Summary of the Pilot
Written by TK
Marian, from Iowa, transfers to a college in Massachusetts, and starts having visions of a dead girl in her bathtub. Her roommate spreads the news, and Professor Miles Ballard approaches Marian inving her to join a group called The Others, all people with extrasensory ability. Miles tells Marian that a girl named Diane died in her room last year... drowned in the bathtub. Marian doesn't want to join this group of "freaks," but after she keeps her roommate awake muttering something that sounds like "My Killer is Dead" all night (which her roommate records), she decides to stop by. The Others freak her out, and she runs away, but the one guy there who seems to understand how she feels, Mark, follows her. He takes her to a tunnel where a horrible murder happened three years ago, and she completely freaks out. After calming her, he remarks that Marian really has an amazing ability. Satori wouldn't have gotten more from that tunnel, and the police would have brought her in on the case immediately. Mark takes Marian out for coffee, and tells her about his healing ability and why he's a doctor. Marian gives Mark the tape of her muttering that her roommate made.
The next day in class, Marian is in a trance, scrawling ME over and over in her notebook. When she drops her pen and a classmate picks it up, it's hot to the touch. She brings her scrawlings to Elmer Greentree and asks him what they are. He says the answers are within her. A blind man with visions, Albert McGonnagal, warns Marian that the room wants her, and she'll die if she goes back. She's scared, and hopes that if she ignores all this strange stuff, it will just go away. She goes to a party that night, but the visions of the dead girl follow here there. She comes back to her room, and after trying to fight off the power of the dead girl, gets tired and gives in. She takes a few of her roommates sleeping pills and climbs into the tub. The boy who took her to the party gets worried because Marian was acting so strangely, and so brings security by to check on her. They find her in the tub not breathing. Meanwhile, Mark has had a vision of Marian drowning in the tub, and bursts into her room shortly after the security guy gets Marian out of the tub. He performs CPR, and when that doesn't work he just grabs Marian's hand and wills her to live. She coughs.
Marian is in the hospital, still unconscious. Meanwhile, by reading old articles about Diane's death which mention her next door neighbor, Michael Erstad, reding the ME scrawls, and listening to the tape of "My Killer is Dead" which could sound like "Michael Erstad," the Others figure out that Diane is trying to reach out to Michael Erstad from the other side. They think it might be because he killed her, and her death wasn't a suicide as everyone thought... after all, she didn't leave a note. Miles hunts down Michael Erstad and brings him to Marian's hospital room, where Elmer has helped Marian go to the other side and reach out to Diane. Michael touches Marian, and sees Diane and freaks out. He says he killed Diane. The Others think they've got him, but it turns out that he was dating Diane, and they'd had a stupid fight that night, and he thinks that Diane killed herself because of him. Marian channels Diane, and Diane tells Michael that she didn't commit suicide... she was drunk and it was an accident. She knew they would have made up in the morning if she hadn't died. She tells Michael to stop torturing himself, because it's keeping her in the land of the living.
Diane has finished with Michael, but then Marian's heart stops beating. Elmer is on the other side with her, and more or less drags her back to life. He almost doesn't come back himself, but wouldn't dare miss his 87th birthday.
Satori has been hired by a widow, Mrs. Talbot, to figure out what is going on with her haunted house. Mr. Talbot died last year after unexpectedly being hit by lightening on the golf course. Mrs. Talbot thought that Mr. Talbot was going to provide for her, but now she's so poor that she has to sell the house. Satori brings her friends in to try to figure out why Mr. Talbot would haunt the house. Warren is upstairs using the bathroom, and sees a stained glass window that sheds a red gleam on a certain table in the hall with a vase of flowers on it. The table and the vase start to shake, so Warren grabs the vase. When it seems to burst into flames in his hands, he drops it. He finds himself repeating, over and over again, 6, 28, 31. At this point, the realtor kicks everyone out of the house, because she's trying to show it to potential buyers and having all these freaks around is not helping.
It's nighttime. Mrs. Talbot is packing boxes. Suddenly, flames burst out from the outlet near the very same table in the hallway. Mrs. Talbot sees the flames, is almost mesmerized, and seems to be caressed by the smoke. As she finally runs away, the fire roars at her with an almost human face. Later, she's outside with the firemen, and they say it was probably an electrical outlet... they see it all the time with these old houses. She says it's just a shame it happened a week before the closing for the house.
Meanwhile, Warren is putting flyers on people's cars advertising Satori's services. Suddenly, he realizes that the license plate of the car he's leafletting is 62831. He looks all around him, and he's surround by 6, 28, and 31. He freaks out, goes running for Mrs. Talbot's house, and runs right in the front door past the firemen. He runs to the hallway where the fire started, and starts baning on the floorboards, screaming 6, 28, 31.
Satori gets a call that she needs to come bail Warren out of jail. When she goes to see Mrs. Talbot, Mrs. Talbot shows her where Warren was clawing at the floor. Satori notices that the floorboards are loose, and when she pulls them up she finds a little safe with a combination lock. She asks Mrs. Talbot what the numbers were that Warren was screaming, and Mrs. Talbot tells her, 6, 28, 31. Satori asks if Mr. Talbot's birthday was June 28th, 1931. Mrs. Talbot is amazed and says yes, and wonders if Satori used her extrasensory powers to figure that out. Satori says she uses her birthday as her ATM code. She opens the safe, and they find huge stacks of bills. Mrs. Talbot is amazing that Mr. Talbot had been squirreling this away their whole marriage and never told her. Satori says he probably meant to tell her, but when he died unexpectedly, he didn't get the chance while he was living, so he had to do it from the other side. The stained glass window swings shut with finality and closure.
Back to episode info