“Bound in the Flesh” chews through material at such a blistering pace that it becomes nearly incoherent, though it finishes with a big reveal and a scary turn of events that should make next week interesting.

Last week ended with Pablo and Kelly arriving right after Amanda Fisher’s death, and this episode picks up right afterward. Unfortunately, there’s little time for standing around having feelings about Amanda’s brutal demise. There’s actually not much time for having feelings about anything this week. There’s not even much time for dealing with Evil Ash, who is dispatched quickly and with minimal fuss once Pablo and Kelly show up.

The big showdown of the week is with Deadite Amanda, but in spite of her creative use of last week’s hikers as puppets it felt anti-climactic. I’d expected to see Ash and company having to face Amanda this week, but I thought it would be pushed off to the end and mostly dealt with in the finale episode for maximum emotional impact. Mostly, I’d expected the Ash vs. Evil Ash stuff to take a bit longer, but like everything else this week, this was all very rushed.

The big reveal of the week was Ruby’s identity, but this too was so hurried it barely made an impact. This was also a place where the script failed. I’d expected Ash and Ruby to have great banter, but that wasn’t so much the case. The jokes were there, but they failed to land squarely. The mad rush towards the end of the episode and Ruby’s betrayal just didn’t leave time for good script writing, apparently.

This is the first time that I’ve thought the show suffered for its short run time. Usually I’m glad that it’s broken up into fun-sized segments so that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, but this episode felt overstuffed and chaotic. Worse, while I know that there’s already a planned second season of the show, which means there can’t be too much resolution in the finale, I don’t see how there is going to be any kind of satisfying ending in just another thirty minutes.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

• This show has the best musical choices. “Just the Two of Us” was inspired.
• The Notorious C.A.T. is a great name.
• I feel like Ruby and Amanda weren’t really friends? I mean, they only road-tripped together for a couple of days. Ruby’s sadness for Amanda was a little inexplicable and not at all earned.
• Poor blonde hiker. I think she’s the only character in this show that I feel worse for than I felt about Amanda Fisher.
• Oh, no! Pablo! That mask thingy is legit scary-looking, though.