Review: Psi Cops “Monster Under the Bed”;“The Shadows of Death”

In this week’s Psi Cops, Kydd and Felixx take on a step-mother who doesn’t respect her daughter’s imagination. It’s the show’s most legitimately frightening episode so far, and also it’s least paranormal episode (Felixx’s car does seem like it has some kind of magic powers, but maybe he’s just that great at driving?).

This episode also introduces us the Paranormal Emergency Phone (just dial 666), which was conceptualized by Kydd and Felixx but (poorly) manned by Eric. When the Psi Cops receive a call from 5 year old Clementine about a potential monster under her bed, Kydd and Felixx’s out-sized paternal instincts (previously seen in the episode “Crop Circles”) kick into high-gear, and they drive off in a random direction before Eric even has time to find out how many penises the monster has. It’s always nice when the boys team up with a child – there’s more opportunity for imaginations to run wild!

Arriving at the girl’s home, they correctly identify the step-mother as a complete asshole, but their attempts to prove her wrong and Clementine right about the monster under her bed prove more difficult – they have to deal with a distracting oscillating fan, bad traffic, and unsummonable demons.

Felixx displays his well established driving skills in this episode but also reveals some pretty decent drawing chops, as he uses police sketch artist techniques to depict a blood-eyed, needle-toothed, many-limbed monster.

I would never accuse Psi Cops of being a show trying to make a point about anything other than the importance of friendship, but Kydd and Felixx’s slapdash coppery frequently lines up with modern day criticisms of investigative techniques. In “Monster Under the Bed” they lead their impressionable witness down the road towards their own biased opinion of what an under bed demon looks like. When Clementine is asked to choose between “rows of bloody shark teeth or thousands of tiny needles with intestines impaled on them”, for the sketch, she responds that she doesn’t know, so they go with the needles and intestines, and end up with a hellish depiction of a Centipede of Horror and Death – something much more in line with Kydd and Felixx’s idea of a demon than Clementine’s understanding of her bed monster. The Psi Cops even have a demon costume in storage that looks exactly like the creature they lead Clementine into describing.

In the end, there was no monster under Clementine’s bed, but there was a regular old local pervert under there dressed up like the Centipede of Horror and Death. And no, it’s not a coincidence, he found Felixx’s sketch when he broke into the house to attack Clementine anyway, and was inspired to leave, make the costume, and break back in. Truly chilling. But don’t worry, the Psi Cops murder him.

Today Kydd goes beyond any regular kind of max despondency, all the way to triple max despondency, which we all know is the max amount of max there can possibly be. The cause of his ennui? The endless, vampire-heavy slog of the exact same, super exciting, completely different things that is their monster of the week hunting existence.

Into this confusing pity party walks Pepe Mantigo, a man who loves packaged fruit pies and is haunted constantly by the long, skinny-armed shadows of death.

Pepe’s desperation to get back to his banana-loving wife before she dies/forgets him leads the investigators on a country-wide road trip to reunite the couple in Ottawa. This sets up a Final Destination type situation, but one where all the Final Destinationing is inadvertently done by Kydd and Felixx. They almost strangle him through triple max seat belting, draining their own brake fluid, gun-busking, and failing to leave the Psi Cops parking lot. In their defence, the gun-busking earns them triple-max tips, the maximum amount of tip you can get.

A nice bit of continuity – the boys eat their fruit pies with the plastic wrapper on, a technique they learned by eating bags of chips whole when they were abducted by “aliens” in the episode “Kyddnapped”. The technique works as well with fruit pies as it does with chips, which is not at all.

“Shadow of Death” is a surprisingly sweet episode, thanks in no small part to the empathetic voice acting of Andres Soto (Yellowjackets, Ondivedu) as Pepe. His devotion to his wife drives the plot forward with more focus than normal, and the three travellers end up having a really nice time together. A lawn chair ride on an old-timey plane restores Kydd’s spirit, and Pepe gets to see his wife one more time before the boys inadvertently kill him.