Dead of Summer Review: Mix Tape (Season 1 Episode 3)

After being incredibly unimpressed with Alex’s backstory in last week’s “Barney Rubble Eyes,” I am more than relieved that this week’s Dead of Summer focuses on Carolina “Cricket” Diaz, one of my favorite characters so far. Even better, “Mix Tape” kicks the larger mystery of the supernatural power at the lake into high gear. Also, Amy’s dead (maybe?).

Cricket is a far more interesting character than our last two episode-centric characters, Alex and Amy, at the very least. In the series premiere, we saw her scrawling derogatory graffiti about herself around camp. “Mix Tape,” which features Cricket and details her backstory, explains her behavior quite nicely (though it’s honestly incredibly depressing).

The gist of it? Cricket used to be “fat.” I’m putting fat in quotes because flashback Cricket doesn’t really look fat at all. She looks like she’s wearing about five bulky sweaters. I’m not exactly sure how Cricket lost five sweaters’ worth of weight in the six months before camp, but I fully believe that she had the motivation to do so, thanks to her deeply screwed up mentality and family situation.

Though the earliest flashback scenes feature Cricket’s father doting on her and her overweight mother, flashback-Cricket is still visibly unhappy at her pre-summer camp weight. At some point, she gets it in her head that attention (in the form of sex) is the best thing that she can hope for from a guy–we even see her scribbling sexual remarks about herself in the boy’s bathroom at her high school, likely the beginning of the habit we see her continue in camp.

Her explanation is that she’s cultivating a “myth” about herself–the myth being that she’s “easy”–in order to lure guys to her. This logic is very ass-backwards, but teenagers come up with some pretty bizarre ideas, so I’m not calling B.S. on that one.

Cricket’s messed up view of sex, self-esteem, and relationships is only further damaged by two major events that we see take place during her flashback sequence.

First, she goes to a party with Blair. Blair, ever the voice of reason (as we’re quickly learning), tries to convince Cricket that what she wants is someone who likes her for her–someone who knows her well enough to maker her a mix tape– and not just someone who wants to get into her pants.

She blatantly ignores Blair’s very good advice and hooks up with the first guy who pays attention to her at the party. It’s implied that this might be Cricket’s first time having sex, because she breaks down when the hook-up predictably ignores her completely in the school hallways the next day.

After fleeing school and returning home, Cricket then finds her father in flagrante delicto with the very, very skinny neighbor lady Erica, thereby undoing all of the “Love yourself!” conditioning that her father tried to instill in Cricket in one fell swoop. Even worse, when she eventually breaks down and tells her mother about the affair, her mother gives her the actual worst advice of all time. Essentially, Mrs. Diaz has known all along that her husband is cheating and is at peace with it, telling Cricket that sometimes women “like them” just have to settle. Wow. Basically, Cricket has the worst week ever, but Amber Coney rocks the hell out of the material she’s given. She’s a rock star.

In the present, things aren’t going much better for Cricket (at first, anyway).

Cricket is still, bizarrely, hung up on the atrocious Alex. She and still-one-dimensional Jessie continue the team up that began in “Barney Rubble Eyes,” with Cricket calling the camp as Jessie’s “mom” to tell them that her grandmother died, in order to get Jessie out of working and remove Amy from the group of campers who go to the local bar for their night off. That way, Jessie can sidle up to Deputy Sykes Amy-free and Cricket can do the same with Alex.

Naturally, Alex is an oblivious dingbat when it comes to her advances, so Cricket resorts to pairing up with obvious criminal Crowley in order to make Alex jealous (and also, most likely, because Crowley is complimentary and pays attention to her).

I’m having a hard time taking Crowley and his walking-cliche friends seriously. They look so utterly, obviously villainous.

And they’re villains indeed. “Mix Tape” reveals that the satanist trio has been stalking Cricket, stealing a lock of her hair and using it (along with the deer heart from the pilot) in some nefarious, probably-demonic ritual.

What’s still shrouded in mystery is whose orders the trio are following, though Sykes manages to uncover some useful information about the lake’s past that could clarify that.

The Tall Man, we learn via Garrett, is named Holyoke, a man who (when living) was the leader of a group of cultists in 1871. He was murdered. That would seem to put the kibosh on my “Tall Man isn’t actually the villain” theory, but we’ll see how it goes as the season plays out.

Interestingly, though the cultists pinpoint Cricket (and stalked her accordingly, using her lame self-hating graffiti to lure her away from the camp), it’s actually Amy that the mysterious lake entity is interested in. Guess they got their wires crossed communicating via the payphone in hell.

The mysterious ritual summons a storm and Amy, who is in the lake, is directly struck by an excessive amount of lightning–after hallucinating blood and a creepy demonic face in the lake’s reflection. Eyes wide open and facedown in the water, she very much appears to be dead, but the episode cuts out before that’s confirmed. As of now, my theory is that she’s dead and her body will be used as a conduit for the evil entity to wreak havoc. Though Episode 3 is a bit early for something that huge to go down!

On the bright side, two great things happen for the counselors on a personal level. Mid-makeout, after finding the mix tape Blotter made for her before being horribly dismembered offscreen, Cricket realizes that Alex is a tool and that Blotter is someone who truly cares (cared) for her. She rejects Alex, and it is unbearably cathartic to see that “Ugh, I screwed up” look on his face when Cricket shows up for volleyball in that teeny tiny red bikini.

Even better, Blair and Drew hook up! Yes! My Dead of Summer OTP lives!!

Stray thoughts:

• You’d think after that super creepy premonitory dream where Cricket is almost sacrificed by satanists that she’d maybe think twice before going off with random obvious villain types… but that’s just me.
• Deputy Sykes is improving in his detective skills. So far, he’s spent the majority of his time hanging around with teens, being broody, and glaring at the files he recovered from the late Groundskeeper Dave’s cabin.
• So Blotter is definitely dead. I expected as much (and mentioned it in my last review), but his severed hand in the lake (still holding a baby bottle!) pretty much confirms it.
• Eli Goree’s arms. That is all.
• Joel and camp owner Deb are still flirting (weird), and she owns one of the occultist masks (extra weird).
• Alex still sucks but I do appreciate that he stuck up for Cricket and punched Crowley after Crowley called her a whore.

What did you think of this episode of Dead of Summer? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Dead of Summer airs Tuesday at 9/8c on Freeform.

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