Ruby’s tormentor and Betty’s past uncovered…

The end of episode 3 ended with fire and a community united in hating the Emorys. Except what was done was done under the cover of the night and not discovered until the next morning.

The Emorys emerge to find the most extreme response yet to their presence and the question is what do they do about it? There comes a time when in the process of being humiliated and insulted and ridiculed one looks at what is being done and is faced with a choice; how do you respond?

It is not simply about fighting or surrendering, because there are different ways of doing both. For the Emorys to surrender would be to leave, to give the whites what they want. Yet there are other ways of surrendering just as there are other ways of fighting. The Emorys choose to fight and they do so by wearing these insults, this hatred, as a badge of honour.

The people around them pride themselves on their home ownership, on the green grass, on the uniformity of the herd. The Emorys take that and undermine it, leaving the street looking ugly, displaying the hate these people want to keep under the surface. It is a lovely piece of subversion, the humiliation turned back on their torturer.

Yet for all that it is also a surrender, a way of saying I cannot overcome this so I must live with it, because the reality is no matter how the tables have turned it is the Emorys who are living with the hatred not their persecutors. Their White neighbours, led by Betty, are being forced to live with their attitude, but those attitudes are directed towards others not inwards so there is no equivalence here, there is just the admission of how unequal the power relationship is.

In episode 3 it became clear how three of the four family members are being haunted. Episode 4 shows us Ruby’s spiritual tormentor. As with the other three, her tormentor takes the form of the type of racism, that of the lonely, isolated young person who, at a critical time in their life, is trying to understand who they are. The racism they face is exclusion, revilement, mockery. The denial of all their hopes about what life might bring, in some ways the racism they face as exemplified by this spiritual evil, is the spoiling of innocence. We do not yet know where this specific spirit is leading Ruby, but one can only think of the tropes of supernatural high school horror such as Carrie.

However, this episode takes a strange turn in that we follow Betty for some significant period of it. We watch her look for ways of leaving the neighbourhood rather than continuing her campaign against the Emorys. What we see is that she comes from a particularly nasty family background which I won’t go into detail about here for risk of spoilers. What concerns me here is that she has been painted as the ringleader of the street’s racism yet she is being described in this episode as someone with their own specific cliched trauma which is being used as a motive reason for her behaviour. I find this disappointing and unnecessary because the racism people like the Emorys faced in the real world did not need some childhood trauma to explain it.

Furthermore, the trauma Betty carries is one of victimhood and rather than present this as an issue to be explored and understood it is weaponised both against the Emorys and also against us, the viewer. There is no need for it in a story of this kind, or any kind. What makes it worse here is there is an inescapable sense that we should feel sympathy for this person because of what they’ve gone through as if to excuse their abhorrent evil against the Emorys. There is no excuse for what they are doing but the message here could easily be read that the reticence of Betty’s white neighbours to pursue the same level of vindictiveness is because they themselves do not carry the same trauma she does. We are witnessing trauma as root of evil trope in full swing. It excuses the others while demonising those who stand out from the crowd – in this case for no fault of her own.

In counterpoint to Betty’s exploration of leaving we also see Lucky’s discovery of their financial situation – that they are effectively tied to the house without enough income of their own to ever consider paying off the mortgage. Their debt is something Henry has not explained and perhaps does not fully understand.

Lucky does other homework, learning about the one other black family in the neighbourhood and what happened to them. It becomes an exercise in discerning what is real, what is horror, and what might be being hidden from them deliberately. The show does a good job in obscuring the truth both from us and from Lucky so that we end the show not really sure what she should be afraid of.

Verdict: This is not quite an episode full of establishing shots, but it is close, and I have big problems with how Betty is being presented.

Rating? 5 out of 10

Stewart Hotston

Them is streaming now on Amazon Prime