Primrose Lane
Trilogy Synopsis
Primrose Lane, is a psychological thriller with a sci-fi edge. It’s designed to be a 3-sequel franchise with each installment ending as a cliffhanger until the final resolve.
When Chris and Robin James arrive to spend a weekend in their best friends’ newly acquired old home, they are bewildered to find no answer at the door, which they discover to be left unlocked. They enter, assuming that the family is most certainly out and about with their young children and will return at any moment. Their concern mounts as the day wears on without sign of their friends. Further, they come to discover all of the elements you might expect would be with a person if they were to leave their home (cars, keys, cell phones, etc.). During this time, the audience sees what Robin and Chris do not: that they are not as alone as they think.
More peculiar clues present themselves, but before Robin and Chris are able to fully grasp the danger that they are in, Chris also goes missing, along with their two dogs. Left alone to unravel the mystery, Robin calls upon her best friend, Joel, a gay Asian man steeped in yogic, spiritual, and metaphysical philosophy, as well as a hearty sense of humor. He’s the polar opposite of Robin’s own skeptical nature … the yin to her yang. Just when he opens Robin up to considering possibilities beyond her rational grasp, and reels in two other metaphysical specialists to assist, Joel goes missing too.
Through much of the story, the audience is privy to the presence of Milty, a little Edwardian era boy, yet unnoticed by our contemporary cast, due to the sheer size of the house and Milty’s cleverness to remain concealed. Our tale is cut with flashbacks offering glimpses into the little boy’s past, which reveal that he was a member of the family who built and first inhabited the home. We also learn that his mother has passed away in his era and Robin is eerily her doppelgänger.
The underpinnings of the story are that there are portals to other realms through which energy forms (human and others) can enter and travel, and this home holds at least one entry point. Much of the current installment is a misdirection, leading the audience to believe that they are watching a ghost story, presuming that the flashbacks are glimpses of a ghost boy’s (Milty’s) former life. Eventually, it is revealed that Milty is very much alive and that things that are disappearing in this era are resurfacing in another … Milty being the common thread that binds them.
The first installment ends as a cliffhanger, when Robin wakes to find Milty on her pillow, seeing him for the first time. He whispers, “I can help you find them.” Cut to black.
Opening in the Edwardian era, the sequel crosses over and journeys through the “Oblique Tween”–a spirit/energy superhighway that exists between time and presents the entry points to every moment in existence. Robin finds herself whisked to Milty’s native era, presenting her to his profoundly mourning widowed father, “Father, look what I’ve brought you.” Apparent only to Robin, this little boy has mastered the time-space continuum, and has discovered how to manipulate travel with his own unique form of navigation. The child has who lured her in with promises of recovering her loved ones, has now kidnapped her in time, trapping her in the Edwardian era to perform as his replacement mother.
Milty’s parent’s best friends, Ewald and Theodocia Lichtenberg, tamper in metaphysical science and Spiritualism, and they incorrectly assume that their attempts to communicate with and call forth the spirit of the dead mother are responsible for this inexplicable entity before them. Robin is aware of the little boy’s role and reason (when she discovers her likeness to his mother), but recognizes how impossible the tale would be to impress upon the Lichtenbergs. The Lichtenbergs convince Milty’s father, William, that it would be best if they sequester Robin in their basement for further questioning and study to determine just what exactly she is and what kind of threat she may pose. Ewald, especially, is eager to experiment with this test subject who possibly provides tangible and living proof of what exists beyond. There’s a delicate dance between need, danger, and intrigue and all are reserved about laying their cards face up on the table.
The Lichtenbergs appear pleasant enough in flashbacks during the first installment, but their dark underbelly is slowly revealed in the sequel and the depths to which they will delve to evidence the possibility of something more in the universe crosses well over ethical boundaries … almost aligning with the devil in their efforts to prove that there is a God. Robin is treated as part houseguest, part prisoner, part lab rat. And she must figure out how to solve the mystery of manipulating the portal before the Lichtenbergs uncover enough to render her useless. Not only must she save herself, but she must also recover the others who have gone missing. Additionally, she must prevent the little boy’s ability to return for her. Her harrowing escape into the Oblique Tween ends the second installment.
We are given hints as to the missing persons’ whereabouts with flashes in the second installment, but Robin’s quest to find them becomes the plight of the third and final sequel. Thrust into the otherworldly realm of the Oblique Tween without the knowledge or experience of its potentials and threats, Robin slowly pieces together a crude understanding of how Milty navigated his way. She eliminates the equivalent of his breadcrumb trail, rendering it nearly impossible for him to ever return to her precise moment in time. But now, she is lost herself, a foreigner in a strange land occupied by everything from human time travelers, to spirits, angels, shadow creatures, and countless other entities that she never formerly believed existed. Eventually, she pieces together clues that lead her to the children of the original missing family. They are stuck between time, being held by Shadow Creatures who feed on their energy to build enough power to pass through the time portals. Robin must save the children and continue her quest to find their parents and her own husband without becoming the next victim of the otherworldly entities. Even if Robin can recover her loved ones, she must still navigate the way home to safety through a maddeningly complex structure of time and space and the broad assortment of creatures that reside there.
Primrose Lane crosses the threshold of what lies beyond … and once the door is opened, time is of the essence.