‘The Boroughs’ Episode 4 Recap – Your Old TVs Might Come In Handy

The Boroughs really gets on the front foot in Episode 4, “Forbidden Fruit”, upping the pace around the midway point and getting the Scooby gang right into the midst of the monster action. Mostly, anyway. While Sam, Wally, and Judy work on this, there are separate, albeit connected subplots for Art, Renee, and even Paz, all of which tie into the overarching story in one way or another.

What we’ve learned, for the most part, is that Blaine, Hank, and probably Anneliese are all involved with whatever is going on with the monsters. It also seems like the monsters are being stored in the basement of the main facility’s main building — if they’re not, something is that doesn’t like being in there. And now that Paz has tipped his hand, he’s suddenly in danger, along with everyone else.

The Forbidden Fruit

We might as well start with Art, since that’s where we left things. We catch up to him, chewing his way through the fruit he found under the desert sand, healing in almost real time. His hair gets darker, his energy is renewed, and he starts feeling like a young man again. His hot streak is contained within a montage to make the point clear. When he gets home, though, Judy isn’t there, and when he finds one of Jack’s shirts in his closet, he realises that his problems haven’t disappeared either.

Art heads to the bar to drown his sorrows, and runs into Anneliese while he’s there. Annaliese hasn’t had much to do yet, outside of a leading conversation with Judy in the previous episode, but here she comes into her own as a proper villain, or at least that’s how it seems. First, she tells Art that he should punish Judy for her transgressions, and she seems visibly excited by the prospect. In the middle of their conversation, though, Art takes a turn. He rushes to the bathroom to throw up, even going so far as to suck the dry pit of the fruit to try and preserve the effects that are clearly wearing off, but he ends up collapsing to the ground.

Anneliese follows Art into the bathroom and kneels over him, almost as if she knows what’s happening to him and why.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

It was pretty obvious Blaine was a villain to begin with, but “Forbidden Fruit” virtually confirms it in a couple of ways. The first is his conversation with Sam, who is in custody (sort of) after being picked up by Hank at the funeral home. Blaine regales Sam with the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, but the original version, in which the boy is telling the truth from the beginning, but eventually everyone assumes he’s lying because the wolf never turns up. To prove he’s telling the truth, the boy ventures into the forest to find the wolf and ends up being eaten.

It’s unmistakably presented as a threat, but Sam is careful to remind Blaine of the ending of the story, which he left out. The villagers went into the forest to avenge the boy, killing the wolf. Threat successfully returned. But Blaine has a trump card, revealing that Edward has died after getting himself — like Sam — into too many “uncomfortable scrapes”.

Again, the point’s pretty clear. If Sam keeps going the way he is, something bad is going to happen to him.

What’s in the Basement?

Paz isn’t having a great day in The Boroughs Episode 4. First, Renee wants to keep their little liaison a secret to avoid people making assumptions about them, given the age gap, which seems fair enough, but Paz takes it as an insult. At work, he has to put up with Hank being awful to the residents, something that Blaine reprimands him for, asking to speak to Hank “downstairs”.

Later, Paz creeps down to eavesdrop on the conversation, which is occurring in a locked room with a faint red light emanating from beyond it. When Hank leaves, Paz sneaks inside and sees something that we don’t get to see, but that is making a lot of noise, before Hank tases him unconscious.

Hank’s Secret History

Meanwhile, Renee looks back over the security camera footage and spots Hank entering the community centre storeroom. She snaps a photo of him and looks up the mugshot, which directs her to an article about a dead prison warden named Milton Hauser. Now, I’ll grant you that the show isn’t entirely clear here. It’s either that Hank is the prison warden, or Hank just so happens to be in the background of photographs taken of the prison warden. I think it’s the former, but I could be wrong.

Either way, Renee goes to see Milton’s son, who is now older than Hank is, who tells her that his father died in a car crash in 1975 and needed a closed casket at his funeral because the burns were so severe. When he was a warden, the inmates called him Mr. Smile, on account of his sadism. This isn’t a good look for Hank, whether he’s the supposedly dead warden — which would mean that he hasn’t aged at all since 1975 — or had a prior association with him when he was in his heyday.

This scene was a little difficult to parse, but it’s quite clearly not good news.

Sam, Wally, and Judy Set A Trap

As the only three residents who are actually aware of what’s going on, it’s up to Sam, Judy, and Wally to try to take the monster down. After getting back home, Sam tells the other two that he thinks Blaine knows about the monster and is covering it up, and also that he thinks he killed Edward. Sam’s plan is to kill the monster himself using his engineering expertise. Wally reckons that it’s drinking their cerebrospinal fluid, which over time will cause severe neurological issues — like the kind Edward was experiencing — meaning the creatures are stealing years from their lives.

Wally thinks he can use a sample of cerebrospinal fluid — which he extracts from Sam using a giant needle — as bait. In the meantime, Sam and Judy drive to Claire’s house so that Sam can collect some of the old cathode ray TVs they used to fix up as a happy. Back in Episode 2, the monster’s blood interacted with the TV, so Sam thinks he can use the tubes, their particles focused using magnets from old toys, to build a kind of beam weapon. Naturally, Claire arrives while Sam and Judy are rooting around in the garage, leading to some awkward questions, especially around why Sam hasn’t been returning any of Claire’s calls, but nothing is resolved for now.

Instead, Sam heads home, where Wally has fixed up a dummy with the bait. Like clockwork, that night, one of the spindly monsters arrives. Sam’s homemade weapon doesn’t work, but luckily Judy is packing heat. She shoots the creature, wounding it, but it manages to escape through the oven. This was also the means of entry it used to get into Renee’s place, so I’m assuming the ovens connect all the properties in the neighborhood underground.

The mystery is, quite literally, getting deeper.