Things have changed.
An abrupt departure from the painstaking, unrelenting ratcheting-up of tension that has characterised the show because the get started, Episode 8 of Them‘s astonishing first season (“Day 9”) whisks us away from the Emorys’ house to an asylum for the criminally insane. After the shattering conclusion of episode seven, Livia has been committed, blamed for killing the newborn son whose body her husband Henry came upon—regardless of his protestation that she’s blameless. The similarly Mrs. Beaumont is still there; so is Mrs. Johnson, as upsettingly cheery as ever. The doctor in charge (Kate McNeil) lies to Livia, claiming her circle of relatives are fearful of her and want not anything to do along with her, no less than until she’s healed. This manner lobotomized, a treatment the doctor appears to inflict at the “Negro ladies” in her price (whom she differentiates from “normal girls”) at will.
Livia isn’t the only girl from her community who finds herself imprisoned. Betty Wendell is now locked in an underground chamber by means of the thoroughly demented milkman George, who seems to have ready for this second for ages. (The bunker even has the similar wallpaper as Betty’s living room; no display in my memory has been as extensively wallpapered as Them.) He fixes them a pleasing romantic dinner; she stabs him within the neck with a corkscrew, a completely futile gesture he doesn’t even appear to be mad about, simply unhappy that issues aren’t continuing as rapturously as he’d was hoping. You may just say that Betty Wendell has fucked around, and now she is studying.
Back at house, Henry and his daughters are still making arrangements to depart and stay along with his cousin Hazel, who fortunately isn't simply the half-melted ghost who nearly drove Livia to kill Gracie a pair episodes ago. But they're thwarted via Marty (Pat Healy) and Earl (John Patrick Jordan), the 2 neighbors who’ve satisfied themselves, roughly, that either Henry or Livia had one thing to do with Betty’s disappearance. (Clark, her secretly gay husband, is not even in the episode.) They beat Henry. They dangle a gun to Gracie’s head. They bring to an end considered one of Henry’s palms, as “Da Tap Dance Man” holds up his own maimed hand and laughs. They devour a chicken they pressure Ruby to prepare dinner for them. And in spite of everything, they hold Henry from a beam in the basement, as his daughters glance on and desperately attempt to unfastened him.
Cue the Black Hat Man, remodeling from his guise as a friendly orderly and taunting Livia as she screams from the bed to which she’s been strapped before her own lobotomy is to happen. Cut to black.
Clocking in at simply over 1/2 an hour, no longer counting the ultimate credits, it is a brief, throat-clearing episode, a squall-before-the-storm. The details are, as all the time, impeccable: George’s casually sexist insistence that his prisoner Betty wear extra crimson; the masks on Marty’s shirt and the Iron Cross at the car he tries and fails to fix in his storage; the brooch on the doctor’s lapel that fits the one worn via Helen the true property agent and, I think, the flowers plucked by way of Livia to position in that awful bloody pillowcase; the parallel fucking rooster dinners fed on through George and Betty on one hand and Marty and Earl on the other. And possibly it’s foolish to have hope when looking at a display like this, but that excruciating basement scene did finish with Ruby retrieving that axe from the corner of the basement. It’s going to get buried in somebody earlier than this all ends—if it ends for the Emorys at all.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and (*8*), truly. He and his family live on Long Island.
Watch THEM Episode 8 (“Day 9”) on Amazon Prime
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
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