Ash vs. Evil Dead - "Fire in the Hole"

Another day, another Deadite. After Ash’s old friend (?) Lem manages to stumble away from the carnage at the diner last week, he heads back to the small militia outpost in the middle of the woods where he has been living; ya know, like you do. Hoping to stock up on weapons for the coming war, our ever-growing group of heroes follows him to the secluded bunker where Ash makes a Ruby Ridge joke before discovering that the Evil has beat them there.

Unsurprisingly, the militia men do not take kindly to strangers. After convincing themselves that the gang are government agents of some form or another and that the Evil besieging them is the result of some kind of virus created by Big Brother, they lock Ash and Detective Fisher inside the bunker and leave them for dead. Meanwhile, Pablo has an existential crisis about who he is—namely what kind of weapon suits him best—and Kelly continues to annihilate the bad guys.

With Ivan Raimi as one of the writers for this episode, “Fire in the Hole” is a pretty good one. We get a badass (if somewhat inexplicable) shot of Ruby (Lucy Lawless) rising like a naked phoenix from the ashes and Kelly using the trope of women always falling down in horror movies to get the upper hand (however short-lived) on the militia men. Watching a creepy redneck Deadite stalk Ash through the bunker in nothing but his long johns was pretty gratifying and as always we got some pretty killer gore.

Where this episode fell short for me were the places that Detective Fisher played a major role. I will avoid repeating the argument from last week that her storyline itself just isn’t all that gratifying in the long-term, but part of it seems to be an acting weakness as well. The monologue of a voiceover she gives while we see Ruby reborn is melodramatic and flat at the same time and her chemistry with Ash is nonexistent, despite Bruce Campbell’s charisma. I really want to enjoy her character, but it just isn’t happening.  

And just when we thought the episodes' formula was getting rote (new setting, kill baddies, emotional speech, repeat) Ash shakes things up by leaving his merry band of misfits behind after delivering an especially sappy speech.

He’s headed back to the cabin where it all began and something tells me Ruby’s on her way too.