First Things First…
I’m glad the mystery is starting to come into focus, at least a little. It seems like we finally learned of a reason why Melody can connect with Dan through space and time. And also, there seems to be a bigger connection between her and the cult through her mom.
Learning that Samuel was Virgil’s brother was a bombshell. And did Samuel really murder Fr. Russo?
Despite the revelations from the last episode, like the demon the cult worships, there’s still so much more that’s unclear. Why are the junkies really being kept on the sixth floor? And why does “mold” seem to make people lose their minds, like it’s doing to Annabelle?
5 Things I Like
5. Don’t Look Back
Groundskeeper Bobbi tells Dan to just finish the job, take the money, walk away, and never look back.
I keep wondering if there’s more to her than we know.
And even if there’s not, I’m intrigued that her warning is basically an admission — vague, but still an admission — that there’s something wrong with this compound, and Virgil, and the entire situation.
4. Welcome to The Circle
The cold opens are always some sort of footage, whether it was Melody’s recording in the premier, a Wellspring commercial, a news report, or now, the introduction to the lost TV show The Circle, with William Crest.
It’s kind of done in the vain of Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling, with dramatic horror music, and it’s really cool and creepy.
Crest even says in the intro:
“… they may wonder if they’ve caught a glimpse into another world. A dimension separated from ours by the thinnest of veils. A realm of infinite power and infinte horror.”
No wonder this is like the Holy Grail for Dan. I’d totally watch it.
3. Cursed Haul
We finally meet Jill and find out she cheated on Dan with “the film festival guy.”
Was she sleeping with Mark, too?
That would explain why I keep thinking there’s something shady about Mark. Jill definitely doesn’t like him. It could be as simple as her not liking her boyfriend’s best friend. But it feels different.
More to the point, Jill just bought a haul from the Crest estate, and she says, “The estate tried to unload this on three other dealers first. The rumor is this stuff is cursed.”
The haul includes the snuff film that seems to have caused a lot of this weirdness. At this point, I don’t know if Dan will even make it out of the compound and get his hands on this stuff. But cursed items are one of my favorite horror tropes. And I’m curious if this will drag Mark and Jill further into the mystery.
2. Infestation
I don’t know what’s real and what’s not when Dan climbs down through that grate. It looks like he’s in the sub-basement Samuel took Melody to — but that was in the Visser, while the compound is in the Catskills.
Plus there’s a ton of screens all over the walls of this circular room, and they’re all playing Melody’s footage.
But somehow it seems everything is infested with the same mold from the Visser — the tapes, the equipment, the walls, everything.
I don’t know why it takes Dan this long to notice, but I like the development. It seems to point, once again, to Virgil being more entwined in the cult than he lets on.
1. Gone Crazy
I don’t understand why Virgil hired Thomas Bellows to digitize the old soaps. But for some reason, this mystery intrigues me.
It’s cool watching him lose his mind over the course of just a few minutes.
He also stumbled on some of the same stuff as Dan. And when it comes to Wellspring, he makes a great point — it seems the whole reason Virgil created a data collection company was because he was looking for someone — probably anyone with the genetic markers the Baldung possess.
Bellows also mentions the face in the screen. The same face Dan has already seen, and that comes into play in a much more real way at the end of this episode. So that, at least, seems real, and not a hallucination of Dan’s
0 Things I’m Mixed On
4 Things I Don’t Like
4. Dan Is a Terrible Friend
There’s no other way to say this.
And unless something unseemly bears out about Mark, I have to say — if I were him, I would’ve told Dan to eff off a long time ago.
Dude asks for a ton of favors. They usually involve challenging research, finding people who are off the grid, and a decent amount of driving.
And he’s rarely grateful for any of it.
As good as the performance is, and as sympathetic as Dan can be under these conditions, it’s hard to fully get behind him when he treats the guy trying to help him like shit.
3. Guns Blazing
If I played poker, I’d love to have Melody at my table.
She has zero impulse control. And she can’t keep anything to herself.
She just barges into apartments and confronts people left and right.
Like, if you really believe Cassandra and Samuel run a demonic cult, or are witches leading a coven, and that they’ve murdered people and are keeping drug addicts locked up in the building, is it smart to shove your suspicions about them in their faces — especially when you have no one to help you?
Or to make wild accusations to the police with no way to back it up?
I could see acting impulsively like this once…
And then learning from it if you’re lucky enough to escape unharmed, so you can come up with a better plan.
But nope…
“Bull in a china shop” is her ONLY move.
2. Nonsense
When Samuel finally puts his cards on the table and tells Melody about the cult, nothing he says makes sense.
Maybe that’s the point.
But I feel like he’d be a more believable villain if I understood what he was trying to accomplish, and why they worship this demon.
That’s hard to do when he spews nonsense like…
“We’re pioneers of the imagination. We’re voyagers. We’re seers.”
Or…
“… the whole of time will be as one… It means that I am merely a link in the chain. I’m a keeper of the flame.”
Bro… what???
Or when he says Jess is their vessel to hold a whole new world inside of her.
We’ll get some light shed on what this means in the last two episodes… right???
1. Coming to Life
When we saw the demon’s face materialize on the screen early in the season, and we didn’t know what it was, it was pretty cool.
But now it’s literally climbing out of the computer and into the control room at the compound. It’s just silly.
Tim Matassa
