A couple of teenagers in a car outside what appears to be an abandoned industrial building in Worcester smoking pot and listening to Rush. "Tom Sawyer," to be precise. You see the dangers of pot, kids? You see the music it makes you listen to? The guy thinks he feels some shaking but the girl just tells him he's high, and they pass the joint back and forth.

And then a high window on the warehouse actually explodes, with a bright light inside, showering the hood of the car with shattered glass. "I'm going to check it out," says the guy, because smoking pot doesn't make you paranoid, apparently, but an IDIOT. She just wants to go, but he says it will be fine, and gets out, and she locks the door after him.

Inside, there are noises and bright flashes coming from within an interior room, where we see a couple of crouched men all covered in goop and a third, less fully defined pile of goop.

And Buddy walks through the warehouse, not at all deterred by the weird noises or the activity that blew out a window over the car where his high girlfriend is now all by herself. He strolls into the room where we now only see the third pile of goop, which looks like it's slowly coalescing into shape. So what does this genius do? Grabs a shovel and starts jabbing at it. My guess is that he's bummed at narrowly missing out on winning a Darwin Award each year and figures he has to actually die to get one, so here's his chance. The pile of goo doesn't seem to appreciate being jabbed at, and before genius here is able to look around and find something to light it on fire, some humanoid grabs him and does that quick head-twist neck-snap thing, and just like that Buddy is dead.

Then the thing, which looks mostly like a human with no skin, grabs his special shapeshifter USB cable and jams it in the roof of Buddy's mouth, and then into his own, and within seconds we have a brand-new Buddy! Jesus, my iPod takes longer to update.

Outside, the shapeshifter-as-Dave gets a dressing-down from his girlfriend, who says he scared the hell out of her. "I want to leave here, Dave," she says. Dave's not here, man! She's not going anywhere. In the rearview mirror, she spots a second shapeshifter and screams, and then Dave attacks her and everything goes black.

After the opening credits, Peter strolls in to the Bishop home to see Walter feverishly rearranging picture frames on the bed. Peter's all "not again!" and his dad says he's just rearranging, because things are "not quite right" yet, but Peter says they're fine, like it was yesterday and the day before, and while Walter thinks a well-organized house is a sign of a well-organized mind, Peter thinks staying up all night to find the perfect place for a laundry hamper is the sign of something else entirely, and you'd think Peter would be a little more cognizant of the fact that his dad did, after all, spend 17 years in a mental institution.