... but is quite delightful and compelling once I know what's going on (I watched part of Episode 2 a couple of years ago and was completely lost).
I'm relieved the director left out the maid's completely random musical number in this episode.
What I've come to anticipate was all there, though: more twists on the old mystery of the girl in the swimming pool, more parallels with the current situation in the hotel, more family (tragic) and staff (darkly humorous) dysfunction.
Once again the temporary guests in the hotel were vignettes more than subplots. Their stories are never completely explored, rather left hanging, and I look in vain for a temporary tale to be followed up in the next episode. True to the real-life hotel visit's lack of neat resolution, but not entirely satisfying to a modern TV viewer. I suspect it was deliberate on the director's part, to differentiate this mini-series from the many hotel shows in which guests' tribulations take up a lot of the screen time and, as on Fantasy Island, check-out is preceded by some tidy emotional resolution. So, strange but not entirely unsatisfying.
There's more than enough meat on the permanent residents' increasingly convoluted sagas and relationships to satisfy, not to mention the fascination of perilous life in a hotel where a killer has struck and may strike again. In fact, another character is dead. Basically it's one death per episode, but never the one I've spent the whole hour holding my breath over. Great twists and turns.
