A new job. A new school…

This second episode of Them is one concerned with the cost of surviving. From textual references to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments through to just how horrific everyday people can be we are once again faced with experience of the real world that is somehow far, far worse than anything the supernatural can dish up.

As with episode 1 there are small snatches of the Emorys’ history, still without context but no less disturbing for all that. Whether it is Henry’s experience as a veteran or Lucky’s experience as a young mother there is no shying away from what they are facing.

Except to say they have brought with them as much as they are facing now, here in Compton. When walking down the corridor and getting in a lift or looking at a window can leave a person a melted mess on the floor how much of a normal life is possible?

Much of this second episode is really about their first attempts to settle into their new lives and the resistance and alienation they experience as part of that process. We all experience dislocation when starting something new but the Emorys both provoke and suffer in ways that thankfully most of us have never experienced.

There are familiar tropes and insults and racism, from gorilla noises to the fact that it was white women, and often still is, who are in the vanguard of the most insidious types of racism. It is easy to see racism simply as mobs and lynchings, but what Alison Pill’s Betty Wendell delivers here is that type of cultural racism which is both quiet, reasonable and absolutely deadly.

The surgical precision with which Pill plays Betty struck me as dangerously fragile and I expect we will find out more about her as the show progresses. It is worth talking here about the kind of prejudice Betty has. It’s out in the open but its real power is in talking behind closed doors, in deliberately misconstruing what is said, in looking for any excuse to turn the community against the other. Betty is the type of person who would complain about cancel culture from the podium at the Town Hall. She is the person who would say taking the knee is offensive while screaming about anarchists burning shops. Betty is the person for whom any kind of protest against what she believes is offensive and she is also the type of person who would suppress others in the name of freedom. In the show she is at the height of her powers and while it is a kind of urban fantasy we should make no mistake – this is what unfettered White power looks like, not mobs with torches but mothers with tea.

We also get a clearer view of what is hunting them, the nature of the bad place. This first season’s subtitle is Covenant and we have repeatedly seen the house deed with its clause stipulating that nobody who isn’t white male should ever live on or own this land. It isn’t yet clear whether this is the source of the supernatural terror, but something is coming. There is a monster in the darkness.

Having said that the family spends most of the episode doing their own things, whether that is work, school, or being under siege in the family home. The day’s events culminate in a family dinner which echoes a similar dinner had in the past. That historic dinner was a disaster and we see it play out alongside this one; turning it into one of the most excruciating sequences centred around pie I have seen. Ever.

Verdict: The second episode builds successfully on the first, continues to layer on horror, supernatural and mundane, and does not let us hope for a moment. Both Lucky and Henry are fragile, strong but ready to shatter. In some ways I fear for their neighbours as much as I do them.

What this doesn’t do is move us on appreciably and the pacing whilst skin crawling is slower than I wanted.

Rating? 6 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston