James Wan is one of the biggest names in horror these days, having co-created Saw, started the Conjuring and Insidious franchises, directed Malignant, and produced fun, winkingly over-the-top films like M3gan and Night Swim. He has not been as busy with TV, producing a few lesser DC superhero series, Prime Video’s instantly forgotten I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Netflix’s canceled-too-soon Archive 81. So it’s kind of a big deal that he’s lending his talents to a new horror TV series that’s hitting Peacock just in time for Halloween. The only question might be whether Teacup would have been better as a movie than an eight-episode limited series.
The first two episodes of the show, which Wan is producing but was created by Yellowstone and Chicago Fire writer Ian McCulloch, are definitely a promising start despite some early signs that pacing might be a bit of an issue. Teacup is based on horror author Robert R. McCammon’s book Stinger — which, full disclosure, I have not read. That might not be too big of an issue, though, because from everything I’ve learned, the 1988 New York Times best seller was more of a sci-fi thriller than the more overtly horror-leaning show, and the setting and characters are very different. What is the same is the most basic premise: A group of people is forced together when a mysterious threat arrives. (Stinger’s dust jacket reveals the nature of the threat, which might constitute a spoiler, so I’ll save any mention of it until the end of this recap in case you want to go in as blind as the characters.)
Stinger is set in a failing Texas town called Inferno that has all sorts of gang problems, but Teacup opens in a much more halcyon setting: a little rural ranch in Georgia inhabited by a happy family. Except the family is not so happy, and the opening moments of the show actually take place in the woods near the ranch. A woman who looks as if she has been through hell is frantically trying to remove zip-tie handcuffs by sawing them against a jagged rock. She’s manically chanting something hard to parse that sounds like “Murder may occur,†and a wolflike dog is observing her as she breaks free and runs toward the ranch. Seems bad!
Inside the ranch, Maggie Chenoweth (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Yvonne Strahovski) is capturing a wasp in a teacup to remove it from her son Arlo’s room. The rest of her family includes her teenage daughter, Meryl; pot-smoking mother-in-law, Ellen; and her husband, James. Things are a little tense because James recently had an affair, though Maggie doesn’t know who he was sleeping with. Maggie has been, by her own admission, a bitch to Ellen, and Meryl is just offering normal teen-daughter snark. Another thing contributing to the general sense of unease is that the radio keeps making weird sounds and all the animals are acting really freaked out, including a goat that runs off into the woods. Arlo sees the aptly named Mr. Goat make a break for it and follows, unbeknownst to the rest of his family.
The Chenoweths realize Arlo is missing when they’re about to sit down for dinner, but right as they start to look for him, a car pulling a horse trailer speeds into their driveway. Some of their neighbors, the Shanleys, arrived unannounced because Maggie is a vet and they have an injured horse named Scout. Their teenage son, Nicholas, explains that he was riding Scout when all of a sudden Scout started raking his head against the fence and getting all bloodied up. Maggie, who is worried about Arlo, goes with Ruben, the Shanley patriarch, to take care of the horse. Everybody else, including Valeria, who shares a quick, nervous look with James, is on Arlo-finding duty.
While Maggie and Ruben successfully pull a piece of broken fence from Scout’s neck (he’ll be fine!), James and Valeria are in the woods looking for Arlo, and it’s revealed that they’ve been sleeping together. Maggie just knows about the affair; she doesn’t know it was with her neighbor, and Ruben doesn’t know he’s being cheated on at all. James tells Valeria a story of a time when Meryl went missing before Arlo was born. Inspired by “Hansel and Gretel,†she hid in the oven, couldn’t get out, then fell asleep. It’s a cute story about what was certainly a terrifying moment for him and Maggie as parents, but that he told Valeria about it will have implications very soon. Nicholas and Meryl are also out in the woods searching for Arlo, and though they don’t find him, they do stumble across Mr. Goat. They also find Duke, a dog belonging to another set of neighbors, the Kellys, who had run off because all the animals were acting crazy.
Somebody else found Arlo, though. He encounters the woman from the opening, who grabs him and then looms over his face with a silent, terrifying scream as a sickly rainbow sheen appears in her eye before appearing in Arlo’s eye, as if she has passed something on to him. We later see this woman, now seemingly free of whatever thrall she was in, get mauled to death by that big dog.
Back at the ranch, another car has pulled up. It’s Donald Kelly and his wife, Claire, two other nearby neighbors who dropped in looking for Duke — and because Donald saw the big, scary, possibly rabid dog earlier and he wants to use his Second Amendment rights to shoot it and protect the Chenoweth kids (even if James clearly is of a different political persuasion). As they’re arguing, Arlo emerges from the woods, now acting just like the woman was earlier and chanting things like “Run, run, hide. Must kill.†This is alarming to Maggie, as are the marks on his arms from where the lady grabbed him.
The premiere ends with a third car pulling up but stopping at the end of the driveway to the ranch. A man wearing a gas mask (very My Bloody Valentine–core) wordlessly uses a spray gun to draw some sort of blue boundary line. The second episode starts with things going from bad to worse as the lights flicker before the power — all power, including the Chenoweths’, Shanleys’, and Kellys’ cars — goes dead. While macho, gun-slinging Donald stays outside so he can hunt down whoever did this to Arlo, everybody heads in so Maggie can clean up her son and provide first aid.
Arlo’s drifting in and out of whatever weird thing is possessing him, and there’s some banter between siblings that prompts Valeria to mention the hiding-in-the-oven story James just told her. Maggie’s face deadens when she hears this, as we later learn that she was so upset by the whole ordeal that she made James promise to never tell anybody about the time Meryl went missing. That her husband betrayed her trust by telling Valeria also suggests that she’s whom James has been sleeping with.
This is probably the least of Maggie’s problems. Arlo is clearly not well, and his erratic behavior causes him to accidentally slam Nicholas into a wall. (Meryl has to clean up Nicholas’s head wound, which leads to some awkward banter in which he’s idolizing her and her family.) Arlo later takes a swing at Maggie with a pair of little medical scissors, once more breaking into the chants and saying, “Run, hide, gunshot. Women, go. Women, go, go, go!â€
James and Ruben are preparing to saddle up so they can ride for help before they notice the car at the end of the driveway — with the lights still on. They run down only for the masked man to stop them, holding up a whiteboard where he has written “Don’t cross the line.†When they try to protest, he fires a gun up in the air, and they don’t come any closer after that. Deep in the woods, Donald is trudging through the leaves with his assault rifle, mumbling to himself about “some kind of COVID-fever bullshit.†(And his name is Donald. Subtle …) He trips over the mystery woman’s chewed-up body, dropping his gun. Without that gun, he’s suddenly a lot less cocky, and he runs for his life as the big scary dog chases after him. Donald emerges from the woods with the dog hot on his tail, running toward where James and Ruben are in a standoff with the masked man. The dog pounces, but Donald is able to fling it off him. The instant the canine crosses the blue border, it begins to dissolve into a grotesque mess of bones and gore.
“Don’t cross the line,†the masked man reiterates with his sign. “Don’t trust anyone.â€
While all this has been going on, Ellen, Valeria, and Claire have been awkwardly talking in the kitchen. Claire eventually decides that she’s simply going to walk back home with Duke and call for help from her landline. She won’t listen to any of their pleas that it might not be safe, and she doesn’t listen when Ruben, James, and her husband come running up screaming at her not to cross the blue borderline. She stubbornly refuses, confused as to what it is they’re even going on about. When Donald tries to prevent her from taking another step, they lose their balance, and as soon as Donald’s hand crosses the line, it begins to melt into a bloody mess. Claire fares even worse; her face starts to slough off, and her rib cage bursts from her chest before she freezes in a grotesque death pose.
Inside, Arlo gets a dictionary off the bookshelf and flips its pages until he gets to the word trap.
“He says we need to hide,†Arlo warns. When Maggie, who doesn’t yet know what horrors have happened outside, asks who “he†is, Arlo replies, “The man in my head. He says we’re trapped. We need to hide. Because it’s coming, Mom. It’s coming, and it kills everything that gets in its way.â€
That’s a good way to end the episode, and I’m intrigued with where Teacup is going to go from here. We’ve met our characters, set up some interpersonal fault lines that are just waiting to be stepped on, introduced some mysterious threat, and even capped things off with a little body horror. (Although personally, I’m hoping Teacup goes a lot further than Claire’s death, which was honestly not that gross. If you’re gonna premiere a body-horror TV show while The Substance is still in theaters, you gotta really go for it!)
And yet despite all that setup, it doesn’t feel as if all that much happened in the first two of Teacup’s eight episodes. And after seeing a person’s insides become their outsides because they crossed a line, I’m wondering how Teacup will fill its next six hours. Either it’s going to be balls-out insanity (which seems unsustainable), or it’s going to have to find places to slow down (in which case, any scene in which two characters have a quiet heart-to-heart might feel silly, because, uhhh, look at what is happening outside?!). It’s not impossible that Teacup could pull it off, but these two premiere episodes seem as though they could easily have been condensed into the first 20 or 30 minutes of a 90-minute horror romp. I would love to be proven wrong!
Over the Line
• Potential Spoilers: From what I’ve read, the plot of Stinger involves two aliens. One is some sort of alien rebel who crash-landed near this town, and the other is the titular Stinger, an alien bounty hunter trying to get the first alien, and he will stop at nothing and cause all sorts of collateral damage in pursuit of his target. Is Teacup’s masked man the bounty hunter, while whatever is inside Arlo is the first alien? Seems like a safe guess, but seeing as showrunner McCulloch said the show “changes 90 percent of the book,†who knows?
• Why is this show called Teacup? Maggie catches a wasp in one to kick off the premiere, calling it a “tempest in a teacup.†Near the end of the second episode, Arlo puts a bunch of marbles underneath one and says “My little lighthouse,†after the song he and his mom were singing. (No idea what that means.) Is it as simple as the blue border being the “teacup†that all our protagonists are trapped in?
• I am glad Scout the horse is okay, but I am concerned that before Teacup is over, he will not be okay.
• Nicholas is a very weird character, but I hope he gets to tell at least one joke per episode, the way he does in these first two. Those jokes were “What do you call a banana eating a banana? Canabananalism,†and “What do you call a bird that’s too afraid to fly? Chicken.â€
• I am not a homeowner, but my understanding is that whatever the masked man is doing is essentially what it’s like to have a property dispute with your neighbor. He’s a county assessor, only instead of determining where you can or cannot do landscaping, he’s making it so that you turn into a Cronenberg-esque mass of gore and die if you go into the other lot.