This is a very interesting episode since this is the one that really acts as the penultimate episode of the series due to the fact that the 9th episode is entirely done in flashbacks.
This episode deals with the fallout of the previous two episodes very well while also setting up the finale. Luke has gone missing with Shirley’s credit cards, Shirley is pissed at Theodora cause she thinks that something happened between her and her husband and of course, Steve is still angry at Hugh for everything that’s happened. The Family is broken beyond belief at this point. Which is exactly where they need to be.
It starts out with Steve and Hugh in the car looking for Luke and their conversation about marriage is actually one of the more touching moments of the series even though Steve can barely look at him.
The problem is that after this moment Steve finally brings everything out. He mentions the police reports with his mother’s death and about how beat up she was that night. About how she was left alone in the house and then committed suicide. In Steve’s eyes, Hugh left her to die instead of getting her the help she needed. It’s probably Michael Huisman’s best performance of the series because of how the speech ends with : “And I miss her. I miss my mom.” Words don’t properly do this scene justice. He’s a fantastic actor and this scene needs to be watched.
In the flashbacks to when Steve was younger, we learn about this vanity that Steve is restoring for his mother. According to Mrs. Dudley, it used to belong to Poppy Hill. Who was married to William(The Tall Ghost) and was clinically insane. This will come into play more in the next episode. Anyway, Steve finishes restoring it for his mother and when he gives it to her, she immediately smashes the mirror with her hand and starts crying.
When we catch up with Shirley, she’s at home and alone when the doorbell rings and there’s no one there. She keeps going outside to see who it is and anyone watching already knows what’s happening. It’s the same knocking that Shirley and Theo witnessed when they were kids. Theo comes over to apologize for the night before and while they argue with each other, it comes back to haunt them and the show does really well with the timing and sound effects. It abruptly stops and then they get a phone call about Luke using her card. They realize that he’s heading to the house and that he’s going to attempt to burn the house down.
Hugh becomes an entirely different person when this happens. He even makes the claim that their family is like an unfinished meal to that house and that Luke is walking right into it. Hugh proceeds to tell Steve of wrong he has been all these years. Particularly when he wrote about seeing the man fix the clock. He basically makes the statement that the house will hurt all of them if they let it.
Theo and Shirley start heading towards the house and this is when Kate Siegel has a massive payoff to all of the stuff that they’ve set up for her in this series. She talks about how she touched Nell’s body and about how she felt nothing and she couldn’t feel anything for hours and hours. She lost all sense of it until she went downstairs and was caught in the dark and she couldn’t feel until the lights came back on and she reached out when she saw Kevin because she needed to feel anyone but Kevin pushed her away right before Shirley found them. Theo then tells us about how even the agony of the shame and the fear she felt was better than the nothingness that she couldn’t feel in the darkness. This is without a doubt Siegel’s best performance and I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. She’s remained so reserved throughout the series that to see her just explode in emotion was one of my favorite moments.
The episode ends on a massive Cliffhanger with Luke trying to set the house on fire and the house not burning at all. He looks up and sees his mother’s ghost and is then grabbed by another Ghost behind him.
