Scream Episode 11 “Heavenly Creatures”
First, a quick recap:
- Audrey secretly loved Emma, and not in a just friends way. Her broken heart opened the door to anger and brought her to Piper Shaw.
- Brandon James did not die 20 years ago.
- Zoe Vaughn, fan of Noah and his Morgue podcast, is dead.
The second to final Season 2 episode features the greatest opening scene ever.
Emma snoozes in her bed as Ghostface tries the various doors around the house, looking for a way in. The security system mysteriously switches off.
Through a back door, the killer enters and sneaks upstairs. In Emma’s bedroom, her worst enemy sorts through her belongings. Her Dream Journal catches his eye.
Opening the hard bound cover bumps a pair of scissors and Emma wakes up. She bravely rolls over and finds…nothing. A door is loudly unlocked downstairs, and Emma follows the sound.
Her front door is open and the infamous carved wooden heart from Brandon James hangs from the knob. On it is her name: “Emma.”
Kieran dresses and heads out to the Duval house, after having a slightly creepy chat with Eli, who is sitting in the morning semi-darkness of the Wilcox home. Acosta is on the scene with his men, searching the house for anything else the killer may have left behind. Kieran shows up and there are hugs for Emma.
Maggie tells Miguel privately that she communicated with Brandon by leaving the note in the tree hole. The only other person with a strong connection to Piper in town is Kristin Lang, who grew up with her in an orphanage.
In the hospital, Noah has lost his spirit. Zoe is dead, he was buried alive; it hasn’t gone well for him of late. Audrey is taking care of him, and Mayor Maddox is on TV ranting about catching the killer. Emma, Kieran and Brooke arrive.
They offer Noah a coffee (he can’t have it) and a laptop loaded with horror films including “It Follows,” “Night of the Living Dead,” etc. Noah doesn’t want to watch them anymore. He’s done with it. Murder board, the Morgue, it’s over.
At Brooke’s posh hotel suite, Stavo draws Quinn Maddox dead. Brooke arrives and they kiss. Her father urges all citizens to be safe and institutes a curfew for young people.
At Noah’s, Audrey, Emma and Kieran break down the Murder Board. They find the photo booth pictures of Noah and Zoe from the carnival and a news clipping of gathered mourners at Will Belmont’s funeral last year. Emma notices something very strange in the image.
One of the mourners is Eli, Kieran’s cousin.
Audrey is ordered to incinerate the contents of the Murder Board. When she gives him the photos of Zoe snuggling with him, he nearly cries. Audrey gets three texts, which together read as follows:
“Your friend is good at cutting people off.
But she’d better watch out.
I cut deeper.”
Noah decides to do one final podcast as a tribute to Zoe.
After the carnival, Eli texted Emma a bunch of times to explain and she never responded. Did she cut him off? Is he running around slaughtering her friends because of some sick crush?
Kieran wants to beat the crap out of the boy, but Audrey and Emma talk him down.
Aunt Tina has been paid $15,000 to leave town by the Mayor. (Really? That’s it? Boy is Aunt Tina is easy to bribe!) She’s taking Eli, who wants to stay, with her. Not only does she want the money, she’s afraid the town will “find out everything about us.”
Eli refuses to leave and decides to “take care of” the Mayor.
Maddox is chilling by his pool, trying to reach Brooke via voicemail. He hears noises in the house, music playing. As he follows it upstairs, Eli slips into his office and breaks into the Mayor’s desk looking for blackmail material he can use to stay in town and get paid.
He finds it and leaves Maddox a little note: “You are so screwed.”
Acosta interviews Lang. She’s surprised that the police know she ever knew Piper. During her time at the orphanage, she barely knew the girl because Piper was so much younger.
Kristin gives Acosta her suspect list. Not Stavo, whom she calls a unique and talented artist. She thinks Stavo’s death art is a means to understand the sometimes grim reality of a police officer’s job. It’s gotta be Emma, who she calls murder obsessed.
Brooke arrives home and Stavo promises to return home, too.
Noah records a Eulogy to Zoe podcast, then stops when Stavo arrives. Though the younger Acosta agrees that Zoe should be eulogized, he demands that Noah not end “The Morgue.” He emails Noah a little present from his phone and then heads out.
And the gift is absolutely brilliant. Panels from a black and white graphic novel showing Noah at his board, deducing at his microphone, sending his theories across the internet and finally, confronting Ghostface in the woods.
It’s all very Sherlock Holmes. I loved it.
At the Wilcox house, Kieran sneaks past his relatives. Eli tells Tina that the Mayor has secretly swindled half the town via shaky real estate deals. He even stole from the James family.
In Eli’s bedroom, Kieran finds a stack of letters between Piper and Audrey. He runs out to the car to show the girls. Along with the letters, there are photos of Emma that were in Eli’s stuff.
Audrey suggests putting the evidence back until they have something more. Emma points out that if they go to the police, Audrey will be implicated in the murders from last year. Kieran returns everything. Emma wants to examine the pig farm again. They head out.
Maddox gets a text after making sure Brooke is safe. He’s being blackmailed. Again.
Brooke gets a text from Stavo. It’s a drawing of her sleeping next to him and the words “I’ll miss this in the morning.” At home, Stavo is packing up his belongings. He picks up his latest masterpiece, Ghostface standing in a field with a barn in the distance, and leaves.
Noah records a better version of his podcast. Though he intended to end “The Morgue” tonight, he is reinvigorated by seeing the photo of Zoe, his biggest fan, and by Stavo’s visit.
“The Morgue” is back, and even more morbid!
After recording it, he uploads the file. But it gets hijacked instead by a second file. It’s a video called “A Nightmare In Lakewood,” and all Morgue viewers, including the police and Brooke, get a notification to open it. It implicates Audrey and Emma in the murders, with audio snippets from Emma’s dream journal, Lang’s tapes and Audrey’s confession. It also includes footage of Audrey kneeling over Jake’s dead body, which makes Brooke very unhappy.
As Miguel watches the podcast video, Maggie bursts in. Emma and Audrey are on their way to the pig farm and no one knows why. Acosta and a deputy immediately depart.
The ladies arrive at ye olde barn. Audrey is on guard duty while Emma checks the place out, finding the mysterious room hidden behind the Murphy bed. She calls Audrey and they discover her dream journal, beer bottles, discarded food wrappers and a mirror previously covered in photos that bears their outlines.
Someone lives here.
The Mayor arrives and enters the darkened barn. He texts his blackmailer and hears the nearby chime of a text being received. He begins sending texts to follow the noise and finds a phone sitting on a stool. As he examines it, Ghostface steps out of the shadows and impales him through the chest with a pitchfork. Ouch!
Audrey and Emma snoop to figure out what the Mayor is up to. They find him sorta alive and handle the bloody pitchfork. Amateurs. The cops bust in to find the two girls armed over the fallen body of the Mayor. Not good.
Acosta arrests them, as Kieran and Maggie protest.
It’s Murder Board time! Let’s go over the suspects.
The Innocent
Miguel Acosta
He’s actively trying to solve the case, got a call from the killer, was honest with the police department and Maggie about Stavo’s behavior. Not the killer.
Stavo Acosta
What’s his motivation? If he were a killer, I see him as more of a thrill-killer doing it randomly. And these murders are tied to the past and the town and Emma. Nothing is by chance. He’s a strange kid with a taste for great murder art, and so far unconnected to any of the events that drive the killer’s thirst for death.
On the other hand, Jake was the first to die and soon after, Stavo became Brooke’s friend and slowly moved to vaguely friend status with the Lakewood Five. Was this all part of the plan?
Nah. I just don’t buy it.
Aunt Tina
Kieran’s shady aunt seems more oriented towards grifting, lying and scheming. She’s a criminal, but of the common get-rich-quick variety. Could she be the Second Killer opposite either Eli or Steven? It’s possible, but unlikely. She did go to work for the Mayor to complete Jake’s work and obviously burned down the model home with Eli and Emma inside because that is what Jake was being paid to do. So she’s an arsonist. For cash, she would be happy to be a lot of different things.
But Wren Lake Estates has several houses. Why burn down the one containing the bodies of Seth Branson and Eddie Hayes? And why did the killer not simply dispose of those bodies instead of keeping them in a bathroom full of air fresheners?
Brandon James
Has the infamous phantom of Murderville finally returned? Since I don’t think James is guilty of the original five murders back in 1994, it would seem rather odd for him to show up now and start stabbing the town to death. Plus, I think the killer is a face we’ve seen before this season. And we haven’t seen ol’ Brandon strolling down Main Street, unless he had extensive plastic surgery and renamed himself Kristin Lang.
Although, Piper Shaw WAS his daughter, and Audrey and Emma murdered her. A father’s rage could lead him to target them. Anything is possible. But Troy and Brandon James are characters who are talked ABOUT rather than heard from directly. Having them be the killer or killers would be kind of cheating. As a mystery, it would be unsolvable because we don’t know what drives the James brothers.
Nothing has ever been discussed about the family who adopted Piper from Blessed Sisters Children’s Home and gave her a life. Who were they? Surely not Aunt Tina, right? Given all the other connections to Piper, it’s possible.
We know that Audrey and Emma played as children out at the old horse stables on the outskirts of town, where Jake was later killed. We know that Emma encountered a little girl who tied pigs with wire and dissected them while laughing at either the James farm or the stables. The present day killer has a definite pig motif, which seems to point to Troy.
What if the strange little girl is Troy’s own daughter? We know he had a family. She would be approximately Emma’s age, and Piper’s cousin.
The Suspects
Steven Duval
Numero uno suspect in my mind. He’s been suspiciously missing-in-action for a few episodes, which could mean that he was abducted by the killer as part of some grand finale scheme, or that he’s been too busy killing people while hidden beneath mask and hood to appear as his undisguised self.
I don’t trust this man.
The killer is intelligent, has some mysterious connection to Piper, and has a few screws loose.
Steven is intelligent, was romantically involved with Piper’s mother (Maggie) and a key part of the massacre 20 years before. And he has some fairly serious violence and anger issues. But is all that enough for him to be considered a cold-blooded calculating serial killer? It’s a tough call.
His motivation for terrorizing his own daughter and her teenage friends is unclear.
Emma’s father, who cracked-up psychologically in the aftermath of the 1994 massacre, shows up in town just as a new series of killings begin. He’s in the woods with a drugged Emma outside the Wilcox house when she’s attacked by Killer #2 but not even slightly harmed, and he tells the cops he saw nothing. He’s at a bar getting hammered when his possible partner, Killer #2, is in the bathroom of Duval’s Crescent Palms Motel Room while Emma sorts through newspaper clippings.
Once again, Emma lives.
If there are two killers, is there an agreement between them that Emma will not be physically harmed, but can be drugged, stalked and framed for various crimes? The killer recorded a video of himself watching Emma sleep while the hunting knife hovered inches from her face. It would’ve been easy to kill her on multiple occasions.
Was Palms clerk Eddie “Krueger” Hayes really killed because he saw Piper and another woman arguing one night? Or did he also see Steven doing something odd? Steven has never gotten a call from Ghostface, but it’s difficult to imagine him having a romantic fling with Haley Myers, as the killer did.
She seems like more like the type to make out with a morbid and much younger dude like Stavo.
Kristin Lang
I want Kristin Lang to be guilty, since her killing partner could’ve easily hurt her by throwing her down the stairs at the high school, but not killing her in the process. The attack could draw suspicion away from Kristin, painting her as a victim. Plus, she was a childhood friend of Piper’s. Also, she locked Emma in her office and Ghostface popped up soon after.
There’s just one huge problem.
She got a phone call from the killer while she was alone and didn’t seem to understand what was happening, then fought the maniac. If she was in league, she’d get a call from Ghostface asking what she wanted for dinner back at the Evil Lair. She also cared for Seth Branson, who was mutilated and tortured by the killer.
It doesn’t track, but I so want there to be a Steven Duval/Kristin Lang killing team. They’d be so cute together in their little black hooded raincoats, with their little knives. Awww, you guys. Totes adorbs.
Eli
Like Stavo, Eli is so incredibly suspicious it all but cancels him out as a suspect. He roams around in stranger’s houses, like the killer. He has a stalking charge. He’s kind of pushy in his attempts to romance Emma. He appears to have lured the Mayor to his death via blackmail, he knows about the messages in the tree hole, he manipulates and lies.
Kieran said something is wrong with him, that he’s not right. Eli made reference to his mother Tina’s loser boyfriend back in Atlanta, whom I strongly suspect is Steven.
If he was killing people, it would almost be anticlimactic.
What if when Piper said she had one more surprise for Emma on the dock last season, she wasn’t talking about Audrey’s assistance? If she were about to reveal the name of her true partner, the one who killed Rachel and made it look like a suicide, it would’ve had to have been someone Emma already knew or it wouldn’t have made sense.
Piper couldn’t say: “My partner is Eli! Surprise!” because Emma hadn’t met him yet.
But she could’ve said, “I got in contact with your father and he’s helping me.”
