FEAR ITSELF Episode Review: "Something With Bite"
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"Something With Bite" is one of the "Fear Itself Five", as in the five episodes which never aired on NBC before the show was cancelled last year. The ep was directed by Ernest Dickerson, and stars Wendell Price as a veterinarian named Wilbur who has a pretty boring family life. His wife doesn't excite him anymore, and he hardly spends any time with his son. He also has an employee who never comes to work, and despite being egged on by one of his female employees to fire him, Wilbur never does. Meanwhile, a rash of wild animal attacks have struck the town where Wilbur resides. One day, Wilbur arrives to work, only to have a large and massive animal brought in and put onto his operating slab.
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The animal turns out to be a werewolf, and when it bites Wilbur, it begins to change his life for the better. This episode has it's cheesy moments, but it's a pretty likeable ep because it puts a new spin on the classic werewolf story. The writer and director could've easily taken the standard route with "Something With Bite", by making it another story where someone becomes a werewolf, and goes on a bloody killing spree, and in the end, dies in a hail of gunfire, by the hands of some priest, or a werewolf hunter. But this episode took a more covert, and intelligent approach to the story.
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Wilbur actually becomes a better husband and more stern and forceful person with his troublesome employee as a result of his newfound wolfdom. It also gives him the abilities necessary to do his job as a vet better, and also track down the culprit of the recent rash of killings, which are the result of another werewolf which is lurking the streets. There's also a few filling subplots such as the parents of the werewolf brought into Wilbur's office explaining to him how their species works, and differentiating themselves from the more primal types of werewolves which are among them. This keeps the episode from getting boring, as the viewer tries to guess who is the rogue werewolf that is killing the locals.
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Wendell Price carries the ep well as Wilbur, and veteran black actress Paula Jai Parker does an excellent job as his wife. Dickerson did an excellent job of grabbing two veterans for this episode, as Jai Parker has done a lot of tv and movie work, and Price, who you genre fans might remember as the lead Detective from "Stay Alive" (2005), is a veteran of movies and tv as well. This episode has a decent amount of blood and gore, and the usual slashing and slicing that any werewolf piece would offer up, but there's no super gory moments so gore fans shouldn't expect a ton of red stuff from this episode. But it does deliver, despite a weak ending where the revelation of the rogue lycan comes off as a bit strange, odd, and weird from a character standpoint. "Something With Bite" is an episode that keeps the werewolf mythology fresh by putting a few new twists and spins on things.
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