Season 1, Episode 9
Original Air Date: October 27, 1994
Halloween is a pretty wondrous time when you’re a young kid, what with all the candy, Halloween parades at school, and perfectly innocent mischief. When you’re a teenager, it’s not quite as clear what you should be getting out of Halloween. You’re a little too old to be trick or treating, you’re not quite old enough for Halloween parties where drinking is involved, and you’ve got enough problems to make it through the school week to care what you should be dressing up as. The Halloween episode from the lone season of My So-Called Life digs into this to some extent, since all of its various characters approach Halloween differently, but the episode also takes a little bit of a detour from its usual clear-eyed honesty.
In the opening moments of “Halloween”, the voiceover coming from 15-year-old Angela (Claire Daines) has her contemplating the ways in which people use masks and costumes to take on personas outside of their own. Since she’s unsure of what type of persona she’s interested in embracing on Halloween, she shows up to school that day without a costume, only to notice that most of her fellow students show up to class dressed in costume. Most notably, her friend Rickie (Wilson Cruz) dresses up as a straight person by barrowing the clothes of their friend Devon (Brian Krakow). It’s in this first classroom scene where a teacher asks where Angela’s crush Jordan Catalano is, which ties into an overarching storyline about him getting expelled, but luckily we’re spared much Jared Leto screen time in this episode.
Angela’s friends then start discussing a former student named Nicky Driscoll who supposedly died at their school on Halloween night in 1963, which inspires Angela to dress as your typical school student from the ’60s. Her kooky friend Rayanne (A.J. Langer) convinces Angela, Ricky, and Devon to spend the night at the school in the hopes of resurrecting the ghost of Nicky Driscoll (who Angela sees flashes of around the school), because apparently every episode I review has to be about a ghost. Apart from everything going on with Angela at the school, we see that her parents Patty (Bess Armstrong) and Graham (Tom Irwin) have to find a Halloween costume for a party they’re going to, so they stumble into a costume shop and end up renting a pirate and Rapunzel costumer, since all the Bill and Hillary Clinton costumes were taken (ah, the ’90s).
When Patty and Graham get home, they find Angela’s little sister Danielle dressed up as Angela and doing an uncannily moody impression of her. However, while Danielle is out trick-or-treating with a friend, Patty and Graham are so turned on by each other in costume that they end up skipping the party and having gloriously awkward parental sex. While all this is going on, Angela is at the school, and after seeing what appear to be hallucinations of the greaser-esque Nicky Driscoll, she opens the door to the gym, which brings her to some spooky haunted version of a school dance from 1963. Meanwhile, Rayanne and Devon hang out in the school’s underbelly keeping each other company while Devon gets constantly freaked out. While Angela is trapped in this 1963 netherworld, she keeps chasing Nicky and trying to stop him from meeting his untimely demise, which of course happens to no avail.
Much like The Dick Van Dyke Show, My So-Called Life is a show that I watched some of on Netflix ages ago, and remember just well enough to still be able to enjoy watching an episode separated from the rest of its one season. My memories of watching My So-Called Life (probably back in college) was that I appreciated the messy teenage emotions of it and Claire Danes’ remarkable performance, though the earnestness of it may have been a bit too much for my then-pretty male tastes. It’s strange that I found the show’s bracingly honest look at teenage girlhood easier to latch onto now being far more removed from being an actual teenager than I am now, but maybe that’s just personal growth on my part. I don’t know.
Anyhoo, I’m not sure that this is a stand-out episode of My So-Called Life, since it veers very committedly into the paranormal on one hand, while on the other you’ve got a fairly silly (but nonetheless fun) storyline involving Angela’s parents gettin’ it on. It makes for an episode that feels like a bit of a detour from a show that explored the angst and discomfort of being in high school, but that’s also what’s kind of fun about it. This was a show in just its ninth episode, which you’d think would be a time when a show is finding its voice, so the genre experimentation makes sense. There are some weird uses of ’90s slow-mo that feel a bit dated, but for the most part, being shot on film and featuring very natural performances, I was surprised by how well this show still seemed to hold up. I know it’s been a recurring theme for us to wonder whether we should watch more of the Shocktober shows we’ve reviewed, but this one feels more feasible and well-deserved.