Whatever else it is, the penultimate installment of Them: The Scare is one of the most visually accomplished episodes of television to air this year. Directing a script by Scott Kosar, creator Little Marvin employs a variety of striking visual techniques to create the sense that for Dawn Reeve and her family, the walls are closing in; Marvin makes this all but literal by adjusting the frame to the comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of an old TV screen.
But limiting the characters’ room to maneuver is just one of Little Marvin’s tricks. He tints the screen blood red for the characters’ nightmarish visions. He breaks out a split diopter shot straight out of classic Hollywood to heighten the painful melodrama between Athena and Dawn. He uses dissolves, overlays, and slowly spinning images to fade us from one image and scene to another in a hypnagogic rhythm. There’s a Vertigo shot, a camera attached to a car door, static horrors placed at the center of the frame in monumental horror-image style. Why settle for just being scary when you can be scary and gorgeous, too?
For all its visual panache, though, this episode reveals an even uglier side to the events befalling Dawn Reeve and her family. Dawn was not separated from her twin brother Edmund by the system, given up for adoption separately. She and Edmund were both raised by Athena and her late husband, until his death, and her resentment of young Edmund for not preventing it and for being increasingly difficult, caused Athena to bring Edmund back to Bernice Mott’s house of horrors. The imaginary friend Dawn thinks she remembers having as a child were her memories of her own twin brother, who Athena convinced her was never real to begin with.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is astonishingly fucked up! To both kids! It left Dawn susceptible to god knows what kind of residual trauma, and it turned Edmund into, well, Edmund. It casts an ugly red light on everything we thought we knew about Athena, too. The kind woman who works at the toy store and dotes on her grandson sent a child she was supposed to protect back to a woman she knew would hurt him, tearing him away from his devastated sister in the process. I don’t doubt she feels awful about it, but how far does that get anyone in the end?
The rest of the story is simple. After tormenting Kel in a variety of guises — including one fabulously creepy sequence in which a false Athena glides down the hall to his room with a tray of blood-red tomato soup — the Edmund entity lures Athena back to the toy store by threatening to kill Dawn if she doesn’t. There, the creature makes short work of her, beheading her with the paper cutter. When Dawn arrives and sees the severed head of her adoptive mother (whether it’s actually there or not is unnervingly unclear), it’s lit in blue after an episode largely suffused with red and pink, making the cold fact of her death that much more visually clear. The episode ends with Dawn passing out on the pavement in front of her terrified son.
It’s hard to know when to call it quits in describing everything that makes this episode such a 30-minute accomplishment. There’s this wonderful warm rainy atmosphere to it that doesn’t really serve any purpose other than to create a warm rainy atmosphere. A shot of Athena arriving at the toy store is like a hot pink cover version of the shot of Father Merrin arriving at the house in The Exorcist. The Pennywise-esque man with the red hair lurks under the basement stairs like every child’s bogeyman. Rainwater dripping down a windowpane is overlaid atop Dawn’s face when she hears the truth from her mother, a striking and evocatively melancholy effect.
All in all, it’s a thrill to see Little Marvin in such fine form with just one episode left in the season. This is definitely the point at which you want to be peaking. This guy’s the real deal.
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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