When the showdown comes, who will be there? Who can you count on to support you? In episode six of Them: the scareour heroes find out the hard way.
Dawn is abandoned by her lieutenant. For everything he likes, for everything he staked his reputation on her, for everything he went so far as to tell world-renowned asshole LAPD Chief Daryl Gates that this black woman would one day command the entire Robbery-Homicide Division… for all that, he still doesn’t have her back when she’s thrown to the wolves.
Nominally it’s about the death of that poor kid in his backseat, but it’s not like you normally see police departments fall over themselves to hang one of their own for killing someone. But as Dawn sees when she realizes there’s a member of McKinney’s white supremacist police gang on the panel overseeing her disciplinary hearing, it’s really about her inability to follow the old boys’ network. .
But it turns out it’s also about more than that. Dawn doesn’t know it, but she’s been working committed this whole time. It was only when she asked her new partner, Detective Diaz, to investigate all of the former residents of Mott’s abusive foster home that the truth came to light: she, too, was raised there as a young child, an experience that has completely forgotten or from which it has been blocked. the memory of her. When the committee attacks her with this, her resolve crumbles, largely because she is too stunned to continue fighting. But what could she say? She is too close to this case.
And on the path to this ugly fate, Dawn is forced to undergo all the humiliating and invasive procedures that suspects are routinely subjected to: the daily process of dehumanization of which she is a willing participant, regardless of what is said. herself about why she does it. job.
But even that is not the solid ground it once was for her. As she tells Athena during a horrendous family dinner that rivals that of Hereditary, follows the footsteps of a man who died so young that he can barely remember him and that he is not his biological father as he had been told his entire life. With his career, his reputation, his life, and his child on the line, it must all seem like a bad joke, and Athena is just another person who can’t be trusted.
Dawn doesn’t know it, but Athena has also seen her job go to shit and been abandoned by a boss she considered a friend. Kyong-ah (Sung Yun Cho), the owner of the toy store where Athena works, found the discarded Raggedy Andy dolls that Athena threw in the trash after her dissociative episode, and for her it’s a bridge too far. He is able to overlook Athena’s recent weakness and her struggles with her physical condition. He might even forgive throwing hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise in the trash… as long as Athena apologizes.
That is ground that Athena will not give up. On the one hand, it’s humiliating to take orders from someone who doesn’t normally do it; She makes you feel like they are waiting for this moment to show you who is in charge. On the other hand, and it is unclear whether this is the real reason she hates the doll or not, the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls are “rooted in minstrelsy”, and the store’s predominantly black customer base does not will want them. (She Close your eyes, imagine a negative version of one of the dolls and you will understand what she says). Kyong-ah dismisses Athena, who mutters “Ten years” as she leaves. The decade-long relationship, ended in two minutes, by some kind of trauma she can’t fully acknowledge or discuss. It’s brutal. (It’s also hard to ignore the fact that neither Kyong-ah nor Lieutenant Schiff are black.)
But what about Kelvin? Does he have someone he can lean on? Yes and no. His mother’s job and reputation, now making headlines all over town, have made him an outcast at school, prompting him to tell her not to attend his band’s performance that night. . But she shows up anyway, an act I’m sure she at least considers supportive. For Kel, it’s a disturbing refusal to respect her boundaries; You can see it in her face the moment he sees her.
But there’s something much worse happening to Kel, including his mother getting caught up in a murder she didn’t commit. Something has come for him.
The red-haired man has finally arrived, a menacing entity who looks like a cross between Tim Curry’s Pennywise and the nightmare version of Dawn he saw on the couch in a previous episode. He plays a “game” with Kel in class that leaves the boy on his knees, hitting the floor, and then causes Kel to have a seizure in the middle of the band’s performance. (It’s a shame, really: more shows should include about a full minute of a high school marching band playing Cameo’s “Word Up!”.)
Recognizing Kel’s symptoms as the same ones suffered by the boy who inexplicably died in his car, Dawn rushes to help him. What he tells her is heartbreaking: “Mommy? “I think something is wrong with me.” He’s not the angry teenager who told her not to come anymore. He now he is a scared child. Now he is her baby and he needs help that she can’t give him. If you’re a parent, these are very, very difficult words to hear.
In the previous episode, a jealous Edmund vowed to “break everything [Dawn’s] toys”. It’s taken her a while, but we’re starting to see how what seem like disconnected crimes have begun to separate Dawn from the people and things she cares about. At the very least, she has been suspended. She can’t trust any of her colleagues. She hates her mother. Her son’s friends hate her and him because of her. Now Kel is under direct attack. God knows how she’s doing it, or what pact with the devil she made to have the power to do it, but if her goal is to make her as alone as him, she’s on the right track. When the showdown comes, who will be there?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
