Things are accelerating now.
For starters, if it wasn’t clear already, every member of the Emory family in Them has an entity attached to them.
In Henry’s case, it’s “Da Tap Dance Man,” a minstrel-show Pennywise who echoes Henry’s hysterical laughter at the TV when he returns home from work after getting demoted for successfully impressing his boss’s boss. With unreadable eyes and a face glistening and dripping with the beer he swipes from Henry’s hand, this monster-man encourages Henry to do something about his professional misfortune. To Henry, he’s Lloyd the Bartender from The Shining, an inexplicable but welcome lender of an ear for all his woes. To us, he’s more The Shining‘s Delbert Grady, a figure whose role it is to get Henry to do something he’d never do in his saner moments: break into his boss’s house to murder him. It’s only dumb luck that a passerby—a racist passerby, it almost goes without saying—stops Henry from going through with the scheme; the unctuous man gets repaid for this by getting knocked out from behind by Henry. In the office, he balled his fists so hard he drew blood from his palms; here he’s able to use his fist as intended.
In Ruby’s case, the ghost is Doris, her jovial and completely non-existent new best friend. Doris guides her (past the real cheerleader tryouts visible in the distant background outside) to join the cheerleading squad in the basement. Ruby dances in the middle of their routine, seeming not to notice that each girl is a contortionist corpse who eventually takes on Doris’s grinning appearance. Ruby does not know that she is, in fact, alone, dancing her heart out in an empty room, her fellow cheerleaders visible only to her.
In Gracie’s case, the demon is Miss Vera (Dirk Rogers), who ruins the adorable little girl’s first day at school (the episode is titled “Day 7: Morning”) by standing stock-still outside the window and distracting her as she attempts to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (which does not yet have the “under God” clause inserted out of mid-’50s anti-Communist fervor) in front of the class. It’s devastating to watch this little cherub get laughed at by the other children. It’s worse still when, instead of continuing the pledge, she begins screaming “Cat in a bag! Cat in a bag!” over and over again. (“Redrum! Redrum!”) Worst of all, to me, is the way she insists she knew all the words when her mother comes to pick her up and take her away from her condescending teacher. After all she’s been through, she still just wants to show her mama that she’s a good girl.
And in Livia’s case, it’s the Man in the Black Hat. Here, he haunts her only indirectly, through the story of Mrs. Beaumont (Latarsha Rose), the criminally insane former East Compton resident about whom Livia has heard horror stories from Henry’s relative Hazel. Both proud of and psychologically wounded by her light skin and what it means for her position in the world, Mrs. Beaumont killed her husband and son, first pouring bleach all over their faces as they knelt while chanting her mother’s magic phrase: “Light and bright, all is right!” There’s no explanation for why they were willing to do this even as Mrs. Beaumont was in the process of killing them, no explanation but a collective madness brought on by supernatural menace. For Livia, who earlier that day had a genuinely terrifying nightmare about taking an axe to her own daughters, the story hits too close to home.
Livia achieves a momentary catharsis—and I do mean momentary, the payoff lasts about 15 seconds before cutting off abruptly—when, after returning home with Gracie, she gets sick of Betty’s racist taunts and slaps her across the face. James Brown’s “The Big Payback” plays for a few seconds, ceasing suddenly when Livia and Gracie go inside their house. Betty, too, goes back inside, and promptly destroys nearly everything she can get her hands on—including the wallpaper (this show practically doubles as a wallpaper gallery), behind which is the black mold she metaphorically warned about in her speech at the Home Owners Association meeting. She finally calms down enough to call her milkman, asking him to do her the favor he promised after mentioning to her that he did the things in Korea that most men could not.
Betty warned Livia a while back that things were only going to get worse for her. I’m worried she’s right.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
Watch Them Episode 6 on Amazon Prime
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
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