Alex Weller’s Reviews > Night Shift > Status Update

Jim is teaching class but Robert and Chip act up and make lewd comments towards a female classmate, Kathy Slavin. Then the two of them chuck a grapefruit at Jim, drawing his ire and causing him to swear in class. Yeesh!

Jim has the dream again, but it's worse this time. After Robert(?) stabs Wayne, he calls after Young Jim and tells him he's next. Yeesh!

Sally notices Jim is troubled and asks what's wrong, but Jim won't answer, understandably. She tells him to go to bed early that night, but he doesn't.

Jim tries to convince himself that Robert Lawson is not the same kid who stabbed his brother sixteen years ago. But when he meets the kid while arriving at class, the resemblance is just uncanny. Is this really the same kid? Is he a ghost or a demon or something? Or is he the son of one of the original bullies? Something weird is going on.

Jim receives tragic news that one of the more well-behaved students in Living with Lit got killed in a hit-and-run during the holiday. A transfer student named Robert Lawson has just come in to take his place. Jim looks at Robert's file and is shocked to discover that Robert looks exactly like one of the bullies who killed his brother. What the hell?

During the month-long winter holiday, Jim has the dream again twice at the beginning, but not again afterwards. Jim and Sally spend the holiday at Sally's sister's house, and Jim returns to school feeling better.

Jim has the dream again, and this time, we finally see it. It's a flashback to his brother's murder. When Jim was nine and Wayne was twelve, the two were ambushed by a trio of bullies. Jim was able to get away, but two of the bullies stabbed Wayne and killed him. And it appears that Jim suffers from PTSD from that. That must be what caused his breakdown at the school he interned at. Yikes.

Jim has a good schedule but hates his final period class, Living with Literature, mostly consisting of jocks with low intelligence. They're extremely disrespectful, and Jim gets encouraged to threaten them with poor grades to make them ineligible for sports. He does this with Chip Osway after he catches Chip with a cheat sheet, giving him an F on the exam. But Chip threatens that they'll get him for this. Yikes.

At the end of October, Jim has his nightmare again, causing him to scream in his sleep until he wakes up to being comforted by Sally. But the nightmare isn't from his breakdown at the school he interned at. It's from something older. Maybe it's from when his brother got murdered?

Jim has just started teaching at Harold Davis High School. He likes it better than the school he interned at, but he feels something ominous after the students leave every day. He almost hears it breathing as he goes to the parking lot. This sounds bad. What could be in this school?