So we’ve finally gotten everyone together but there’s still multiple questions left about the the origins of the house. This episode focuses primarily on Hugh, especially his younger self as he goes over the events of the night he and his family left Hill House. Hugh is a much more complicated person than I first realized while watching the season. He truly wanted what was best for his family even if you don’t realize it at first and honestly, Hugh hadn’t realized it yet either. He keeps hearing Olivia talk to him from the grave and together they get to to see how their children have grown. The unfortunate part is that while they’re seeing this, Nellie is already dead.
When we focus on young Hugh and Steven is when we get some of my favorite parts of the lore. We learn the history of the tall man who keeps haunting Luke and we get some insight into the possession of women in this house.
That second part leads to one of my favorite speeches in the entire series, which is given by Mr. Dudley. He asks Hugh about Olivia because he starts to notice that she’s been acting weird but when he tells Hugh that she might need some time away, Hugh gets defensive. Mr. Dudley begins to tell the story of how his mother would get “Scattered” and how she would start talking to herself and would start walking in the woods at night before she died. But it’s when he starts talking about his wife and his first baby that we really get to see the acting abilities of Robert Longstreet. He kept me enthralled the entire time. He’s equally scared, angry and morose over the loss of his first child. His claims that he and his wife could hear the baby’s cries during the nights at Hill House make my skin crawl every time I watch the scene. His main point is that once he and his wife stopped coming to Hill House at nighttime, his wife got better and wasn’t scattered anymore. No more nightmares and no more crying. The way the camera closes in on him is another reason this scene is so well done. It reminded me of something that Orson Welles would’ve done.
As for the tall man, that’s where the core storyline for Hugh comes from. Steven discovers that there’s mold in many of the walls and and Hugh starts to try and fix it. The mold is all over the house and he has no idea where the water could be coming from. When they’re in the basement, he starts to hear scratching behind the wall and when he tears the wall down, he finds a decomposed body which belonged to the tall man. He apparently went crazy and walled himself in to commit suicide and now his ghost haunts the house.
This is also the episode where we see Luke’s final journey begin when he sees Nellie’s ghost at the graveyard. All she says is “Don’t” and then he later disappears with Shirley’s credit card. Everyone initially thinks that Luke is trying to just use it for a Fix, but we’ll get to that more in the next episode…
