Does anyone else feel a lack of urgency here? “Road to Nowhere” features some solid storytelling on a personal level, but it’s difficult to feel like any serious momentum is building, especially with so little follow-up on the cliffhanger about one patient going home. Even the personal stories themselves are a bit hit-or-miss, with some resonating more than others.
Take Spence, who’s newly emboldened to confront his mom after learning Cheri is out to her parents. This is the type of teen-drama storyline that will always reliably move me, but I’m not convinced the show has done the work to invest Spence and his experience with real complexity. I find Mark’s uncomplicated generosity touching in all their scenes together, sure. But Spence sticking up to his mom feels like the next obvious beat in this story. There’s nothing particularly novel about this angle, especially when the show so broadly lumps the stigma of Spence’s AIDS diagnosis with the general stigma of his sexuality. I’m glad Spence refuses to lie about who he is, but I struggle to engage when most of his scenes go through the typical motions.
Natsuki, on the other hand, gains some nice dimension from the specificity of her experience with depression and suicide. Amesh, naturally, takes Natsuki’s slight flakiness personally, interpreting her spending time alone in her room as avoiding him. But when he runs into her at midnight and gives her the okay to dump him, she explains that she wants to share the deepest parts of herself with him.
So she tells him the story she would’ve told at the Midnight Club, the same story she’s been working on since she read Tristan excerpts over the intercom. It’s about a girl named Teresa, clearly based on herself, and the long drive she takes one late night.
Teresa stops to reluctantly pick up two hitchhikers, Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn, played by Flanagan regulars Henry Thomas and Alex Essoe. The two have an air of danger from the beginning, practically forcing her to drive them and bickering loudly most of the time. But the horror of the scene really comes from its cyclicality, the growing sense of disorientation and irrationality every time they pass the same walker, the same gas station. There’s something quite unnerving about any nighttime drive through hell, and the relatively short time frame of this story gives it a momentum and escalating eeriness missing from many of the other Midnight Club stories.
Weird smells saturate the air, Jack keeps uttering the phrase “It’s going to hurt,” and the two hitchhikers are locked in an ongoing struggle to convince Teresa whether to stop the car or not. There’s also the casual suggestion, maybe implied from the beginning, that the pair are a couple of killers. It all culminates when Teresa follows a little girl — a young Teresa, meaning a young Natsuki — into a garage, where she sees herself in the driver’s seat of a running car. It becomes clear that Teresa has slowly been dying of self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning this whole time, with Jack and Poppy representing different impulses in her brain: one telling her to let go and die, the other telling her that living is worth it no matter how hard it hurts. So Teresa returns to her body and weakly opens the garage door, saving herself.
Natsuki notes that in real life, the ending was messier: She made it out of the car, but her mom stumbled upon the worst image she could ever see and screamed the same way she did after her husband died. When an ambulance took Natsuki to the hospital, she learned she wouldn’t die from the suicide attempt, but she would eventually die of something else, something slower.
The horror-as-depression angle has been explored to death, especially with the mid-death hallucination twist, but the symbolism of Teresa’s dream is foreshadowed pretty effectively. And in general, Natsuki’s perspective on depression is refreshing and complex. The reveal of her terminal cancer diagnosis so soon after making the choice to live feels like a cruel twist of fate, and that conflict of feelings makes her a more layered character.
By contrast, Ilonka is beginning to irritate me. After screwing up with Anya, she doesn’t seem to have learned her lesson. She confronts Dr. Stanton about what she overheard last night — that one patient might be going home — and Stanton firmly tells her she can’t tell the others. She’s not sure if this is a done deal yet, and it’d be both cruel and selfish to break the news without knowing for sure. Stanton makes a good point, but Ilonka pulls an Ilonka and tells Kevin almost immediately.
And she continues to steer even harder into her belief that her ritual meant something, that she was the healer who saved someone. In her latest therapy session with Shasta, she even admits to a suspicion that she’s the patient who’s going home. Shasta encourages this belief, going so far as to invite Ilonka to stay with them at the collective. She explains that Good Humor chose this spot because of its proximity to a “nexus point” centered on Brightcliffe. But the vibes with Shasta are only getting creepier by the episode, and the moment when everyone else stares at Ilonka is pretty unsettling. (She doesn’t seem that put off, though.)
Still, I can’t help the feeling that the biggest reveals of this episode — like the cliffhanger discovery of Kevin’s sleepwalking — feel more like episode-three reveals than episode-eight reveals. I’ve accepted that The Midnight Club isn’t shooting for horror on the level of The Haunting of Hill House, that this story is closer to The Fault in Our Stars than The Conjuring. But there are only so many episode-ending old lady sightings I can watch without craving something deadlier.
Scary Stories
• I haven’t seen the movie, but Natsuki’s story reminded me most of Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, in both the psychological horror of an uncomfortable road trip and the fracturing of identity.
