The Big Door Prize focuses on the prickly mayor of Deerfield this week. The Apple TV+ show, about a small town interrupted in a big way by a machine that’s supposed to be capable of telling people’s futures, digs deep into the hidden feelings among Deerfield’s citizenry.
The episode, entitled “Izzy,” proves very affecting.
The Big Door Prize recap: ‘Izzy’
Season 1, episode 8: When we last left Mayor Izzy (played by Crystal Fox), she was about to destroy the Morpho machine. Only the intervention of Jacob (Sammy Fourlas) stopped her. After getting high with Dusty Hubbard (Chris O’Dowd), he decided to use the Morpho again, and it kept giving him the same destiny (“Hero”), even though he kept entering bunk information into the machine.
Izzy, intrigued, tries the same thing, and the machine spits out the same potential she got last time: “Ghost.” Of course, that’s not what she told everyone. (She told everyone she got “Dancer.”) If people find out she lied, that might get in the way of her re-election campaign.
Cass (Gabrielle Dennis) goes to confront her jealous and possessive mom about the lies she’s been telling all their lives, namely that Izzy broke up with her long-term girlfriend Martha (Susan Savoie) because of Cass. That was a lie. Cass is tired of the lies and of living in her mom’s shadow. To her shock, Izzy offers to buy Cass lunch so they can talk.
Pick a card, any card
Izzy confesses that she did some selfish things to protect herself and half-apologizes for them. Cass challenges her to a game of Dance Dance Revolution. And she beats her mom, whose whole identity was that she was once a dancer. Cass and Dusty’s daughter Trina (Djouliet Amara) overhears this and offers Izzy a favor.
Trina knows Jacob has blank Morpho cards. (He was there when the machine first appeared in Deerfield’s general store.) If they get one, they can dummy up a card that says “Dancer” for Izzy. When Jacob and Trina meet for the handoff, they both confess that their breakup hasn’t been good for either of them. It’s a truly moving scene.
Dusty, Giorgio and some strange revelations
Photo: Apple TV+
Later, Trina tells her dad that she saw Giorgio (Josh Segarra) try to kiss Cass yesterday. And she demands that he do something about it. Something big and violent. So, wary of disappointing his daughter, Dusty heads right to Giorgio’s house to fight him.
Instead, he finds Giorgio drunk and passed out — sans wig — on the floor of his living room. Giorgio apologizes and Dusty takes pity on him, recognizing that the loudmouth restauranteur’s love for Cass has consumed his life and made him pathetic. Dusty even offers to help Giorgio get back some of the memorabilia he sold in a panic at the gala to impress Cass in last week’s episode.
Dusty realizes while talking to Giorgio that the last time he and Cass were apart was when she went abroad to Italy. (It turns out Dusty spent that time working at a ski resort.)
Magic and mortification in Deerfield
That night at a magic show put on by general store owner Mr. Johnson (Patrick Kerr) — his Morpho card said “Magician” — Dusty is called onstage as a volunteer for a magic trick. Mr. Johnson asks him to picture a time when he was happy. Dusty recalls the ski resort, then something strange occurs to him. His Morpho card said “Teacher/Whistler.” The ski resort in Canada where he worked was called Whistler. He looks like someone just walked over his grave.
Then something even more dispiriting happens. After having finally reconciled with Cass, Izzy throws her daughter under the bus.
First, Izzy says she won’t be running for re-election because she lied about the Morpho card. Then she tells everyone that Cass and Jacob conspired with her to make a fake card. Izzy is clearly trying to tell herself that she’s doing this for the good of the town, to try and make them understand that the machine can be beaten and people shouldn’t be so in thrall to it. However, she won’t go the extra step of seeing that she’s selling out her family for the spotlight once again. Cass, Trina and Jacob are all mortified.
Then Izzy puts Martha on blast because more people are coming up to her motel to have affairs since their Morpho cards told them to. Dusty gets up to try and stop Cass and Izzy from having it out, but he gets distracted. In the resulting confusion, Izzy leaves. And she sees something strange in the middle of town — a white deer.
Jacob and Trina win The Big Door Prize
Photo: Apple TV+
Sammy Fourlas and Djouliet Amara are very good together on The Big Door Prize. Their characters, Jacob and Trina, frequently stand apart for bringing a kind of bracing realism to a show that usually operates in a softer, more obviously comedic register. Obviously, we get variations in the forms that the show’s comedic side takes, from O’Dowd’s nebbishy everyman being buffeted by the bigger personalities in town to Cass and Izzy’s more pointed, often theatrical antics.
Jacob’s gentle stoner demeanor makes him the odd man out in a lot of situations but it frees him up to observe people and to be himself without people noticing. Trina is a much more aggressive character, and can sometimes deflate scenes by taking the low road when everyone else is living in their own fantasies.
However, when these two share the screen it’s frequently the best thing on The Big Door Prize. Their genuine care for each other, the way their damaged hearts complement one another, their chemistry — this all adds up to very fine work. And it brings the show to its emotional best. Even though they only shared one scene in a very strong episode, it elevated the whole half-hour.
★★★★☆
Watch The Big Door Prize on Apple TV+
New episodes of The Big Door Prize arrive every Wednesday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 30 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
