Twilight Zone 01x21: Mirror Image

This is one of the more understated episodes of The Twilight Zone, especially of the ones that were penned by Rod Serling. There’s no grand soapbox moment at the end where twist and narration combine to tell you what’s what, and maybe that’s why it’s so effective and timeless.

Sometimes on TZ, the morality got in the way of the story. Sometimes the brilliant twist closed too many doors. In “Mirror Image” the point is in the wondering, and it’s that wondering that wakes people up at 2:05 in the morning, just to listen to the wind and make sure that they’re still who they think they are.

And there’s a tremendous cast! Our leading lady is Vera Miles, enigmatic and cool as always. She’s probably best remembered today for her supporting role in Psycho (even though she crushed it in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Plus, we’ve got TV legend Martin Milner, who somehow hasn’t been in a recap yet, which makes me think I’ve been falling down on the job.

The episode opens with a dark and stormy night. Lightning cracks across a deluging sky. But it’s not the couple who finds the bridge washed out, or the once-wealthy residents of a Gothic manor house we’re concerning ourselves with. It’s a young woman – Millicent Barnes, played by Miles – waiting in a dreary bus depot in upstate New York.

She sits alone on a double bench, finishing off a quick bite to eat. The depot is brightly lit, a public place with all the safety and clean simplicity that can bring, though the rain and darkness outside are casting strange shadows in the corners. Behind her is a baggage check desk, beside her is her suitcase. It has a broken handle she’s mended hastily with white kitchen twine, the kind you use to tie a chicken’s legs together.

A cleaning woman sweeps the floors, and an old couple dozes on a bench on the other side of the room. The clock on the wall behind her reads 2:05. Millicent looks at her watch and gets a little perturbed. The bus should’ve arrived by now.

She goes to the ticket agent and complains that the bus to Cortland is a half hour late. The ticket agent, reading a book while she talks to him, doesn’t even look up as he nods. She asks if he knows when the bus will arrive, and he says it’s hard to say with the rain so heavy. He has a clipped, northeastern accent, and his disinterest seems rough and rude when he talks.

Annoyed, Millicent asks him for a general estimate of when the bus might get there.

The ticket agent glances up at her then, a pair of cold eyes peeking over the rims of his glasses. He snaps that the bus will get here when it gets here, same as he told her the last time she asked.

Only this is the first time Millicent has spoken to him.

The very first time.

She hasn’t been up to the desk before, and she hasn’t asked any questions about the Cortland bus until just now. The ticket agent scolds her for coming up to him “every ten minutes” and requiring new information.

“Situations just don’t change that rapidly.”

Millicent tells the ticket agent that he needs his eyes checked, and is about to make a more emphatic point when she notices a suitcase that looks like hers in the baggage room behind him. As anyone who’s grabbed the wrong bag at the airport can tell you, a lot of people in this world have the same kinds of suitcases. But two identical cases in the same bus depot, both with broken handles bound with kitchen twine? That’s weird.

Millicent quickly looks over her shoulder to the bench she’d been sitting at. Her case is still there, twine and all.

The ticket agent notices the sudden change in her demeanour, but Millicent dazedly tells him that nothing is the matter and walks slowly over to her own suitcase. Something is not right, and you can tell that she feels it, like a prickle on the back of her neck or that cold terror that washes down the side of your head like rainwater. She’s staying calm – oh so calm – as she tries to puzzle it out.

Maybe Mr. Serling can shed some light on the goings on in this eerie bus depot:

“Millicent Barnes, age twenty-five, a young woman waiting for a bus on a rainy November night. Not a very imaginative type is Miss Barnes, not given to undue anxiety or fears, or for that matter even the most temporal flights of fancy. Like most young career women, she has a generic classification as a ‘girl with a good head on her shoulders.’ All of which is mentioned now because, in just a moment, the head on Miss Barnes’s shoulders will be put to a test. Circumstances will assault her reality and a chain of nightmares will put her sanity on a block. Millicent Barnes who will, in one minute, wonder if she’s going mad.”

That didn’t help at all, Rod! And you forgot to say “in the Twilight Zone!”

The phrase “temporal flights of fancy” is interesting, though. I’ve never heard it anywhere else. I suppose it means using your imagination to logic out plausible futures. Like if you’re at your desk at work and two coworkers are flirting, and you mentally plan their wedding around things one of them has said about liking sailing, so you come up with an elaborate cruise ship wedding with a nautical theme, and then you’re like: “What if the bride’s father gets murdered?” And the next thing you know, your whole afternoon is gone. (The groom’s ex-wife who the bride didn’t know about it killed him to make sure the wedding went forward. She was going to throw him overboard, but she ran out of time and stuffed him in a steamer trunk.)

Millicent doesn’t do that. She’s a focused person. I admire that.

Before we get back to her story, it’s time to learn a little more about Rod Serling, who is often mentioned around here but rarely discussed. This episode takes place in upstate New York, and you’ll notice that quite a few of the episodes he wrote himself have a similarly bucolic setting; or a sense of feeling islanded in a medium sized town surrounded by a train line of stops or a bus line of stops.

Our man Rod was from Binghamton, New York, which gets a nod later on, and it really informed his sense of place. He kept a house in Binghamton all his life, and when he moved to L.A., he began to associate the cities of the west coast with dissatisfaction, while the small east coast towns were always used to bring out a sense of nostalgia or normalcy to create contrast in his scripts.

While double checking production information for this episode, I’ve regularly come across a piece of trivia that I can’t verify. Apparently, in a package created to sell The Twilight Zone to a European market, Rod Serling said that this episode was based on an actual experience he had in an airport. Whether or not that’s the case, it’s certainly believable. There’s a dreamlike, almost unstructured quality to the whole thing that feels true.

Especially if you’ve ever been stuck in a bus depot or airport late, late at night.

Millicent decides she can’t quite get over that duplicate suitcase in the baggage room. She looks over her shoulder at it, and you can probably make a pretty good case for symbolic baggage and Millicent starting a new life having a lot to do with the core of this story. Whether or not that case will sway the viewer is, of course, up to the viewer.

She approaches the baggage claim hesitantly, staring at the twin suitcase. Unsurprisingly, the ticket agent gives her a sidelong glance and sneeringly demands to know what she wants now.

Look, buddy, your job is customer service. I don’t care if the same person comes up to you every two minutes to ask about the bus to Cortland, you smile and tell them that there hasn’t been any word yet. You’re not getting paid to make customers feel bad.

Charging forward despite the frosty reception, Millicent points out the suitcase and says it’s not a big deal, she was just struck by how similar the checked bag was to her bag. Even down to the broken handle. She’s quite amused by it, or at least seems in good spirits as she points it out to the ticket agent.

But those good spirits falter when the ticket agent gets agitated and complains about her playing games with him.

“That is your bag!” He growls at her, “You checked it!”

This is a guy who’s not good at his job in the slightest, so instead of trying to get to the bottom of what might be going on, or being in any way concerned about all of this, he yells at her to go sit on the bench and “breath through (her) nose” and leave him alone. You easily get the sense that the ticket agent isn’t annoyed because a person keeps asking him questions, but that a woman is wasting his time.

Twilight Zone stories often explored the idea of identity, and some of their most powerful episodes – like this and “Nightmare as a Child” – featured female leads. It gives the main characters more insecurity about the identities that they’re trying to preserve, because the world of the early 1960’s wasn’t exactly telling them that their minds were worthwhile. If you compare Millicent with Richard Long’s character in season three’s “Person or Persons Unknown,” it’s taken for granted that his original identity is valid, that in searching for it he’ll be able to recover it because it existed. But here, even Rod’s opening narration dismisses who Millicent is to begin with.

She’s a stereotype of a woman who’s leading a bland, career-oriented life. And now she’s going nuts, because when women try to stretch beyond what old men like the ticket agent think they should be doing, they go all hysterical and start hallucinating and junk. Thankfully, good ol’ Rod doesn’t make that the whole story, but it’s definitely our presumed baseline, which is kind of sad and frustrating.

“When the Cortland bus gets here, there’ll be a loud sound of an engine rumbling. Door’ll open. People’ll come in. Then you’ll know the bus is here.” The ticket agent says condescendingly, as Millicent wavers between offense at his outburst and confusion about the dual suitcase situation.

She starts to explain to him that the suitcase case in the baggage room can’t be hers, hers was next to the bench. But as she looks over to point it out, she notices that her suitcase isn’t where she left it. Bag Number One has disappeared. Stumped, but still cool as a cucumber, Millicent quietly goes to sit back down.

Across from her is the ladies room, marked with an enormous neon sign. You’d think a little wooden plaque on the door would suffice, but director John Brahm (who also directed “Queen of the Nile”) has chosen to surround Millicent with big, unblinking words. In the case of the ladies room sign, he occasionally frames her with just part of it:

Millicent decides that a splash of cold water on her face might be the ticket, so she heads into the restroom, where the cleaning woman greets her with a quizzical look and asks if she’s okay. Millicent starts to bristle a little as she washes her hands.

“Of course I’m alright, don’t I look alright?”

Honestly, you look stressed out and maybe a little sick to your stomach. But, see, the cleaning woman is concerned, because when Millicent was in the bathroom before—

Hold up.

Millicent was not in the bathroom before.

This is her first time in this bathroom.

Ever.

Despite the fact that the cleaning woman is way less of an a-hole than the ticket agent, Millicent chooses to vent her frustrations on her. She says that something kooky must be going on with the bus depot’s staff, or that something’s wrong with the place itself, because her suitcase has disappeared, and the ticket agent is giving her crap over asking questions she’s never asked, and now the cleaning woman is trying to tell her she’s been in and out of the bathroom, which is just not true.

She goes to storm out, and swings the ladies room door open to be met with a chilling sight.

In the mirror over the cleaning woman’s shoulder is a reflection that shows two separate Millicents.

One is our Millicent, standing in the bathroom door, and the other is sitting on the bench. Waiting.

Whatever is on the bench looks up and catches Millicent’s eye in the reflection.

Trembling, Millicent gasps and shuts the washroom door so that she can hide behind it.

The cleaning woman couldn’t see the reflection, and so has no idea that there was a doppelgänger kicking back in the waiting area. She thinks Millicent is ill, maybe feverish, so she offers to get her a cold cloth. It’s hard not to like the cleaning woman, she’s kind and not judgemental, and she calls Millicent “honey” in the warmest, friendliest way. She’s played by Naomi Stevens, who appeared in The Apartment, Valley of the Dolls, and was Juanita on The Doris Day Show.

Millicent pulls herself together quickly, and decides that she’s just overtired. Who knows how long she’s been awake, and now it’s well after two o’clock in the morning. People get loopy when they’re tired.

She tells the cleaning woman that she’s alright, she doesn’t need the cool cloth, and she heads back into the waiting area. Her suitcase is now right where she left it, the bench is now empty. No second Millicent, no duplicate pieces of luggage. Everything is as it should be.

The ticket agent watches her bitterly, anticipating another round of questions and answers. But she hesitates to go over to him, and you can hardly blame her. Instead, she approaches the elderly couple on the other side of the station. The husband is dozing on his wife’s shoulder, and the wife herself is fading at the end of what’s been a long wait for the bus.

Gently, Millicent asks the old woman if she happened to see anyone sitting in her seat a moment ago. The old woman says no, but admits she wasn’t paying much attention to anything. The other women in the story are by far the most generous to Millicent, simply contributing their answers to her puzzle, devoid of judgement or speculation.

The husband startles awake, and asks what the trouble is.

“No trouble,” Millicent replies, now a little embarrassed, “I just thought I saw someone I knew.”

“In here?!” The husband scoffs, and looks at her like she just asked about a talking chimp or something.

Sir, you’ve been asleep for the last half hour. You have no idea what may or may not have been happening in the bus depot, you’ve literally had your eyes closed this whole time. All the men think they know everything, but we the audience know that there’s an actual doppelgänger around, so all the men can shove it.

 Millicent is starting to doubt her own mind, now, as she sits on her bench and has an internal monologue about whether or not she’s delusional. She thinks maybe she’s sick, maybe she’s running a fever like the cleaning woman suggested, but then she’s not warm at all. She feels fine.

She looks up and sees the cleaning woman, watching her with concern from a crack in the ladies room door. When the cleaning woman realizes she’s been spotted, she quickly goes back to her business.

A voice snaps Millicent out of the fog of this strange night, and back to some semblance of normality.

 

“Excuse me, Miss?” It’s a friendly, masculine voice, and she turns quickly to its owner.

Martin Milner! Well, Paul Grinstead. A baby-faced boy-next-door in a rain soaked hat and dripping wet slicker. Maybe he’ll be less inclined to write all of this off as female hysteria and help Millicent out. It’s high time we had a dude about who wasn’t campaigning for President of the Bus Depot Asshole Society.

Paul has picked up Millicent’s purse. Somewhere along the way, she dropped it.

He plunks down on the bench next to her, in his slimy wet coat, probably smelling like muddy shoes and dank Brylcreem, and letting all the rain soak into the wood of the bench. Super thoughtful, Paul. Next time, take your slicker off before you sit down.

(Still, way better than the usual type of guy that picks up women at two a.m. in a bus depot…)

He shakes some of the rain off his hat onto the floor and comments that the bus sure is running late. Millicent asks if he means the bus to Cortland, and he cheerfully tells her that they’re destined to be bus buddies. Paul was supposed to be in Syracuse at ten, but the planes were all grounded because of the storm, so he tried to take a cab to Binghamton, but the cab skidded into a tree. Nobody was hurt, but Paul had to walk all the way into town in the pouring rain, so he’s kind of glad that the bus is late, otherwise he might have missed it altogether.

Millicent doesn’t care. She’s still trying to hash out this much more pressing doppelgänger issue. Paul’s nice enough, of course, but his plane, trains, and automobile troubles aren’t as big of a deal as the whole evil double thing.

Get over yourself, Paul. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.

He notices that Millicent is staring in slight horror at nothing in particular, and also doesn’t want to talk about his travel woes, so he asks her if she’s ill.

Kind of desperate for somebody to help her solve this puzzle, to maybe give her a straightforward suggestion of what might be going on, Millicent explains the entirety of the episode so far to Paul. Now, on the one hand, this is kind of dull, since we’ve, you know, watched the entirety of the episode so far. But it also pulls off an interesting trick, because it confirms that everything we’re watching is unfolding in real time. Not only does it happen in one night in one location, it’s an actual half hour of these people’s lives that changes everything.

The delicate pacing and eerie lack of resolution seem more potent because of that. Look how slow and yet how fast that clock ticks when something is not right, the story seems to say. Look how quickly reality can become unreal.

We also learn that Millicent is a private secretary who just quit her old job in order to take a new job in Buffalo, which is where she’s headed tonight.

Paul is down with most of her story, until we get to her seeing a dark clone of herself in the powder room mirror. That’s when he starts to balk a little. And, really, you can’t blame him for that, it’s a weird twist on a tale that might otherwise be explained by human error or confusion, or maybe a ticket agent with undiagnosed dementia.

Millicent earnestly tells him that she’s not mentally ill, which is a sure fire way to convince people you’re losing marbles left and right. This is a tough spot for both characters, because Paul clearly is not up to the challenge of helping somebody who’s in the position he thinks Millicent is in, which is some kind of breakdown. And Millicent doesn’t have enough imagination to guess what other people would make of her very real yet fantastical predicament.

“I’m not some sort of kook,” she assures him. “I’ve never had any trouble like this before. I mean, trouble with my mind.”

Paul, for his part, decides to humour her. He tries to come up with some explanations of what’s going on, tossing around a couple of ideas like a woman who resembles Millicent being in the bus depot (with the same hat and the same broken suitcase? Come on, Paul) or people playing a joke. (Yeah, the ticket agent seems like a wacky, fun guy who’d love to get in on something like that.)

Millicent starts to poke holes in Paul’s theories. But that’s understandable, because Paul’s ideas were just ridiculous and we’re all doing that. The trouble is, of course, that the more Millicent refuses to believe mundane explanations, the less and less credible she seems.

The bus comes, just in the nick of time, to seemingly save Millicent from being forced into thinking she’s insane. A couple of passengers trickle into the station as the elderly couple get up and head over to board. Paul offers to carry Millicent’s bag, and she thanks him for being so kind.

He says she’s “easy to be kind to.”

It looks like things are going to calm down now, like the universe might take a turn towards normalcy as Paul gallantly escorts Millicent and her suitcase to the bus, where the driver is waiting to check their tickets.

But it all goes south when Millicent suddenly gasps and runs back into the station. She seems terrified by something she’s seen, but we have no idea what that might have been just yet.

Paul tells the driver to wait for them and hurries after Millicent, leaving their bags on the pavement and a baffled driver standing by a bus full of passengers. One of them, watching from a window and smiling with cold, empty eyes, looks just like Millicent Barnes.

So, doppelgängers, doubles, dybbuks. What's the deal, and what are the differences? In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malevolent ghost that wants to take over the body of a living person. The name means something along the lines of sticky ghost, or clinging spirit. In some variations, it takes on a weakened physical form that gains strength as it drains the living victim. So way closer to what we saw on GhostStory. A double is somebody who looks like you and isn’t supernatural at all. Think The Prince and the Pauper. Doppelgängers are sinister portends of doom. A mirror image of somebody doomed to death or misfortune begins appearing supernaturally alongside the victim.

Millicent comes up with her own modern variation in a little while, but for now, she’s lying unconscious on one of the benches in the depot. She fainted during the commercial.

 Paul has bundled up his raincoat and put it under her head, and the cleaning woman has brought a cool cloth. Cool cloths are always a good place to start. The two of them look at Millicent with genuine concern, as the bus driver comes in to ask if Paul wants to board or what. This bus is already running crazy late, he’d rather not have to hang around here.

“We’ll get the next one,” Paul nods to himself.

Paul’s a good guy. Maybe I just think that because he’s Martin Milner, though.

The ticket agent, that darling of a human being, comes over to tell Paul the next bus isn’t arriving until seven the next morning. Paul says that’s fine, and the driver heads on his way. The cleaning woman says that it’s time for her to go home, but she hopes Millicent feels better soon.

Quietly, she adds to Paul that Millicent might need “some looking after.” And she taps the side of her head. It’s a gentle suggestion, and perhaps a warning to the young man that there might not be anything he can do to help Millicent.

The ticket agent announces that he’s going to turn off the lights, since nobody’s in the depot any more. I guess only that elderly couple were people by his standards and Paul and Millicent are sub-humans or something. The lights click loudly as they’re switched off, and the depot takes on a new, more unsettling form.

It captures how lonely and wrong public places can feel at night, when they’re darkened and empty. The light now comes only from the neon signs outside, cast in through the rain on the windows, making shadows that writhe like snakes on the cold, smooth walls. A row of lockers look institutional and bleak.

Paul’s golden hair and angelic face seem more vulnerable now. Millicent’s prone form more afflicted.

When the lights were on, the depot’s high ceilings were bright and airy. Now they’re cavernous and swirling with darkness.

It’s quiet.

Quiet except for the rain.

Millicent wakes up, and she takes a moment to remember where she is and what’s been happening. Finally, she says:

“The bus.”

Her head is still on Paul’s raincoat pillow as she turns to look into the distance. The camera captures her from Paul’s view sitting beside her, so that we see her face upside down while she talks. It’s a wonderfully strange way to film a lead actress during an important speech.

“I’ve been thinking about something. It’s very odd, but I’ve been remembering,” she says with the tired determination of someone on an important search. “About something I read or heard about a long time ago. About different planes of existence. About two parallel worlds that exist side by side, and each of us has a counterpart in this world. And, and, sometimes, through some freak… through something unexplainable, this counterpart – after the two worlds converge – comes into our world and in order to survive it has to take over. Replace us. Move us out so that it can live.”

Vera Miles delivers this chillingly, with soft intense music in the background, and Paul watching her with growing unease. Her need to understand, to try to make sense of what’s going on, is palpable, and her calm rationality is refreshing and tragic. It’s nice to see a heroine of the era in a suspenseful story not devolving into hysterics, but it’s tragic because it won’t matter. The end result will be the same as if she spent this whole scene screaming and crying and trying to smash the depot windows.

Also, the speech itself makes her sound a little like when somebody has a couple of champagnes on New Year’s Eve and tries to tell you the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Paul admits that this is above his paygrade. He just wanted to give a beautiful woman her purse and maybe hit it off.

Millicent digs in and starts suggesting that in the mirror universe, everyone has an identical twin. She can’t explain how she knows, but she’s certain that the woman she saw was her mirror counterpart.

Paul shakes his head and says there’s probably an explanation that isn’t supernatural at all. Like, for example, Millicent is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or maybe somebody slipped her some kind of hallucinogen earlier in the evening, did you accept a drink from a stranger, Millicent?

“I just thought of something,” Paul stands up with an uneasy smile as Millicent stares fearfully into the distance, “I’ve got a good friend, lives in Tully. I’ll call him. Maybe he’ll bring his car down here for us.”

Uh-huh. A “good friend in Tully.” Sure, Paul.

Millicent doesn’t say anything, she just stares, eyes searching her memory for something to hold onto. Some way to maybe fight what this mirror Millicent is trying to do to her.

Paul is unsettled. He backs away from her and towards the ticket agent’s desk to use the phone. The ticket agent decides that we all care a ton about his opinion, and he tells Paul that Millicent is a can short of a six-pack. (Actually, he picks “she’s got a leak in her attic” but I don’t like that one as much.)

“You got a thing about sick people?” The old man asks Paul with a gossipy sneer.

But Paul does not have a thing about sick people. Paul is, as it turns out, just as bad as the ticket agent in his way. Unsurprisingly, there’s no friend in Tully. Paul is calling the police to haul Millicent away for involuntary psychiatric observation at the hospital.

Millicent isn’t violent, she hasn’t tried to harm herself, but Paul feels that this is best for everyone.

What the actual hell, Paul? Even if there wasn’t a doppelgänger – and there is – this is a pretty extreme action to take. Why not get her to check herself into the hospital so they can look her over at her own discretion? Why not take a cab with her to a hotel somewhere in town and get her a room, maybe she’s sleep deprived? Why not just leave her to her own non-violent, vaguely metaphysical devices? Nothing about Millicent is dangerous enough to warrant police intervention.

Serious question I want everyone to contemplate: if Millicent were a man, would Paul take this step, or would he just wash his hands of the whole thing? Would he have gotten on the bus to Syracuse and left then? Why does he feel like he has to take charge of a person he’s known for twenty minutes?

While Paul is betraying her with a phone call, Millicent gets to thinking about that mirror in the ladies room. Slowly, she goes in and flicks the lights on. There is a second Millicent waiting in there for her, but it’s only her reflection in the mirror above the sink.

Determinedly, she tells the double to show herself and explain what she wants.

There’s a fire in Millicent now that she knows what’s going on.

Paul’s voice calls through the door and asks if she’s alright, and with great conviction, Millicent says she is.

She comes out of the washroom, and Paul suggests going out for some fresh air. (Don’t go with him! Run! Run and start a new life as a doppelgänger hunter, like David Vincent on The Invaders but with parallel universe copies instead of aliens, and then have an episode where you can’t tell which is real and which is the copy, and you might have shot the wrong one but the ending is left to the viewer’s perception! Run away right now!)

Millicent goes with him, and we watch from behind the glass of the windows as the police take her away. There’s no sound, we’re trapped inside the depot, unable to help Millicent with our audience knowledge that she’s not insane.

She fights to get away, but the two policemen force her into the car, while Paul stands by and watches. In the end, he looks at the pavement and not at her, as her eyes blaze with rage.

One of the policemen nods at Paul, like he’s done the right thing.

Paul looks ashamed of himself, sick to his stomach, as he wanders back into the depot and the police car drives away.

You stink, Paul Grinstead.

He’s contemplative and unhappy as the ticket agent tells him he’s got about four and a half hours until the next bus. He ought to sleep on the bench, get some rest while he waits.

“This place is like a tomb between now and morning,” the ticket agent tells him in an almost friendly manner. He can find it in himself to be cordial to Paul, for some reason.

Paul thinks that’s a good idea, but he’s deeply disappointed in himself as he loosens his tie and moves the rain slicker pillow to his preferred bench. He also picks up his briefcase and puts it on the floor next to his bench, before heading over to the water fountain for a drink. Trying to wash out the bitter taste of your treachery, Paul? Good luck.

When he looks up from his drink, his briefcase is gone.

He catches a glimpse of a man running through the doors of the depot. He calls out angrily and chases after him.

Paul runs and runs behind the man, whose face he can’t see. But we can see it.

It looks just like Paul’s.

“Obscure metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon, reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it parallel planes or just insanity. Whatever it is, you’ll find it in the Twilight Zone.”

Man, Rod really phoned in the narration on this one.

So, the big question is whether Millicent was right, and these are mirror twins slowly invading our world, or whether they’re just good old fashioned doppelgängers, foretelling and perhaps creating misfortunes. After all, poor Millicent was committed right after she saw hers. And who knows what dark fate might befall Paul as he chases after his double down dark, rain-slicked streets on a night where strange things have been happening.

But, like I said before, it’s the guessing that makes this one so good.