Summary
The Terror Season 3 gets off to a solid start in “November in My Soul”, but these things always seem to. Dan Stevens is carrying the drama for now, but the compelling horror of institutional indifference is also effective.
I’m never quite sure what AMC is doing with The Terror. There are always giant gaps between seasons, the marketing is always light, nobody ever seems to watch it while it’s airing, and yet everyone seems to have seen it once it’s finished. We’re technically on Season 3 – subtitled Devil in Silver, for what that’s worth – but since each block of episodes has nothing to do with the others, we might as well be starting from scratch. That’s exactly how Episode 1, “November in My Soul”, feels. And yet as soon as you start watching it, you’re reminded of the thing that does unify every season of The Terror, which is that it always starts really well.
The secret is New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, a setting which would be scary even if it wasn’t haunted, though it seems to be very haunted for good measure. It’s a bit like what Widow’s Bay is doing over on Apple TV, finding what’s frightening about, say, social ostracization. Here, the terror is in the idea of an inescapable Catch-22, being consigned to a psychiatric facility under false pretences, and then playing into their hands whenever you resist. Refuse to take medication you don’t need? The more you supposedly need the medication. If official-looking doctors say you need care, then care you’ll get, and anything you say in your defence will be treated as proof of whatever ailment you apparently need treating for. Even writing it down makes me irritable.
Not as irritable as Pepper, granted. This is a guy who’s close to the bone, which makes him susceptible. Sure, he loses it when he sees his girlfriend being hassled by her abusive ex in front of her child, and he does lash out at the ex and indeed the plainclothes cops who try to pull him off. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a mental health condition. The arresting officers don’t seem to think so either, but they agree to place him on a psychiatric hold at New Hyde simply because it’s administratively easier. What harm can it do? If Pepper plays ball, he’ll be out by Monday. But playing ball means giving yourself to the institution, and once they have you, they don’t seem to want to let go.
One of the smarter decisions in “November in My Soul” is having all the hospital staff act like what they’re doing is totally normal. In an opening scene that has nothing to do with Pepper, a patient is found dead, having torn himself apart in madness, and must have his awkwardly contorted bones snapped back into place just to be wheeled out the door. It’s treated as a minor inconvenience more than anything, even though it’s deeply horrifying in practice. Whatever’s going on at New Hyde, it has become normalised to a frightening degree.
This is the same way that Pepper is treated. The illusion of everything being above-board when it clearly isn’t baffles and isolates him, so the other patients become voices of reason, even though they visibly can’t be trusted either, albeit for different reasons. They see what’s really happening but are often too addled to articulate it properly. The things they mention could just as easily be delusions as clues, but mentions of old secrets tied to the place’s past seem pretty on brand to me.
It’s through Louie that The Terror Season 3, Episode 1 highlights New Hyde’s determination to keep its own doors closed and its secrets hidden. But it’s also through him that it highlights how the system is fallible. It doesn’t take much of an effort to realise that Pepper’s circumstances are weird, and that he’s being held on false pretences. It only takes one person asking the right questions for the cracks to start showing, and then the hospital itself, through a creepy, murderous ghost-doctor, takes action to keep things quiet.
Whatever secrets New Hyde has, it’s obviously willing to go pretty far to protect them, which is a compelling enough way to kick-start a mystery, even if initially it risks being bogged down by asylum-horror cliches. It seems like The Terror has realised that the scariest thing about this premise is institutional indifference, and if it commits to that angle, it’ll fare better than if it leans too heavily into played-out scares. But thus far, at least, signs are promising, and a frazzled Dan Stevens is doing a good job of carrying the whole thing. We’ll see how it goes.
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