Here’s the kind of day Eli is having. In the morning, he has a meeting with his troubled client Noah where he hallucinates that an action figure the boy buries in the sand so it can’t “hurt anyone” looks just like himself. Before action figures are going to be the hottest toy of this holiday season, mark my words.
He’s so alarmed by this that he goes to get a drink of water, at which point Noah vanishes, along with Eli’s distinctive Mets pen. (How this must have pained dyed-in-the-pinstripes Yankees fan Billy Crystal is beyond me.) He tracks the boy down, but can’t find the pen.
Eli goes home and learns from his assistant, Cleo (Ava Lalezarzadeh), that there’s no apparent connection between Noah, a farmhouse, and the Dutch language to be found in any of his files. Around then he discovers that the bathroom where Lynn killed himself is leaking into his office. When he fixes the drain, dirty water bubbles up, the dissipates when he pulls a chunk of her hair out. His seemingly psychic granddaughter asks him if he’s mad at her Gran for clogging the drain, then claims the woman lives on in her stuffed lizard.
Having forgotten that he was supposed to watch the kid all day while his daughter and real-estate agent prep his house, he takes her along with him on a fact-finding mission to the church where Noah was dropped off as a safe-haven baby. He winds up just getting angry at a priest’s faith and storming off, barking at Sophie that her grandmother doesn’t live in the lizard and calling God “a vengeful motherfucker” on his way out. Needless to say, Sophie does not enjoy her time with Grandpa.
Then he discovers that his wife was secretly corresponding with his best friend, Jackson, about something she thought her husband couldn’t handle hearing. He arrives at Jackson’s in the middle of a party he didn’t want to attend, where the culinary centerpiece is lobster gumbo — lobsters loom large in the iconography of the day of his wife’s suicide, as we learned last week.
Then a woman starts choking and going into anaphylactic shock. He removes an entire small lobster claw from her throat and performs an impromptu tracheotomy with a knife and…a Mets pen, which someone hands him to use as a breathing tube.
Grateful that he saved the life of a guest, Jackson finally listens to Eli long enough to find out what he wants to know. Turns out Lynn was working on a new book about mortality and dying, something she hid from Eli because he was all determination and optimism that she’d simply recover. The drawings involve a frozen pond, and a black swirl — the hallucinations that continually plague his patient, Noah, though Eli doesn’t know this yet.
As for Noah himself, he spends the day being suspected by everyone — the nice nurse, a mean-mugging older kid in the ward — of still having that pen. But the secret item he’s been carrying around all day isn’t the pen at all. It’s the action figure, with the word ELI written on the back. Thank goodness, too: He sees that tentacle coiling around the nurse’s neck, and if he’d had the pen he might have driven it right in.
So yeah, not a great day for our guy Eli. He left an at-risk patient alone enough to make a run for it, he alienated his granddaughter, he learned that his best friend knew something fundamentally important about his wife that he himself did not, and oh yeah, either somehow enormous chunks of her blonde hair are causing murky water to bubble out of his bathtub drain, or he’s merely hallucinating that this is happening. Neither option is all that appealing.
And not a great day for Noah, either. He winds up tied down and restrained in a strange place, far from the loving foster mom who sings “You Are My Sunshine” to him, far even from the therapist to whom he has built some kind of connection.
But if you’ve been hunting for the connection between Noah and Lynn, this episode gets you closer than ever. There’s long been an implicit link between the two characters because they’re both talented artists, but since Lynn was a children’s book author (and the books in question aren’t the old Stephen Gammell versions of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark), we haven’t seen any of her drawings echo the dark intensity of Noah’s. But if she was secretly drawing a book about her death…well, i hope you’ve got a lot of black crayons, because I have a feeling we’re gonna need them.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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