary Katherine Duhon) has been helping her “special friend” set up the party, so of course the second she’s alone, she’s brutally murdered. The murders have little impact because they’re killing off meaningless characters.

With Emma and Audrey stuck upstairs looking for their “better half,” they instead find the rotting corpse of Piper Shaw. The killer this season is obviously someone who was close to Piper and was upset about her death, thus tormenting those who killed her. As Sheriff Acosta (Anthony Ruivivar) and a deputy search inside the orphanage/asylum, they find Haley hanging from the party sign.

As a regular episode goes, this was a better effort for this show this season, but it again felt lacking. They’ve teased a Brandon James connection this season, and since Piper was his daughter, Emma’s half sister, then maybe it’s a James family relative or something. But they spend so much time introducing and exploring these new characters who obviously have nothing to do with that story. Stavo, for instance, is being made to look like he’s a suspect, but he has no connection to Brandon James. Eli wasn’t even in this episode, and for weeks he was made to look like a suspect with no hint of a Brandon James connection. In the film Scream 2, one of the killers was Mrs. Loomis, Billy from the first one’s mother. So I get that maybe here they are trying to connect things to the first season… but they’ve tiptoed around that plot so much, it’s almost forgotten. And again, they haven’t had a meaningful kill this ENTIRE season. Hopefully, they kill off a bunch of people before the finale.

Scream‘s is on next Tuesday night at 10:00pm ET on MTV.