Congratulations to Sandra on officially not having terminal lymphoma! In a post-Anya world, Sandra has been my favorite Brightcliffe patient; her conflicts over her faith, especially her frustration at being perceived as a one-note religious nutjob, are some of the more complex in the show. And something about Annarah Cymone’s performance is innately sympathetic to me. In short, I’m happy for her.
This latest development provides even more substantial material for Sandra because she really doesn’t know how to feel. (“However you feel is correct,†Dr. Stanton tells her, which should be GIF’d and used in empowerment seminars.) When Ilonka breaks the news to the Midnight Club that someone’s going home — again, awful idea, Ilonka — Sandra takes no joy in telling everyone it’s her. In fact, she’s going home tomorrow, on Family Day. It turns out she was misdiagnosed; there was no miracle, either faith driven or ritual driven. To make things worse, she admits it was her talking to Spence on the intercom, not some ghost; he was in a dark spot and she wanted to give him some hope. As Sandra leaves in tears, she’s a ball of complicated emotions. It doesn’t feel good to be the only person going home, as Anya found out in her flash-forward dream.
But in the end, everyone lets Sandra back in, happy for her without reservations. The bigger drama of the episode comes from Ilonka’s continual desperation to survive following the realization she wasn’t the cured patient. There’s still reason to think at least some of the supernatural events of the series are real — Ilonka and Kevin seem to have pretty similar visions, even if he sees the old man more than the old woman — but Ilonka’s determination to follow her new faith to the end is misplaced.
At Good Humor, Shasta admits a truth so obvious even Ilonka apparently knew it deep down: She’s Julia Jayne. After she was cured, she started the collective to share her miracle and heal people. She’s been hoping to access the energy center at Brightcliffe for years, but Stanton hasn’t allowed her to. So Julia persuades Ilonka to let her in late at night, after Midnight Club, in order to perform a ritual to heal her.
Although Ilonka has plenty of reason to be skeptical — and it seems more obvious than ever to the audience this isn’t going to end well — she still has blinders on, hyperfixated on the slim possibility of her survival. (It’s like when I got scammed out of a Charly Bliss concert ticket by a Facebook vendor I wanted to believe was legit despite all evidence to the contrary.) She clearly has qualms about letting in three uninvited guests, and the mention of the Five Sisters should further deter her, not reassure her. Remember, Aceso invoked them just to gather enough human sacrifices for herself.
Stanton makes it there to intervene, but Ilonka has never listened to her over Julia for the simple reason that Julia is the one telling her what she wants to hear. She only accepts the impossibility of Julia’s altruism at the very last moment, when, mid-ritual, the three other participants begin vomiting and convulsing from the poisoned tea they just drank. Julia leaps at her to complete the sacrifice, and we cut to black.
Overall, these are very exciting developments with a taste of the sustained horror and mayhem I’ve been craving from this show. And then there’s the Midnight Club.
Besides Cheri, Spence is the one character we haven’t seen tell a story yet. So it’s his time to shine, even though it might’ve felt more natural last episode following his big moment with his mom. The impetus for the story this time is his trip to meet Mark’s group of queer activist friends, who immediately take him in, exuding so much warmth and freedom despite how much they’ve been through. The reason nobody seems scared, Mark explains, is that they choose to embrace love instead of wallowing in what they can’t control.
Spence’s story is about a transfer student named Rel and his romance with Christopher Perry, a robotics student. Rel first wins over Christopher by buying an expensive VCR to record late-night sci-fi movies, a passion they share. On their first date, a trip to Rel’s dorm room to watch The Terminator, they instead find a tape of the football game that’s happening later that same night. This VCR tapes the future.
So begins a romance built on hustling straight guys, though it quickly turns into saving lives when they learn a student is about to get crushed by an AC unit one morning. They agree to take a break from the tapes while Christopher visits his mom, but Rel inevitably watches them anyway. And good thing he does because one tape reveals Christopher is going to be gassed and dismembered by an intruder that night.
Rel makes it to Christopher’s mom’s house to warn them, but he’s too late to protect them from the gas bomb thrown through their window. What follows is a pretty wild series of mind-bending Terminator-y reveals. I’ll try to sum this up the best I can: The intruder is an older version of Christopher from the future, and he’s there to kill Rel, who’s actually a cyborg made 40 years from now by Christopher’s company, Robotic Experimentation Logistics (R.E.L.). Rel escaped back in time after Old Christopher (O.C.) deemed him defective because he was capable of fear and sadness. That journey damaged his memory, but his background code makes it so he recognizes the importance of Christopher — he just forgets that his mission is to kill him and prevent the A.I. future, not fall in love with him.
But O.C. himself is also a cyborg, the first ever. Christopher would go on to get sick (from AIDS, it’s implied) and replace each part of himself until he became a new species altogether. Now O.C. plans to eliminate fear and sadness from future cyborgs. Rel surrenders and lets O.C. kill him but not before generating a taped message for young Christopher showing him the truth about his future. As a result, Christopher has a change of perspective and stops seeing “defects†in human nature, altering future events.
This story is meant to give us a little background on Spence and the young man he loved who transmitted the virus to him. It also clearly follows up on the lesson he learned from Mark about loving despite fear. But I have to say this one didn’t do much for me overall, especially compared to Natsuki’s story in the previous episode. For one, it hews pretty damn close to Amesh’s story in both inspiration — The Terminator is a James Cameron movie — and the specific time-travel content (competing forces traveling back in time to either avert a disturbing future or enable it). More broadly, it’s difficult not to view these long digressions as distractions this close to the end of the season even though they’re arguably the whole point of the show.
Still, things are happening, and the characterization here remains solid, if sometimes surface level. Let’s see if the finale brings it home.
Scary Stories
• Ilonka also explodes at Katherine, who comes bearing photos from prom and boasting about how good Kevin looks. Ilonka harshly tells her that her desire for him to appear normal is weighing on him and that he shouldn’t have to put on a brave face for her. While I actually find Katherine quite sympathetic despite her little screen time, Ilonka is kind of right. But Kevin later says he won’t break up with Katherine because he wants to be a good memory for her after he’s gone.
• Ilonka shows more genuine joy seeing Amesh in Natsuki’s room than hearing Sandra’s going to live. But I do really like Iman Benson’s grinning delivery of “Okay†as she gives Natsuki the “Good for you!†look. It’d be nice to see Ilonka in this mode more often.
• There are some amusing made-up football team names in Spence’s story, including the Charlatans, but Kevin’s performative annoyance at them didn’t do much for me comedically.
• By the way, I haven’t given them their due, but “the Mirror Man†and “Cataract Woman†are played, respectively, by William B. Davis and Patricia Drake. Davis famously played the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files.