I guess it was sort of a dare when, in last week’s recap, I declared that if the show asked to me to sympathize with Mapleton’s least favorite cult, I would remember the empty photo frames and resist.
The show accepted and opened this week with Gladys, a familiar scowling member of the Guilty Remnant, being pulled into the woods, taped to a tree and brutally stoned in a scene that had me covering my eyes and pulling my knees to my chest before the opening credits rolled.
And so?
Certainly Chief Garvey is sympathetic, or at least in so far as it is his job and he now has reason to fear for Laurie’s safety. While I think it remains unclear what exactly the GR want (how do people prove they are remembering, after all?) and other characters’ desires seem either muddied or too simplistic, the Chief isn’t much of a puzzle. He wants his family back and he wants to be good at his job. This murder might offer him the chance at getting both. If only the world hadn’t gotten so used to throwing up brick walls each way he turned.
Laurie, meanwhile, is feeling the ground open up beneath her. She is among the ghostly search party that ventures into the woods once Gladys goes missing, and is the one who turns her flashlight beam across the tree where Gladys is found. Laurie doesn’t let out a wail, but she crumples to the ground. Her knees give way a second time back at the GR house, as she grasps for breath and the world swims, the camera’s claustrophobic focus telling us what a doctor soon confirms, Laurie has had a panic attack.
There are a number of interesting threads and examples of rhyming action in this episode. The Chief goes a little mad trying to find his white shirts (white, of course), he and Jill go back-and-forth about setting the alarm, and we learn that the man shooting dogs from the start of the series is real, is named Dean and is someone everyone can obviously see at a city council meeting wherein the Chief and the Mayor’s plan to institute a curfew is handily voted down.
But the true heart of the episode this week was with the GR, and with Laurie in particular. Patti picks Laurie up from the hospital and in what seems like an act of sympathy of empathy, turns on the car radio and takes Laurie to a motel where she offers her the luxury of a single bedroom, a bath tub and a “This is Non-Smoking Room” sign. When Laurie wakes the next day, well into the afternoon, there are colored and patterned clothes waiting for her and a note saying that Patti is in the diner.
In the world after the Sudden Disappearance the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has two new responsibilities: Explosives and Cults. There are more than just the two we’ve seen, and though this is an interesting wrinkle that is gleaned from the Chief’s murder investigation, it doesn’t answer in any satisfying way what might be driving the GR.
Patti offers Laurie food, ordering her a good two meals worth of pancakes and French toast and the chance to break her eight month silence, which Laurie refuses to do. Is she confused at the sound of Patti’s voice? Does she feel betrayed? In response, Patti is both amused and angry. She tells Laurie that Gladys once sat where she did, when after learning her son had died, she began to crack and “feel things” again, opening herself up to doubt and testing her commitment to the GR. Doubt is fire, Patti says, and it will turn you to ash.
And, on cue, the episode ends a few moments later far outside of Mapleton. The Chief has lost control of his murder investigation and Gladys’s body has been sent to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives and Cults where it is being “processed.” The body is wrapped in plastic, and in a reverse from the opening doll sequence of episode 4, is placed onto a conveyor belt where it travels into a cremator and fire turns Gladys to ash. It’s just like Patti said, though what it means or what difference it might make still remains to be seen.
Margaret LaFleur lives, writes and watches TV in Minneapolis, MN. More of her writing and miscellaneous internet interests can be found on Twitter or at margaretlafleur.com.
