‘Teacup’ Gets A Little More Sci-Fi In Episodes 3 & 4

I don’t know how anyone is getting a decent night’s sleep in Teacup. At the end of Episode 2, a woman was turned inside-out. At the start of Episode 3, “Quiet For No Reason”, everyone seems to have gotten used to the idea of having a flash-frozen grotesquerie in the front yard. Then again, this and Episode 4, “In the Heart of the Country”, provide enough new developments and weird little mysteries to make one think that an impassable blue line is going to be the least of everyone’s problems.

By now, at least we’re completely over the leaden exposition that marred the premiere. But we have run into another problem, which is best described as Too Much Stuff™. The idea is that there are so many weird things happening and bizarre revelations being dispensed that it’s basically impossible to buy into any of the human drama. Like, how can I concentrate on an affair, or a teenage crush, when there’s an alien in a little boy’s head that wants everyone to drink rainbow toxic sludge?

Arlo’s Housing An Alien

Yeah, about that. Meryl and Nicholas have been assigned to keep an eye on Arlo as whatever is inside his head uses a dictionary to communicate. It manages to identify itself as “Harbinger” before clarifying that an “assassin” is coming to get them. The only way to ward this off is, apparently, to venture out into the woods without telling anyone, since that always works out well.

Eventually, Harbinger leads the kids to a smoldering crater which (he mimes) was created by him when he landed from outer space, which is taken relatively in stride, all things considered. The rainbow sludge is pooled in a rock, and Arlo tips some into a jar to take with them. Apparently they need to drink it to stay alive, but consuming too much or too little will result in death.

James and Ruben Are Good Neighbors

Back on the farm, Maggie has intuited that James’s affair was with Valeria and confirmed it loudly enough for basically everyone to find out, including Ruben, which makes it all the more awkward when he and James go to explore the perimeter marked out by the blue line and Ruben makes a very ominous comment about how nobody would realize if one of them were torn inside-out by the boundary. James, somehow, doesn’t quite get what he’s implying here.

Anyway, James and Ruben end up at a neighbor’s farm, where they find the family all dead, being eaten by crows. One of the clan, Carmen, is who Arlo ran into in the woods and was subsequently mauled by a deranged dog, but she’s obviously not home (Maggie discovers her corpse, guided by a still-grieving and badly injured Donald.)

At the end of Teacup Episode 3, Ruben gets trapped in a silo and James gets dragged bodily into the basement, and we don’t check in with them again until Episode 4 when it’s revealed that Ruben has discovered a rainbow tree – obviously connected to the rainbow goo – and James has discovered a surviving neighbor. The only problem is that the neighbor doesn’t seem in great shape and may well be hostile. We’ll find out in a subsequent episode.

McNabb in Teacup | Image via Peacock

Don’t Trust Anybody

In the meantime we get a new addition to the cast – Lt. Olsen, who arrives at the ranch armed and wearing body armour and identifies himself as a cop from Birmingham, Alabama, who is part of a task force who all conveniently work alone and are looking for Carmen.

It’s very obvious Olsen is lying right from the jump, but it’s also clear he knows more about what’s going on than the Chenoweths do. He knows the boundary, for instance, is a field of extremely intense vibrations that violently disassemble complex organisms. He also takes a keen interest in Arlo when he hears that he encountered Carmen and has been acting strangely ever since.

Maggie, realizing that something is amiss, knocks Olsen unconscious with the butt of Donald’s assault rifle, and ties him up. When she has to head out and take a breather, she foolishly leaves Ellen in charge of guarding him.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what happens here, so excuse some spit-balling, but I imagine that whoever Arlo/Harbinger describes as “Assassin” is a fellow alien and that the alien is inside Olsen. This must be the case, or close to it, as when Ellen gets close, Olsen transfers the alien to Ellen in the exact same manner that Carmen transferred Harbinger to Arlo. They must be the same species.

Once she’s possessed, Ellen shoots Olsen in the head and smashes her own face against a nearby beam to create the illusion of a struggle. We have to assume that Assassin is now loose amongst the Chenoweths and looking for Harbinger.

McNab

In the woods, the kids run into the weird dude with the gasmask and whiteboard, who writes them a message instructing them to roll the jar of rainbow goo over to him. When they refuse, he marches over the barrier – I should clarify that it was established earlier you can cross the other way safely, you just can’t leave – and gets into a scuffle with Nicholas.

Now, Nicholas is kind of feeling himself since he has confessed his lifelong crush on Meryl and wants to defend her. In doing so he stabs the man with a knife he brought along for safety, and the jar holding the goo gets smashed. This turns out to be a mistake since Harbinger recognizes the man, whose name is McNab. He was previously pursuing Carmen – and thus Harbinger, I suppose – but lost track of her when she legged it into the woods.

McNab is trying to protect Harbinger from the Assassin now inside Ellen, which is where we leave things at the end of Teacup Episode 4. There’s a distinct sci-fi flavor now to complement the body horror that was introduced earlier, and I think it’s a good mix, especially since nobody has any idea that the true threat is not the barrier, but the alien killer among them. That should be fun to explore in the next pair of episodes.