Summary
The Terror continues to develop multiple mysteries in “Disturbed”, with Pepper’s stay at New Hyde feeling much longer-term, and his various naive acts of rebellion only worsening his predicament.
We’re not very far into Season 3 of The Terror, and we don’t know Pepper especially well. He’s trapped in less-than-ideal circumstances, and he’s under a lot of pressure, so you can forgive him a wobble or two. But I nonetheless found it weird in Episode 2, “Disturbed”, that the long and short of his master escape plan was to find a set of keys and leave New Hyde through the front door. Even he should know by now that leaving this place is going to be much more complicated than that. It seems very much like the only way out is through the administration, and as is becoming increasingly clear, the powers that be very much want Pepper in situ.
I’ll grant you that Coffee’s plan isn’t much better – arguably, it’s worse. But there’s a bit of charm to the naivete of Coffee trying to scrounge up enough cash to call the President of the United States directly and say, essentially, “You need to come and check this out.” Pepper doesn’t have time for that. He’s also disinclined to believe it would work, which is fair enough. But obsessing over the keys hardly seems much better, especially since his near-constant state of fatigue and delirium on account of the pills he’s being force-fed means he’d struggle to find them at the best of times, which these, obviously, are not.
But Pepper’s obviously a guy whose priorities have been historically skewed. His flipping out on Ivan was ostensibly in defence of Marisol and Isabel, which is a good thing, but he hasn’t expressed a great deal of interest in their well-being since then, and when Marisol turns up during visiting hour, his primary concern is the cost of the drum set that Ivan wrecked. Visiting hour is an interesting proposition in this context, though, since Marisol was able to find out where Pepper was simply by calling around, which implies that New Hyde isn’t doing an especially good job of keeping their patients hidden. They don’t need to. The red tape that rings the building is so dense that even if folks know who’s in there, they still can’t get them out.
A new detail about Pepper: He has a son, a near-adult named Anthony, whom Marisol reveals was looking for him shortly before his incarceration. This is something that Pepper had kept from Marisol, so there’s obviously a story there, but it’s presumably going to be something to unpack down the line, since Marisol gave him New Hyde’s address.
As in the premiere of The Terror Season 3, Episode 2 also hinges heavily on the predicament that the more Pepper resists his circumstances, the more appropriate those circumstances seem. He flips out a bit when Marisol is leaving, and in so doing, knocks over the visiting grandmother of another patient named Loochie, who tackles Pepper and batters him until they’re separated and sedated. Fastened to his bed and muzzled (!), Pepper has a hideous vision of monstrous hands reaching from the ceiling above his head and pulling at his body, which leaves behind visible marks that all of the patients seem to share. This kind of puts paid to the idea that any of this is in Pepper’s head, unless, of course, that seeing the marks on the other patients is also in Pepper’s head, but that’s probably a bit too knotty to be any use as a theory.
Regarding things we don’t know – which, when it comes to this show, is almost everything – it remains unclear why anyone would work here. I do wonder whether the staff are totally in the know about the extent of what the patients are experiencing, or whether, like Scotch Tape, for instance, they’re just people in tough spots who need something from the job – experience, a qualification, money, whatever – enough that they’re willing to ignore multiple pretty obvious red flags. And besides, whose mind defaults to the possibility of a horrendous, vengeful ceiling demon to explain oddities at work?
This creates an interesting moral predicament for Pepper. His best bet for the keys turns out to be Dorry (Judith Light, seen just the other day playing the villain in The Punisher: One Last Kill), who has found the keys and has been using them to steal cookies, but not, crucially, to try and escape. Dorry believes escaping is dangerous, but she also believes that New Hyde is the equivalent of the cliff that herds of American buffalo were once forced to the edge of to be killed in great numbers during the late 18th century. The buffalo were integral to the way of life of the Native Americans whom settlers were trying to forcibly displace, so this isn’t an especially positive metaphor. Dorry is willing to hand over the keys, but she makes it clear that if Pepper takes them, Josephine, who has already had eight weeks of her salary docked to pay for a locksmith to repair the broken locks, will suffer as a consequence, as will her family in the Philippines. This feeds into the idea that the staff are as trapped in New Hyde as the patients, just in a different way.
Pepper takes the keys, obviously. But at the end of “Disturbed”, he’s also set upon in his room by what appears to be a bison-headed monster, though the scene is deliberately obscure. Once the attack is over and a patient is dragged out by Miss Chris and Scotch Tape, it isn’t clear whether Pepper was attacked by a patient, by a monster, by a patient who might have turned into a monster, or some other possible combination of things that we haven’t even considered. What’s certain is that during the attack, he lost the keys, which obviously sets him back a bit.
The timing of an animal-headed monstrosity so soon after the buffalo conversation seems too suspicious to ignore, and it’s obvious that Dorry knows more than she’s letting on, beyond her comments about fathers and sons and Pepper’s suitability as a “candidate” for one thing or another. At this stage in Season 3, I don’t really expect The Terror to be providing concrete answers. But it’s going to have to soon, so that the ambiguity doesn’t become overly frustrating.
