Tru Calling/Recap/S1/E01 Pilot

Tru Calling Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot
Synopsis: Tru finds out that she can travel through time, back one day, but only when a dead body asks her to save its life.

Analysis of the episode is below the recap. Recap by Korval.

Recap
We open the series looking up at a girl's face, 12 years old. She's looking down at a woman, obviously dead and in a coffin. Pan up to a family standing around said coffin: an older man, a teenage girl, and a boy younger than the original girl. Decent job of efficient storytelling here, telling us everything we need to know without resorting to pesky dialog. The little girl's family lost its mother.

May, 1993. At least, that's what the caption says.

So, the little girl is looking down at her mom, and a voiceover whispers "true". The little girl answers to this. Wha? Oh, that's right; the name of this show is TruCalling. Which means that the little girl is named Tru.

Tru? Really, TV show? That's what you're going to call your main character? Is the big plot twist that Tru murdered her mother in revenge for giving her such a punariffic name that she no doubt caught hell for at school (and, considering her age, will no doubt catch further hell for later)?

Anyway, the voice, which the camera lets us know is coming from Tru's mother, tells her that it's OK. And Tru whispers back that it's OK too. Um, OK Tru.

Tru sits down with her family and the pastor begins the eulogy with "Before her time".

Tru, being young, decides to ignore the pastor and tell her big sister that their dead mother just spoke to her. Tru admiting crazy things to people that other people would be wise enough to keep to themselves is not something that she will outgrow over the years, as we will find out.

Tru tells big sis that her mother forgave her for not helping her. Apparently, this has to do with the mother's death. Not unsurprisingly, big sis calls BS on this, and informs us that Tru was murdered in front of her.

The dialog stops so that the pastor can say "before her time" again. Yeah, that won't be coming up anytime later...

Big sis is not pleased with this needless echo, calling him "full of crap". Tru expresses the wish to be able to go back to that day and help her. Yeah, that wish won't be coming back to haunt her either. Big sis shows that she's a callous bitch or in deep grief by dumping on Tru, saying that she can't so there's no point in wishing for it. As we will find later, the "deep grief" theory of big sis will be thrown out in favor of "callous bitch," since that's what she grows up into.

Tru having been put into her place, the screen fades out.

10 years later, Eliza Dushku is seen running down the fire escape because the elevator is out. Intercutting her marathon is a shot of a college graduation ceremony, thus more efficient storytelling: Eliza's character (ie: Tru, in case you didn't notice) is clearly late for graduation.

I'm going to make you a promise right now. I will do my best in these recaps to mention Buffy: the Vampire Slayer as little as possible. However, the show is going to make that difficult for reasons it didn't have to. Tru is pretty much the polar opposite of Faith, so it isn't the fact that Eliza played both roles. The similarities are mostly that the other polar opposite of Faith is... well Buffy. And Tru and Buffy will have far more similarities than they really needed to. Sometimes it's Eliza effecting a Buffy-esque mannerism, sometimes it's the costume department putting Tru in something that Buffy would wear, and sometimes it's writing a Buffy-ism for Tru to say. Just letting you know that I'll try to avoid harping on the connection.

Tru is wearing a very low-cut shirt, and she is running at a dead sprint. Ergo: she gets bouncy. Like, a lot. And you're going to see a lot of Tru running/bouncing in the first half of the sieres. Fortunately, they abandoned that concept later, but you're going to get to know the Running Tru a lot in the initial episodes.

Please note that I am not against the bouncy Running Tru;)

Anyway, as Tru's name is called at graduation, two characters in the audience, one male, one female, look and talk worriedly about Tru's absence. Suspense is built for a moment, then Running Tru appears, in full graduation regalia (! When did she change?) to collect her diploma to thunderous applause. Apparently Tru is somewhat well-known and popular.

While looking at the throng of admirers, her gaze falls on on three empty chairs, and she looks incredibly disappointed.

Well, we immediately find out in the next scene that those chairs were for her family who didn't show up, and Tru is downing a hard liquor to deal with it. Hey Tru: it's kinda hypocritical to be made at your family for showing up at your graduation when you barely made it yourself.

Tru is with the two friends at a bar. BTW, the guy friend: don't get too attached to him. He vanishes, well, pretty much after this scene. Considering that he made a crack about Tru complaining about her family not being at graduation, Tru probably cast him out of her show.

The female friend, who's name will be revealed to be Lindsay, offers sympathy rather than jerkassness. We find out that her little brother (Harrison) is a womanizer, her big sister (Meredith) is a workaholic, and her father got remarried and decided to abandon his first family. Surprisingly efficient and effective exposition here, disguised as a plausible bitching session. We also learn that Tru was a track star, hence the flimsy excuse for shots of bouncy Running Tru. Again, not against that.

After dispensing with the necessary exposition, Tru decides to head home, so that she doesn't show up at her internship hungover. A wise decision, but Lindsay spots a professor from their college. Tru infodumps that Lindsay thinks that she has a thing for him, but Tru isn't into professors.

The next day starts out and oh, what a surprise, Tru just boffed the aforementioned Professor Evans. And this wasn't a first-time thing either; the professor comments that she was an ethics violation yesterday, which suggests that it's been going on a while.

After some playful banter, Tru gets a call from little brother Harrison. We learn that Harrison is a gambler, and apparently not that good of one. He tries to bum some cash off of Tru, but she's not going for it. After that, he tries to apologize for not being at graduation. Tru seems disappointed again and hangs up.

Tru's day seems to be degenerating, as the next scene opens with her internship being canceled. We learn that Tru is trying to get into medical school. She gets sent to a job that she is told "people would die for it." Ha ha, jokes on you, Tru; it's a morgue. Aren't those writers funny?

Enter the morgue supervisor: Davis. He is... not well versed in basic human interpersonal communication. He asks if she's been to a morgue before, and she answers that she did back when she was 12. He suggests that there's a story behind that, and Tru just looks uncomfortable.

Davis gives her the tour of her new job, graveyard shift of course. They eventually come to the "crypt", where unnatural deaths are stored awaiting autopsy. As they stand around the needlessly dark, creepy room, Davis tosses "before their time" out there. Didn't see that coming...

Cut to Tru and an older, blond woman in the woman's restroom. The older woman, Tru's big sis Meredith, is kinda weirded out by Tru taking a job at a morgue, but Tru says that it'll help with medschool. Meredith complains about lack of sleep, which Tru picks up on, but Meredith cuts her off. Mere doesn't want to talk about how she's feeling. Meredith tosses off a very strange, almost nostalgic, line about how things used to be when it didn't take the anniversary of their mother's death to get the three of them together. Bad infodump.

Meredith leaves in such a huff that she forgets her purse. That contains cocaine. Which Tru immediately snoops out and finds. See kids, drugs make you so stupid that you can't conceal your drug habit from the person you least want to find out about it.

At the restaruant table, Meredith suggests a number of excuses for why Harrison didn't show up. Tru twists the conversation onto the drugs she just found. It turns out that Meredith was a former user that went through rehab, but has since regressed. Tru's snooping pisses Meredith off (how dare she care about me!) and she leaves in a huff.

Tru gets a phonecall, and there's a huge jump cut to Harrison bleeding and bandaged in the hospital. Apparently, the 10-of-clubs didn't show up when Harrison needed it, he lost big, and since he couldn't pay, they hurt him. Harrison blows Tru off for not giving him the money when he asked for it, and he gets wheeled away.

So, now at Tru's new job. The person bringing the body in has an unusual sense of humor, and he introduces Tru to Rebecca Morgan, a corpse. She died due to a gunshot wound at around 10pm. The camera lingers on a heart-shaped locket as it gets dropped into an evidence/personal effects bag. Yeah, that won't be important.

Tru asks if they know who did it, but the guy reminds her that they don't solve crimes. They just collect and process the bodies. After storing Rebecca's body in the crypt, the guy leaves. Tru complains that Davis said that she wouldn't be left alone, but he points out that she'll have 32 friends: the corpses. Joy.

Cut to Tru sitting alone in the dark. In the dark? What, they can't afford lights in the morgue? Anyway, she starts hearing voices. Whispers of "help me." She does the usual schtick, calling out to whomever is there, asking if someone's playing a joke, that sort of thing. The voices lead her to the crypt, where she starts opening doors, looking for someone. The music starts getting, for want of a better term, weird. It's not scary at all, contrasting with the actual on-screen action which is kinda creepy.

Eventually, she opens Rebecca's crypt and pulls out the body. She stares at it for some reason, with a blank expression on her face. The shots of the body and Tru are designed to echo the shots in the opening scene. As the camera lingers on Rebecca's face, her eyes suddenly open, she turns to Tru, and says the show's signature line "Help me."

A whooshing sound is heard as images from early are shown zooming out. It stops when Tru wakes up in her bed, wearing exactly what she was last morning. Her alarm clock turns on after she wakes up. She looks around in confusion, when her professor walks in just as he had before, talking about her being a former ethics violation. He repeats the dialog word-for-word, to Tru's general confusion.

Tru starts talking about how bad of an idea it was to take the job at the morgue, due to the creepiness factor. The professor of course, is highly confused, as she hasn't gone to her internship yet; it starts today. She says that it was canceled yesterday, and he points out that she graduated yesterday, went drinking with her friends, and had a night of unethical sex with her professor. He suggests that it was a bad dream, which Tru is willing to accept.

Well, until Harrison calls, asking for money. And until she sees that the lottery numbers are the exact same as (her) yesterday. Tru seems to have caught on that whatever happened was, in some way, real. Or real enough that she tries to warn Harrison off of continuing to gamble. This is not what Harrison wants to hear, so he blows her off.

She fetches the newspaper and sure enough, it's the same day.

Her interview with Davis is a bit weird. Well, weirder, since she knows what he's going to say. She asks to see the crypt, and then rushes over to Rebecca's chamber to check to see if the body is there.

Now, I need to stop here and point out that there's no reason for her to do this. By now, she has all of the evidence she needs to know that either she went back in time, or she had a prophetic vision of the current day's events. Either way, there's no reason for her to do this.

Also, this looks really suspicious to Davis, and were this real life, there's no way she'd be getting hired after this. It gets even more suspicious when she starts to recite what she knows about Rebecca, complete with black&white flashbacks of key moments. Of course, Rebecca was never there, which Davis tells her. They talk about the crypt's function, holding unnatural deaths, people who died "before their time." This time however, Davis points out that she should accept the fact that there is nothing she can do about them.

O rly? Tru accepts the job and promptly pulls a Batman disappearing act on Davis (though not nearly as magical as the one's Batman does).

Tru recruits Lindsay to help her research Rebecca's life. Lindsay takes a moment to chide Tru on her morgue job, but Tru isn't paying attention. What with life and death being on the line and all.

Behold the glorious return of Running Tru, bouncy and all. She tracks down Rebecca and proclaims "She's alive." OK, that just got to the level of truly stupid. There is absolutely no reason for her to be surprised by this at this point. Is she incapable of realizing what is happening to her? I know that time travel isn't exactly a common, everyday occurrence, but how dense do you have to be to not accept it by this point?

Moving on, Tru finds that she is a waitress in a restaurant. She sits down, orders coffee, and Rebecca is interrupted by her cell phone. She's talking to "Aaron," saying that they've been through this. Then she hangs up. She tells Tru that some people don't know when its over.

Then, Tru shows that her college education was all for naught. Her very first outing, her first chance to save someone's life, and she goes straight for "crazy." She tries to just tell Rebecca that she's going to die, but fortunately, she's interrupted by another restaurant staff worker coming in. Only that postpones her crazy moment for 5 seconds as she remembers the bullet wound in Rebecca's neck.

Not unsurprisingly, this goes over poorly. Rebecca goes to talk to the staffer who postponed Tru's crazy time; Tru, the snoop that she is, takes the opportunity to look through Rebecca's purse. She finds a prescritpion for folic acid. She pulls a Bond and looks at the last call Rebecca got on her cell phone: from a guy named Aaron Mc Cann.

Tru tracks Aaron down, and apparently she learned her lesson from Rebecca. While she does tell him that she may be in trouble, she doesn't go into crazy-ville. Aaron tells her that he didn't know of any enemies, but she was hard on herself. However, Tru blows her cover when she volunteers information that Rebecca's an actor, which she isn't: she's a dancer. She learned a lesson about crazy-ville before; maybe she'll learn a lesson about B Sing one's way through a conversation.

However, he does point out a useful fact: there's another ex-boyfriend for Tru to investigate. Aaron drops the name Elliot Winters.

Again, Tru tracks him down, this time at his office. Rebecca was apparently Elliot's daughter's dance teacher. He says that he loves his family and rebuffed Rebecca's advancements. However, Tru sees that his wife is wearing a heart-shaped necklace identical to the one Rebecca had on.

However, when he asks why he's worrying about Rebecca, Tru tells him that she's going to die today. Again, not unsurprisingly it goes over poorly. She walks out when he starts calling for security. At least this time she was doing it on purpose; she thought he was the killer and wanted to rattle his cage.

Only it's not wise to rattle the cage of someone you think murdered someone. Which is why Tru finds herself in an elevator with Elliot, being strangled. However, all is not as it seems, as he tells her that he doesn't want Rebecca blackmailing him, that it's over between them, and Tru should tell Rebecca that. However, he jumps off the slippery slope by saying that he will do everything he can to stop her from going to his wife about the affair.

Cut to Harrison at a card table. The Running Tru shows up, and is allowed to talk to him. She takes note of the cards on the table, and tries to get Harrison away from the card table. Harrison apparently took a loan from the house as his stake in the game, and seems to be up somewhat.

Tru doesn't try to go to crazy-ville on him, but she does tell him that she heard another voice. Which tells us that she told Harrison about her mother talking to her (or he overheard her talking to Meredith). And that Harrison was a lot less of a callous bitch about it. He seems surprisingly supportive of her on this. She doesn't tell him about the time-travel aspects of this.

So, back to Rebecca's restaurant. Rebecca went home, and Tru's trying to talk to the other restaurant guy. He's proving unhelpful, so she uses her time-travel powers: she bets him that the obvious winner of a baseball game will blow a 7-1 lead in the ninth inning. The stakes: he starts being more helpful on the Rebecca situation if she's right.

Now, it's off to help Meredith by intercepting her drugs before they arrive. She drops in on Meredith after the intercept. She tells her about the cocaine delivery, that she knows. Meredith tries to play it off, but Tru hands her the envelope. Meredith quickly turns angry, telling her that she can't save everyone.

Tru decides to consult with Davis on Rebecca, but she tries to be circumspect with it (see? She can learn), saying that it's for old cases. Davis tells her that neck bullet wound suggests a small caliber round, and an execution-style killing, the latter suggests that she majorly pissed someone off.

While talking to Davis, Tru buys a deck of cards to match the one's Harrison was playing with. She slips Harrison the 10 of clubs. Then she gets a message from the restaurant guy. Her hunch about the game was right, and Rebecca went to see Elliot.

Tru goes to an exhibition of some kind, where Elliot is with his family. She spots Rebecca and tries to intercept her before she can reveal herself to Elliot's family. She escorts Rebecca home.

And who's in Rebecca's appartment? Aaron. He's trying to reconcile with her, and she just keeps telling him to leave. Tru checks the time, and it's near enough to 10 that she pegs him as the killer. Unfortunately, she says this right there in his presence.

She gets better at this as the series progresses. I promise.

Granted, he did come into her apartment with a small caliber pistol in his pocket. However, he tries to give it to Rebecca for protection from Elliot. When Tru tries to intervene, he points the gun at her, saying that interfering in Rebecca's life is a good way to get hurt. Way to make yourself look innocent there.

Cut to Harrison at the card table. He gets a Royal Flush; well, it would be if that 2 of diamonds could magically turn into a 10 of clubs. Oh wait...

Cut back to Rebecca's apartment. Really? We needed a 10 second cut to Harrison at the table in the middle of a gun standoff? Knowing full well that the 10 of clubs was going to save him anyway?

In any case, Tru deduces that Rebecca's pregnant, as Folic Acid is prescribed for pregnancies. Tru tries to plead with him, but it doesn't seem to be working. So... um...

I know I promised and all, but that's what the scene plays like. The spirit of Faith channeled by Eliza Dushku possess Tru's body for a half second, and she kicks the gun out of his hand.

Rebecca picks up the gun and aims it at him, telling him to leave. Tru tells her to lock the door and call the police.

Cut back to Harrison, who has performed his bit of cheating. He wins the hand.

Cut to the restaurant where Tru and Meredith met on day 1. This time it's Tru and Harrison. Harrison wants to know how she knew what card to give him, but Tru has decided that she had enough of crazy-ville and is mum on that.

Meredith walks in, commenting on how happy they look. Meredith says that it was nice to see Tru earlier. Hey, maybe Tru's bit of meddling did some good, helping Meredith to see how far she'd let things get. Or maybe Meredith sneaks off to the bathroom to "powder her nose."

Tru and Harrison talk about her mother watching over them, and Harrison says that she might not like what she sees. Tru suggests that maybe mom is trying to change that.

Davis interrupts her by cell phone with some surprisingly pertinent information. Apparently, the reason for there not to be an exit wound, initially attributed to a low-powered gun, may have an alternate explanation. That is, it is the exit wound; the entry was through the mouth, which suggests suicide.

Of course, anyone paying attention would have noticed that, while Aaron was around near 10, it wasn't near enough to 10 to match eye-witness accounts. Well, the Running Tru comes back in full force, intercut with scenes of Rebecca preparing to kill herself.

Tru breaks into the apartment building via the fire escape and finds Rebecca (how'd she get into the apartment that she told Rebecca to lock?), looking perhaps dead. Only not; she's just really depressed with a gun in her lap and a suicide note on the floor.

Tru tries to cheer her up by telling her about her yet-to-be-born child. She throws in an annecdote about her mother's death, which helps Rebecca pull herself together.

So Tru's first day at work. Again. The guy brings a body in, the circumstances sounding suspiciously like Rebeccas. Only this time, it was cancer. Which is apparently not something that Tru can do anything about.

The episode ends the next day, with Tru standing over her mother's grave, pledging to use her powers to save people.

Analysis
So that's what the show is about. Tru experiences a day, a corpse asks her for help, she goes back in time one day, and she tries to keep that person from becoming a corpse.

This series isn't really normal Sci-Fi/Fantasy; it's really a murder mystery show. That's where most of the tension comes from: who's the killer and how does Tru stop him/her? Tru is given some crucial information due to the time travel, but it is usually not useful without first-hand investigating from the actual day of the murder.

The pilot is a decent episode of the series, but it's not hard to pinpoint why the show never took off. The pilot is one of the most important episodes of any series. As useful as sweeps can be, it's not where you're going to gain audiences. It's the pilot that's going to be where you pick up the most number of people. The pilot needs to deliver the goods, and this one didn't quite make it.

Quite simply, too much stuff happens. It's much faster paced than most of the episodes that come after it, due to the need for exposition. Some of the camera cuts just didn't work. And Tru comes off as an idiot sometimes, as though the concept of time travel is something that she has never encountered before.

This was an episode that really needed to be a 2-parter. That way, you can deal with Tru's relationships and exposition, while still allowing Tru to investigate the crime and stop it from happening.

That being said, this episode is about the best it possibly can be for the amount of material it needs to cover. There are details all over the place. For example, remember back to the first discussion between Aaron and Tru. Even then, the seeds for her suicide were laid when Aaron told Tru how hard Rebecca was with herself. A throwaway line that Tru could have picked up on, but didn't. The writers did the absolute best with the 43 minutes they had.

The performances were pretty decent. Zach Galifianakis's performance as Davis was too awkward; he didn't sound like someone who could even function in society. He'd tone that down pretty dramatically in later episodes. Pilots are about character establishment, so Shawn Reaves (Harrison), A.J. Cook (Lindsay) and Jessica Collins (Meredith) didn't get much to work with. But I have to give props to Jessica's Meredith. She comes across as cold and remote even when she sounds warm and inviting. Her quick transitions between nice and angry flow naturally due to the subject matter (drug abuse), and shows quite a bit of character. While Shawn will eclipse her over the next few episodes, that's mostly because Meredith was underutilized as a character (though Shawn certainly kicks ass as an actor).

Eliza Dushku, the leading lady. She's functional, but not quite as good as she needed to be. There are times when I was thinking that Tru should be near-panic, but I never really read anything like that. All of Tru's surreptitious checking, her complete and utter unwillingness to believe that she was in the past unless she she was presented with overwhelming evidence, all of that sounds very much like someone who is in panic mode. But Tru never looked like she was panicking; she seemed to be taking the whole thing well, except that she needed more and more confirmation of what she already knew was happening. And panic, while something you can read from dialog, really needs to come from acting. And Eliza didn't deliver the goods.

Panic isn't really what Eliza does best, but that's what the script needed to do in this episode. She gets better, though; mostly because she doesn't need to panic much.