by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime showed the second episode of their
three-part “Thrillogy”, Obsession (or,
as they sometimes spell it in all-caps, OBSESSION): Escaping My Ex, which like the first episode, Obsession:
Stalked by My Lover, was directed by
Alexander Carrière from a script by Melissa Cassera. (For tonight’s third
episode, Obsession: Her Final Vengeance, Cassera continues as writer but Curtis Crawford, frequent collaborator
of Christine Conradt, took over as director.) The first episode centered around
Madison Turner (Celeste Desjardins), a college student majoring in photography,
and Blake Collins (Travis Nelson), the genuinely hot and sexy 25-year-old who
moves into Madison’s apartment as her new roommate, then seduces her while at
the same time pursuing a career as a professional criminal. His main gig is
stealing cars for an auto-theft ring — his contact is a pawnbroker whom he
kills at the end of episode one — but he also runs a phony “security” company
through which he can plant spy cameras in front of people’s home safes so he
can read off the combinations by watching their owners open them, then
burglarize the premises and steal their stuff. (One would think any such victim
would immediately suspect their security installer, but in fact we don’t see
Blake actually finish such a crime: the one time he tries it, the police are
called by a neighbor and arrest him with the swag on him.) Stalked by
My Lover ended with Blake — whose real name
is Nicholas Bransworth, by the way — getting arrested, but when Lifetime and
its producers, directors and writers dreams of a mini-series dancing in their
heads the idea that one of their melodramas could have such a neat and tidy
ending is just unimaginable. So at the beginning of Escaping My Ex Blake, still wearing his orange prison jumpsuit, is
escorted out of his cell and put in a van in the dead of night (later we’re
told that this was to take him to a court date, but a court date in the middle of the night? C’mon, Melissa Cassera, you should have known
better than that!), manages to overpower the driver and strangle him with the
handcuffs they’d put on Blake, thinking that would make him safe to transport.
Blake extracts the driver’s key to the handcuffs and frees his hands, then
steals the van and starts driving it (though for some reason he does not abandon the orange jumpsuit and change into the
driver’s clothes) towards Philadelphia, where the first episode happened.
The
big thing that happens in Escaping My Ex — ironically, considering the title — is that Blake kidnaps Madison
and takes her to, you guessed it, a remote house in the country where cell
phones don’t work. He also contacts Madison’s sister Evie (Kelly Hope Taylor),
with whom Madison has been living since the end of episode one and who’s
working as a real-estate broker following her bitter divorce (thanks to Blake
filming her husband having sex with another woman) while waiting for a
multi-million dollar property settlement to come through. Blake says he’s
kidnapped Madison and is holding her for a $1 million ransom, and will kill
Madison in 48 hours if he doesn’t get his money wire-transferred to a secret
bank account by then. Blake controls Madison by using chains and bondage cuffs
to tie her to the bed in the hideout; he also insists on sleeping with her,
though it’s not all that clear whether he also forces her to have sex with him.
(One thing Melissa Cassera doesn’t bother to explain is how Madison uses the
bathroom; since Blake never lets
her leave the bed, and since he sleeps in it himself — a powerful disincentive
to allow piss and shit to accumulate in it — we presume he’s giving her a
bedpan.) The entire story consists of Madison’s looking for a way to escape her
ex while still convincing him she’s still in love with him so he’ll let her
live, and Evie’s attempt to trace her younger sister and find out where Blake
is holding her so she can rescue Madison and get the madman either killed or
arrested for keeps. At one point Evie attends a birthday party for her
grandfather — grandma has died since the similar party she, her husband,
Madison and Blake attended in episode one but granddad is still around and has
an important part in Madison’s life since her and Evie’s parents died in an
accident during Madison’s childhood and Evie, who’s 15 years older, could have taken Madison in but decided she couldn’t raise
a child at that point in her life and palmed Madison on to their grandparents,
who raised her.
While Evie is at the party she meets an old friend of her
grandfather’s, a retired cop who says he has contacts with “private security”
who will help her deal with any security problem she might have, but does she
take the guy up on his offer, especially since she’s petrified with fear about
going to the authorities since Blake has promised to kill Madison immediately
if he sees any evidence that the cops are involved? No-o-o-o-o, all she does is pump the guy for information about
the local train schedules because when Blake sent Evie a phone video to
indicate that Madison is still alive, there was a train sound in the
background. Madison fakes an ankle injury and gets Blake to put her in a less
intense form of bondage she’s able to break out of, though ironically by
leaving the house where Blake was holding her she misses Evie, and the movie
ends with Blake catching Madison as she’s out trying to run away, bringing her
back and simultaneously trying to hold a gun on both Madison and Evie even though they’re on opposite
sides of him and they both have weapons — Evie has an elaborate candle holder
that would make a great blunt instrument and Madison has a kitchen knife with
which [spoiler alert!] she
ultimately stabs Blake to death just as Blake was about to kill her sister. But
in case you were wondering how Melissa Cassera and the folks at Lifetime and
their producing partners, NB Thrilling Films and Reel One Entertainment, were
going to get a sequel to this one, in the promos for episode three they
re-introduce us to Blake’s sister Lisa (Anastasia Phillips, who in the first
two episodes was quite good even though she had only one scene in the first one
and two in the second — in which she discovers that Blake has ordered two phony
passports, one for himself and one for Madison, and Lisa picks them up but has
a jealous hissy-fit when the one for a woman has someone else’s photo on it),
who in tonight’s episode is apparently going to go after Madison and Evie for
having killed her brother. Oh, great …
