4 out of 5

Director: Mick Garris

I hated this episode the first time I saw it, and probably for the reason echoed in the other comments – I went into the series expecting horror, and, though continually let down by many episodes, I sort of hoped that the series creator would turn in a winner… but Chocolate ends up being mostly just a thriller.  Coming back to it several years later with incredibly LOW expectations – both for the series in general (which I saw, overall, as a failure) and this installment in particular – natch, I found that I actually enjoyed it, and what I perceived as a heavy-hand with direction the first time around was actually quite well done…  But yes, besides one nifty first-person stabbing scene, Choco is pretty lacking in chills or guts.  So Henry Thomas starts “seeing” through the eyes and senses of another person… a woman… with whom he falls in love… aaand what he sees through her eyes causes some problems.  There are definitely some gaps here – Thomas effectively plays the role of the getting-over-divorce, and I buy into how affected he is by this new woman in his life.  But there’s some script fakery with the wife, and as such she seems to be included just to keep that up, but since the ending – which after it drops the curtain, essentially just fades to black – since the ending fizzles out as such, there’s no effective tie-in for the wife, and no real need for her in the plot.  The same could be said for some extra details which they really could’ve used but don’t get much mileage out of – Thomas’s job, his friend.  Once the ball gets rolling, it exposes how much padding those parts are.  But the ball gets rolling fairly quickly, and Garris (along with Thomas) actually does a good job of making us interested / aroused
/ uncomfortable all at the same time, with a couple of great gags based around that thrown in.  The sound was also a nice cue and was very well mixed in.  If you can set aside any horror expectations and just view this as a bloody Twilight Zone episode, it’s pretty good.  Alas, it wasn’t Twilight Zone, was it?