Summary
A recent death hangs heavy over “The Mourning After”, and the characters all respond to it in interestingly different ways.
It’s probably just Sam’s luck that, just as it seemed like he was making friends in The Boroughs, one of them ended up dead. Jack’s untimely demise naturally hangs over Episode 2, “The Mourning After”, affecting different characters in different ways, but it’s only Sam who knows that his death might have been caused by a monster. And since he has been gaslit enough recently, he keeps that to himself. Until, of course, he doesn’t, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
What we can be relatively certain of, however, is that this isn’t happening in Sam’s head. Despite his wavering, grief-stricken mental state following Lilly’s death and now the shock of Jack’s, Sam is definitely prone to obsession and a snappy demeanour, but what he’s discovering about Jack’s death, the Boroughs itself, and the strange substance that leaked from the monster that killed him is pretty unambiguously otherworldly. And by the end of “The Mourning After”, at least one other resident is in the inner circle.
The Quartz Case
As suspected, the quartz stolen from the community centre is only one component of a wider spate of quartz theft. Renee gathers all the evidence and witnesses she can and takes them to Hank and Paz, and once again, only the latter is really interested. He would be, though, since he’s angling for a date with Renee (who’s played by Geena Davis, so, you know… fair).
For some reason, Hank tries to claim this crime has been solved and comes up with an appropriate culprit, which he hopes will put the matter to bed. But Paz looks into it and realises he’s lying, which he later tells Renee. Whether Hank is doing this purely because he’s lazy or because he’s operating on orders from on high is another question.
What it means in the meantime, though, is that Renee and Paz will be investigating the thefts in their own time, providing a secondary mystery that is already evolving in a more romantic direction.
Judy Takes Jack’s Death Badly
It was hinted in the premiere that Judy and Jack were having an affair, and that’s obviously confirmed here in The Boroughs Episode 2, but it becomes clear throughout the episode that their connection was likely more than just physical. Judy takes Jack’s death harder than anyone, and doesn’t make a secret of it. Her grief makes her less tolerant of the flaws in her marriage to Art, including his seeming disinterest in her and lack of concern about Jack.
What we also learn in “The Mourning After” is that Art already knew about the affair and simply kept his mouth shut in fear that Judy would leave him. His frequent “golf” trips are just periods of isolation where he can reckon with his own thoughts and feelings, but what he begins to realise here is that Judy was perhaps in love with Jack in a way that she no longer is with him. Luckily, he’s distracted by the sight of a gigantic murder of crows that inexplicably kamikaze themselves directly into the ground.
Judy, reeling from Jack’s very performatively polite memorial service, where Renee and Walt aren’t showing an appropriate degree of respect, can’t take Art’s “evidence of the divine” as anything other than the ramblings of a guy who has smoked too much weed. But that’s probably also because she’s smarting from his apparent lack of interest in her and their marriage. Now she no longer has an outlet, the cracks in the foundations are becoming wider.
If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It
Sam, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with the idea of the monster he saw lurking over Jack’s corpse. Naturally, this also makes him obsessed with Edward’s claims of keys in lights and owls in walls, which are beginning to seem much more logical than initial appearances suggested. Before long, Sam has ripped all the light fittings from his wall in search of this mysterious key, which he finds in the bathroom. We should probably also pay attention to the fact that Blaine watches Sam’s interactions with Edward rather intently.
The key leads Sam to Edward’s storage unit, where he kept a bunch of really creepy stuff, including a padlocked chest with an owl inside. Sam takes it home in the passenger seat of his golf cart and watches a classic movie with it, which is fair enough, but he’s distracted by his Boroughs-provided TV going on the fritz. This leads him to a discovery that he later shares with Wally, who, it turns out, is a doctor (which is making it even harder for him to rationalise his terminal cancer diagnosis).
Scraping a bit of dried monster blood from the head of the hammer he whacked Jack’s assailant with, Sam puts it on a teaspoon and sets the spoon in front of the TV. It causes a staticky interaction as the molecule floats into the air and eventually explodes in a shower of tangible light, like a display of the Milky Way that you can touch. Wally describes it as a miracle. But at this point, it’s easy to imagine it might be more of a curse.
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