Welcome to Eidolon…

Episode 9 is called Eidolon. The temptation, particularly because of the way the characters in the show talk about this word, is to assume it is a name for God or something similar stemming from a biblical view of the world.

It is not. Eidolon is a classical Greek word with a dual meaning. The first meaning is of an idealised person or thing or perhaps even place and that really is where the narrative of the show takes us, explicitly through the self-disclosure of this week’s main character, a Dutch sect leader called Epps.

The second meaning is that of a spectre or phantom, a shade of someone real but in itself definitely something Other.

We see in black and white the founding of the original settlement of Dutch people who are responsible for the Emorys’ basement.

The story is simple but twisted; of grief, selfishness, longing and how the desperate can be led astray simply by giving them what they really want.

Epps lost his family and in looking for answers discovers someone who can take their place. He is so grateful he never questions where they come from or what they want. The other members of his community are suspicious of him, particularly his claims to hear from God. These claims to hear God are ones the wider community wish they could make so themselves they do not consign him to madness but instead listen more carefully as if he himself might become their sacrificial lamb. I was reminded of the work of social anthropologists René Girard and Mary Douglas who speak of the King enjoying the benefits of the community because when bad times come they will be the one who is sacrificed – Epps has that cast around him.

When strangers in need arrive at their settlement he argues that they should treat them according to the Bible’s exhortation to welcome the stranger. This quickly turns to resentment and perverse voyeurism. The community looks the gift horse in the mouth and find it wanting.

These newcomers are, of course, Black. They quickly find themselves not so much beneficiaries of good hearts but people whose enslavement is being justified through the Bible after the same book is used to extend them welcome.

It should go without saying that slavery was defended by a faith which marshalled the Bible to justify treating other people as property and explicitly arguing that Black people deserved to be enslaved. So much of the narrative in contemporary society is that Christianity was rightly a bedrock of the emancipation movement. We should not forget the other side, particularly when White evangelical Christianity continues to display supremacist and racist articles of faith. The show takes an ambivalent approach to Christianity, whether it is here in Eidolon or in other episodes of the show. As if to say whether God is real or not is beside the matter because you shall know the nature of people by their fruit.

In the series’ second most harrowing sequence we learn the nature of the evil is that is pursuing the Emorys in the present. It is complex in that it is a bad place created by a bad spirit who came to dwell there in answer to a man’s innocent prayers.

The question the show asks of us is this: is the devil racist?

My answer from watching? I don’t think so, at least no as far as Them is concerned. I think to make the devil racist would let off the people of Eidolon too easily. What happens to the newcomers is done with no provocation, an escalating path that drives a straight line from boundaryless curiosity to lynching the Other.

The demon here uses the Other as its fulcrum on which to move the world. It destroys everything, and suffering is its goal. That Black bodies are the focus of White violence is entirely the fault of White people. My reading of this show is that they cannot blame the devil for their ills because at each step they chose what they did, they knew the bargain they were making, and they entered into it willingly.

I think this is super important because too many people will look at horror like this, or like what really happens in the actual real world, and try to make sense of it by looking for something beyond the people involved. Structural racism is the closest we come to supernatural evil and honestly if I was a demon I’d go and sit on the shoulder of a CEO because from there I could do the greatest amount of evil. Not for me possessing individuals when I could command megacorporations.

So no, when we find evil of human making we must resist the temptation to look beyond humanity for its explanation.

If the devil here acts as facilitator that is truly the limit of what they achieve because they aren’t needed for the wrong to be done. Yet their presence and their goals explain to us almost everything that has happened to the Emorys. Epps has a bargain to fulfil and it is, as we have speculated, to destroy from the inside out, to take trauma and hope and fear and love, and ruin them and thereby all those connected to them.

Verdict: As an interlude this episode provides the coda for the series. I am not entirely sure it’s necessary to explain where the evil comes from. It is an interesting episode, but it is not essential.

Rating? 6 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston