The Outsider Season One Finale: Nearly Happy Ending

So as long as I'm reviewing sicko shows, I might as well say a few things about The Outsider's season one finale, on HBO last Sunday evening.

It started with Jack, under the evil entity's control, killing more of our pinned-down posse, along with some in the reinforcement car.  But a part of Jack responds to Holly, which leads him to stop shooting and allow himself to get bitten by a rattle snake.  One down and El Cuco him/itself to go, and Ralph gets him/it, too.

That was the harrowing action part.  But not the end of the story.  The rest is almost a happy ending, as the authorities move to clear Terry Maitland, while keeping El Cuco under wraps.  Ralph and Jeannie make as much peace as they can with the loss of their son.  Ralph and Dolly hug, and wonder if they might be teaming together again someday.

So why isn't this just a happy ending?  Because there's some evil spirit left in this world, as we see in the last scene with Holly.  Is El Cuco still around, somehow?  Is another evil being taunting Holly?  Is the evil in some way in Holly herself?  I hope not.

But there's talk of a second season, and it would be intriguing indeed to find out what's going on with Holly.  She'll no doubt contact Ralph sooner or later.  Cynthia Erivo and Ben Mendelsohn put in primo performances as Holly and Ralph, and a nearly happy ending is a perfect reason for a new season, and I'm up for seeing that when it comes back on HBO.

See also The Outsider 1.1-2:  Two Places at the Same Time ... The Outsider 1.7: The Tear-Drinker ... The Outsider 1.7: The Guy with the Neck ... The Outsider 1.8: Two Monsters ... The Outlander 1.9: A Bit of Clarity

The Outsider 1.9: A Bit of Clarity

So we finally get a bit of clarity about what's going on in The Outsider 1.9, the next-to-last episode of this season, on HBO last Sunday night.

El Cuco the monster is definitely affecting two human beings, Jack and Claude, in two different ways.  Jack is apparently a human who is driven to do very bad things, like ambushing the good guys in the very last scene.  Claude has been duplicated, and his double is an evil being who looks like Claude, and is out to do some horrible things.

And a bear cave seems to be a focal point, or even a modern point of origin, for that monster.   We learn that two kids and their rescue party got killed when the cave caved in in the late 1940s.   Evil Claude is holed up there now.  The good posse was on the way to get him, when Jack opened fire.

Both Jack and evil Claude were tipped off about the approaching cavalry when Claude's brother told good Claude that the good guys were on their way.  Another supernatural quality of the doubles is that the bad double knows everything the good double, or the original, knows.   The lawyer should have tarried over the chicken at Heaven Chicken a little longer - that would have prevented the hell that greeted Ralph et al as they made their way to the bear cave.

Just one more episode to go, and I was glad to see that next week is the finale not of the series but the season.  The Outsider has been a strange narrative, and while I'm not devastated that it's ending, I'm not likely to pass it by if it comes back on the screen some time in the future.

See also The Outsider 1.1-2:  Two Places at the Same Time ... The Outsider 1.7: The Tear-Drinker ... The Outsider 1.7: The Guy with the Neck ... The Outsider 1.8: Two Monsters

The Outsider 1.8: Two Monsters

So, if I'm understanding The Outsider correctly - as of episode 1.8 on this Sunday - we now have two monsters at large.  I don't mean the evil spirit and the person whose identity he/it takes.  I mean, we have Jack and now Claude, who now both seem afflicted by the evil.

Claude looks ok, even though he doesn't feel that great and has been seeing shadows or whatever lurking around.  The evil has its hooks in him, and indeed is transforming into him, to the point of almost kidnapping another child, this time a boy, in a truly harrowing interlude.

And then there's Jack, the guy with the bad neck.  As far as I can tell, he has no doppelganger, at least not yet.  But something is, almost literally, eating him up.  What's going on with that?

Meanwhile, Ralph is finally almost there, in accepting Holly's position.  She's still frustrated with him, but in every episode, he's coming closer to seeing the light, or maybe the true darkness would be the better metaphor for this.

The Outsider continues to be a highly effective, stylish horror story.  As I said in my review, it's what you'd expect from Stephen King (who wrote the novel) and Richard Price, who brought the story to the screen.  Both, in their own ways, are known for their surprise endings, or at least the unexpected.  I'm wondering that will be in The Outsider.  I'm guessing it's something that's been right under our noses all this time.  But this story is so different, in its flow and intensity, that all bets may be off about how it will conclude in just two more episodes.  All the more reason to watch them.

See also The Outsider 1.1-2:  Two Places at the Same Time ... The Outsider 1.7: The Tear-Drinker ... The Outsider 1.7: The Guy with the Neck

The Outsider 1.7: The Guy with the Neck

Most of The Outsider 1.7 tonight was devoted to the guy with the neck, aka Jack.

Here's what I think I get and don't get about him.  He's in pain.  That draws the evil spirit to him, for whom, as Holly has said, pain is its "wine".  I'm not clear on whether the evil spirit is making his body deteriorate more quickly, or whether the spirit is just inhabiting and going for a ride on that deterioration.

Also, I'm not clear on when and where the doppelganger appears and fits in.  Will that happen when Jack is completely taken over?  Terry had a doppelganger, but his neck with ok.  What was up - or down - with that?

Now to Holly: if she's so savvy about the evil spirit, how come it took her so long to realize that it was at least in part afflicting Jack?  Why didn't she sense something before she got in the car with him.? I guess she thought that it took 20-whatever number of days for the evil spirit to totally take over, so she had a little time?  And her escape in the car with her extra set of keys was well done.

As is Ralph's struggle to make some rational sense of what's happening.  He doesn't know he's in a Stephen King story, so his resistance to what Holly and Sablo are telling him, or trying to telling him, makes sense, i.e., is rational.  Sablo also has one of the best lines of the episode, when he tells Ralph that the difference between Ralph and him is that Ralph wants to understand what's going on, but Sablo just wants it over.

Indeed, what's gradually happening is Ralph is standing increasingly alone.  Well, at least on his side of the screen.  Because I'm with him - I'd like a rational explanation for this, too. Even though I know that's just beating my head against Stephen King's fiction.

See also The Outsider 1.1-2:  Two Places at the Same Time ... The Outsider 1.7: The Tear-Drinker

The Outsider 1.5: The Tear-Drinker

Ok, here, are best I can tell, is where we are with The Outsider, as of tonight's episode 1.5 on HBO:

At least three murders of children have been committed by doppelgangers.   Molly, who seems to be the most knowledgeable about is going on, thinks that some kind of evil entity is at work - a bogeyman, is the least arcane name for it.   More important, he or whatever it is feeds on people's grief - drinks their tears, as our saner characters are coming to realize.  ("Tear Drinker" is the title of this episode.  I rarely use the given titles in my reviews, but this was too apt to pass up.)

There aren't too many of them on hand, by the way.  Molly, a private investigator with a taste for the evil supernatural, seems to be in her right mind.  Her logic is leading her to supernatural conclusions.  Ralph is also rational, and not quite yet ready to accept what Molly is telling him.  But he's becoming a believer.   The stripclub owner and the other cop - the one who wants back into police work - I'm not too sure about.  I'm not even sure they're two different people.  At least one of them, I think, has that half-eaten neck - that is, his neck looks half eaten.  Presumably that's the work of the bogeyman?

Meanwhile, the bogeyman is upping his game.  He's not only lurking around under a hoodie, but he's warning Ralph's wife Jeannie, telling her that Ralph and she will die unless Ralph drops the case.  Assuming that guy is the bogeyman, and not some other kind of spirit trying to help.  Nah, I think he's the tear-drinking bogeyman.

So there you have it.  This is a noir detective into horror story to the max, all the more intense because the depredation is as much psychological as physical, and the scenery is somehow pastoral and horrific at the same time.  I have no idea how this will end, which is why I'll keep watching.

See also The Outsider 1.1-2:  Two Places at the Same Time

The Outsider 1.1-2: Two Places at the Same Time

What do you get when Stephen King writes the novel and Richard Price the screenplay?  You get a television series as slap-in-the-face riveting as it comes.  The first two episodes of The Outsider on HBO tonight were that and more.

Here's what we have so far, in terms of narrative.  A boy is brutally murdered.  The suspect's blood is on the victim, and reliable witnesses put him near the scene.  But a video shows him at an academic conference many miles away, and his fingerprints on a book he handled at the hotel where the conference took place are confirmed as his.  Too.

The "too" is the key and paradoxical point here.  There's an old Yiddish saying, with one tuchas you can't dance at two weddings.  In the supernatural police story that is The Outsider, Detective Anderson (perfectly played by Ben Mendelsohn whom I last saw in Bloodline) realizes that, of course, one person cannot be in two places at the same time - the same person can't have committed a horrible murder at the same time he was video-recorded at at academic conference miles away.

As an academic, I can testify that I've been to some conferences that are so boring as to be maddening.   But not to the point of making someone commit murder, and certainly not at a place miles away from the conference at the very same time.

So, what's going on?  Since Stephen King wrote the novel (which I haven't read), there has to be some kind of supernatural element.  We do see a person with a hood, standing at the edges of some of the tragedies.  We don't yet know what his story - assuming it's a "his" - is.  Maybe some spirit or monster than assumes the shape of an innocent person and employs that shape to commit murders?

I'm looking to seeing how this plays out, against the grit and dialogue that is itself a fine example of a film noir police procedural.