Jennifer
Episode 5 of Brand New Cherry Flavor begins with Boro bringing home a stack of raw meat for her ravenous undead subjects. While they gobble down their food hungrily, Lisa manages to track down Jennifer’s husband, Mike. Lisa brings Mike to Boro’s hideout, where he’s immediately given a big ol’ bearhug greeting by a zombified guy called Pierre. Boro knows who this man is and offers Lisa the chance to learn everything about her past. Heading over to Mike’s place, it turns out Boro has kids that have been abandoned for the last 10 years. This certainly hits home with Lisa, who arrives back at Mike’s and oversees Boro making dinner like it’s a normal day. She watches wide-eyed as Boro puts her hand in boiling hot water without flinching and pulls out a piece of spaghetti. Dinner takes an unexpected turn when the kids and Mike both suddenly start sleeping after asking too many questions. It turns out there’s some being that’s inside Jennifer, jumping between different bodies, which explains this whole Boro persona. Just before they leave, Boro enlists Lisa’s help for a gnarly memory extraction procedure. While this is going on, Lou remains determined to figure out what’s happening with Lisa. Part of this includes heading over to the house she shot her film at. As he starts snooping around, Lou runs into Mary, Lisa’s partner on their old film. Well, it turns out Lisa completely screwed the girl over. Despite sporting a missing eye, it turns out on the last day of shooting she saw a strange being inside Lisa and it scared her half to death, The next part of this story is hazy for her, but given the state of her fingers, it could well be that Mary gauged her own eye out. At the hospital, Lisa heads in to check on Jules. He’s still alive, despite the nasty burns and body-wide cast, while the gang decorate his casts. Jonathan meanwhile, rocks up at the hospital too, where Veronica takes him home. Jonathan is certainly not himself, jumping at the opportunity of eating dog food and only perking up at the sound of Lisa’s name. Lou is not happy and believes that Lisa is responsible, enlisting the help of his hired goons to kill her. As James (the assassin) shows up at her apartment, Mary watches the movie and watches as she literally takes her own eye out and eats it. It seems this isn’t some weird special effect – it’s real. Back at the apartment, Lisa is beaten to death, sporting a shattered ankle and blood all over her face. When she suddenly awakens, Jonathan happens to be standing down the far end of the hallway. Crawling over, she asks to see Boro weakly.
The Episode Review
After four episodes of escalating weirdness, Brand New Cherry Flavor goes one step further and begins to compound its numerous questions around exactly what’s going on. It’s clear that there’s a spiritual force at work and it seems like this being is inside Boro’s body. It doesn’t explain the spirit that’s been haunting Lisa, nor does it reveal exactly what this trapdoor is that’s in her apartment. It seems like Boro has some sort of power over the different people in town too, keeping her own identity a secret all this time. And what’s with the vomiting kittens too? This episode goes one step further than that and introduces zombies which, will befitting for the weirdness factor, does seem a little silly in the grand scheme of things. That’s something this series has struggled with, and while you do need to suspend your disbelief with this one, it sometimes feels like one step too far. Still, whether we’ll get any answers this season or not remains to be seen but this is undoubtedly an addictive watch.
