"The Pirate's Promises" just seems... off, somehow. It seems like writer Carl Binder just grafted on the plot of the last movie he saw, 'The Fog', onto a cursed antique plot. The foghorn summons McBride, but was McBride just hanging out waiting for someone to get the foghorn to summon him. McBride apparently has a swinging bachelor's pad in the cave near Whaler's Point: did he just hanging out their twiddling his thumbs until Joe got the foghorn?
Micki and Ryan don't have much to do, and Jack is entirely absent for unexplained reasons. Maybe he's in Singapore still looking for the Icarus Feather? They never say, so who knows.
The plot boils down to the plot of 'The Fog': a ghostly pirate (one in this case, instead of a crew's worth) is after descendants. There's a "twist" of sorts, but it's not particularly twisty. And just helps to wrap up the story without the cousins actually doing anything. Which keeps their hands neat and tidy as far as not killing anyone, which is the only way they could resolve the story if McBride didn't thoughtfully kill the antagonist.
There are several other unexplained bits. Dewey is the worst: he goes on about how he's Barney's only friend, but other than Dewey dismissing Barney's story about seeing McBride, there's never any interaction between them. Micki seems strangely upset about Dewey's death. They talked some, but not enough to establish any deep bond like the one she demonstrated. Yes, Dewey was a nice guy who died saving her life. He's not the only one in the first season: why is Micki so moved by his death. And what the heck does Ryan's "consolation" mean at the end? So Dewey was a nice guy who probably went to Heaven. What does his being Joe's brother have to do with that?
When Joe kills Dewey, Robey does the same cheerleader/panic routine we've seen in previous episodes. Meryl Streep, she ain't. Or even Julia Roberts.
The fact the episode was apparently done on the cheap doesn't help. They're supposedly on the ocean coast (in Illinois?), but the lighthouse shooting was on Lake Erie. It shows. We never see the ocean except in insert shots. That's what I mean about shoehorning: previous indications have been that Curious Goods is in a Midwest city (except a mention of tropical storms in "Bedazzled"). But here writer Binder transplants the location to the ocean so he can tell his story of pirate's revenge.
We also get one pirate instead of a crew, and a reference to Joe killing a lot more people than the four missing women. He says at one point that he killed twelve people, but only four women are referenced. Who are the other eight? Wouldn't twelve killings/disappearances in one small town make national headlines and draw major attention?
And why does McBride attack Ryan? Ryan isn't a descendant. Micki even says non-descendants are safe from McBride.t
Whaler's Point isn't given any characterization whatsoever. We don't meet any of the residents except two of the victims, who are knocked off in short order. And rather conveniently: they're women, which means their last names probably don't match the original male crew's names. Joe figured out who they are, but never saw that Dewey was his brother. Huh? And one of the women has a profession that lets Joe lure her to the lighthouse to check the coins? Isn't that convenient?
Overall, "Promise" is a low-budget knockoff of 'The Fog', transplanted into an episode of 'Friday the 13th: The Series'. It's not bad, but it's very atonally out of whack with the show.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
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