Teacup
Peacock has been billing Teacup as a horror series, but the book it’s based on, Stinger, is really more of a sci-fi page-turner with some horror aspects. There’s lots of great horror with sci-fi elements and vice versa, so it’s not like it would’ve been impossible for Teacup to successfully flip Stinger’s genre ratios. If there’s a big distinction between the two genres, it might be that sci-fi tends to explain things, while horror is at its scariest when the characters and the audience are wondering, What the fuck is going on? It was inevitable that Teacup would start explaining some of the weird goings-on that made the first few episodes unsettling, but the fifth episode’s flashback so thoroughly reveals what’s happening that this alien invasion doesn’t feel scary. A thing going bump in the night is scary; patiently explaining what that thing is, less so.
Take, for instance, the man in the gas mask who drew the deadly line around the ranch. The image of him, one eye crazily looking out through the glass of the mask, is Teacup’s main promotional image as Peacock suggests the show for your pre-Halloween viewing. This episode revealed that the masked man, McNab, is actually just an alien conspiracy theorist who happens to be right and is trying to save the world. To be determined if he succeeds! Doesn’t seem to be going great!
The young man in the basement who held James at gunpoint at the end of last week’s episode reveals that his name is Travis, and it’s through Travis that we learn how this all started. After being forced by his boss to drive a too-drunk McNab home from the bar where he works, Travis finds himself intrigued by what McNab is saying. Soon, he’s hanging out with McNab regularly. McNab explains how the aliens work: They don’t have corporeal bodies, and they arrive not in spaceships but by hitching rides on meteors. Once on Earth, these “Visitors,†as McNab calls them, “inhabit†people’s bodies. There are two types of Visitors: good ones and bad ones. Whenever a good one lands, a bad one comes to follow it. McNab knows all this because a good one inhabited his daughter, and she was hunted down and killed by a bad one. He’s got a gnarly scar on his arm from when he brushed up against the bad Visitor’s trap, and it’s because of this encounter that he can sense exactly where the edge of the trap is. (This is how he was able to spray-paint a border around the ranch.)
Travis gets roped into McNab’s alien-hunting gang along with Olsen, whom we saw last week, in the present, being inhabited by the Visitor known as Assassin before it switched over to Ellen’s body and blew his brains out. The pair explain that they, along with an online chat room of fellow alien hunters, have been observing a woman named Mary Ellis Drucker for two years. There’s a bad Visitor inside her, and she has suddenly started acting suspicious in the lead-up to a meteor shower. A good Visitor is coming and Assassin, inside Mary Ellis, is going to hunt her down — but McNab, Olsen, and Travis are going to get it first.
This attempt goes horribly. They follow her to the Navarros’, the farm where James and Ruben are trapped in the present. While Travis starts filling up a pool for reasons that will be revealed later, McNab and Olsen rush in after Mary Ellis as she goes after Carmen — Harbinger’s first host and the woman from the beginning of the series premiere. For all their bluster, McNab and Olsen are utterly useless — while they’re inside the house, Mary Ellis escapes, shoots one of the Navarros in the head, and goes into the silo to plant the rainbow tree that’s the source of the trap. McNab’s spider sense is tingling from the imminent deployment of the trap, so he straight-up ditches Travis. Carmen, whose hands are zip-tied, flees to the woods. Mary Ellis emerges from the silo and transfers Assassin to Travis, freeing the real Mary Ellis from her thrall. She shoots Travis twice in the chest before she’s killed herself, and Assassin transfers itself from its new, mortally injured host to Olsen when he finally comes out to investigate. I cannot imagine a plan going worse than this.
In the present, having explained how all this started, Travis decides to shoot himself so that he can tell his late aunt Judy that her alien conspiracy theories are right. RIP, Travis; you shouldn’t have become friends with the crazy barfly. James goes back outside and rescues Ruben from the silo where he had been stuck inside by the rainbow tree. Ruben repays him by punching James in the face, because, oh yeah, James slept with his wife. Not to make light of Ruben’s feelings of betrayal, but James is extremely correct when he says, “I don’t have time for this,†and the two saddle up to head back, encountering Arlo, Meryl, Nicholas, and the injured McNab in the process to end the episode.
Compared to the exposition-heavy fifth episode — which is also the first episode of Teacup to indulge in streaming’s tendency to have episodes be 20 or 30 minutes longer than an average episode for some reason — the second of this week’s two episodes is a brisk affair that sets up the finale to come. Upon getting back to the house, the Shanleys quickly depart for the woods again in search of any remnants of the rainbow goo Nicholas dropped. If there is any left, and they can drink it, they can escape the trap. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. Ruben and Valeria are fighting because of the infidelity and then once they get to where the goo was, a wolf saunters in, laps up all of the goo, and then casually trots off through the trap unscathed. This might be the dumbest part of the entire show so far.
Luckily, the show offsets it by making what I think is a very smart decision. As soon as Ellen was inhabited by Assassin at the end of last week’s episodes, it seemed as though we were poised for an episode in which Assassin goes incognito amid Ellen’s unsuspecting family. That’s the sort of familiar plot that could get old quickly because the audience knows something the characters don’t. Luckily, Donald is suspicious of Ellen’s story, seeing as Olsen was obviously shot while he was still tied up rather than after he supposedly escaped. He tells James, and James instantly puts this discrepancy together with the story Travis told him and realizes that his mother is Assassin. He readily accepts this, saving us from having to see a clichéd scene in which he can’t believe his sweet old mother would do this.
Unfortunately, Ellen has gone missing — and she’s not the only one. McNab is causing trouble, too. Maggie is once again applying her veterinary training to people as she tends to McNab’s knife wound. While he’s unconscious, she talks with Arlo, who explains that Harbinger is on a mission to find a machine and prepare for an invasion. He needs to do all this without waking up the other assassins hidden in people. Just then, McNab wakes up and pulls a gun, leading to a standoff between him, Maggie, and James that’s only broken up when Donald rushes in and gets himself shot. He’s okay thanks to Olsen’s body armor, which he had put on, but McNab is gone.
The adults split up to look for McNab and Ellen, but they find only the latter. It’s unclear, however, if Assassin is still inhabiting Ellen or somebody else. I’m not sure when Ellen could’ve transferred the Visitor inside her to somebody else. Donald was the one who found her — does that make him the most likely suspect? In any case, Maggie thinks there’s enough plausible doubt to remove Ellen’s zip ties. Any of the adults could be Assassin, so they decide the right thing to do is to stay isolated from Arlo-Harbinger and Meryl and Nicholas. Eventually, Assassin will slip up and reveal itself.
But what then? Nicholas, who picked up McNab’s notebook, may have the answer. Once they figure out who Assassin is, they can get rid of it … by drowning its host. This explains why there were resuscitation instructions by the pool Travis set up at the Navarros’ house.
Who is Assassin? Will everybody figure out how to escape the trap? What is the machine that Harbinger is trying to get to, and what does “preparing for an invasion†mean? These are all important questions that the final two episodes will address, but I have another one: Will Teacup get scary? Or, at least, will it get gory again? I need to see at least one more body go all inside out!
Crossing the Line
• There’s one player we learned about this week who hasn’t made a proper appearance: Hayden, the guy in the muscle car from the flashbacks. He was McNab and Olsen’s old partner before they had a falling-out. Hayden must know all about the Visitors, and he’ll presumably pop up on one side of the trap or another for the finale.
• McNab gave Travis a little vial of goo. Wonder if that will come in handy.
• The big scary dog was apparently just a normal dog that Assassin, inside Mary Ellis, trained. Kind of a letdown.
• Episode six opens with a plane flying overhead. Makes you wonder, How high does the trap go? I was half-expecting to see it crash.