TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “Self-Contained”
By: Brandon Wolfe
“Self-Contained” continues with the ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ series’ tack of taking a single scene from the film and drawing it out into an hour-long episode of television. In this instance, it’s the tense, fairly brief sequence on the Fuller RV where the family attempts to successfully smuggle the Geckos across the border into Mexico without incident. However, unlike previous episodes, this expansion actually mostly survives the transition.
On the road to the border, the episode doesn’t deviate from the film in too many major ways. Richie still holds the kids in the back of the RV while Seth and Jacob get themselves acquainted up front. Seth still digs into Jacob’s background concerning his wife’s death, but unlike Harvey Keitel’s Jacob, this Robert Patrick version has more fire in his belly, and isn’t content to take Seth’s guff without asserting himself as much as he can, given the circumstances. The differences in this go-round largely concern the volatility of Richie, who is still having demonic visions of snakes, monsters and the mysterious seductress who governs his actions, prompting him to almost shoot the Fuller children when he believes them to be inhuman. However, this Scott actually has a gun on him, for some reason (bullies, I believe it was), and an armed standoff ensues between Richie, Scott and Seth as the RV approaches the border.
Jacob opts to create a diversion and rams into the car in front of him, forcing a confrontation with the car’s driver. Jacob, thinking quickly and in the absence of other options, knocks the driver unconscious and hauls him into the RV, forcing Scott to take over the man’s car (all of this, of course, goes unnoticed by the dozens of other cars all around, it bears mentioning). Scott tries to play everything smoothly, but is deemed suspicious by Border Patrol and is brought inside for questioning, leaving the other members of his party scrambling to figure out their next move.
Ranger Gonzalez is also on the scene, having escaped custody from his superiors over the motel shootout. He attempts to approach the RV, but is detained by Border Patrol due to suspicious activity. Brought inside the offices on-site, he encounters Carlos, Seth’s vampiric cartel contact, who has killed a Border Patrol agent and assumed his identity (Carlos is still played by Wilmer “Fez” Valderrama, a fact I don’t see myself ever getting used to). Carlos keeps Gonzalez in place, returns Scott to the RV and uses some armed henchmen to assist the Geckos and Fullers across the border. But Gonzalez is one tough cookie, and his next move is to strip down to his underwear, go to the nearest body of water and wade over to Mexico, which apparently is a thing you can do. As he begins to make his way over, the Geckos finally arrive at their rendezvous point: the infamous watering hole The Titty Twister, which looks, as near as I can tell, exactly as it did in the film.
Of course, this being ‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series,’ we are again treated to pointless flashbacks to things we don’t at all need to know. The ongoing mystery of the circumstances surrounding the death of Jacob’s wife are finally shown to us this week after much unnecessary buildup, where the series had been attempting to use this event to cast doubt on Jacob’s character. But it turns out that all of the buildup was even more pointless than we realized because Jacob did not kill his wife via drunk driving or something more nefarious, but he instead was having an apologetic argument with her and crashed the car when she attempted to JUMP OUT of the moving vehicle. So none of it was his fault at all. His wife was just either reckless or extremely unsuited to dealing with marital conflict.
But useless flashbacks aside, “Self-Contained” is the most successful episode of the series to date. As I said earlier, it does the best job an episode has done thus far with the series’ very wobbly M.O. of trying to stretch “From Dusk Till Dawn” out piecemeal into weekly installments. The RV segment works in a lengthier format and the new wrinkles added blend with the familiar into an end result that does its job well enough. But now that we’ve arrived at the Titty Twister, it’s going to be interesting to see what the series does from here. Up until now, the film offered a variety of different locales and situations for the series to draw from, but when the Geckos arrived at the bar, they remained there for the duration of the film. A lot of funky stuff goes down inside the bar, but I’m not sure how you parse those events out into five whole hours without a ton of repetition. Let’s hope Robert Rodriguez has managed to crack that nut.
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