‘Them’ Season Finale Recap: Escape

“Day 10,” the tenth and final episode of Them Season 1, is a story of escape. Just not all the time, and not for everyone.

Not for Betty Wendell. Oh, it seems like it at first, when she finds the hatch to the underground chamber in which George the milkman has imprisoned her. Scarcely believing her luck, she runs free through the verdant green pastures of George’s farm, smiling as she rushes past the cows. Then a shot rings out and she drops like a stone. It’s George, from his porch, with a sniper rifle. Looks like he learned how to “do things” in Korea after all. Once again, you have to quote Stephen King in The Stand: “No great loss.”

But Henry Emory escapes death in the noose thanks to the quick action of his daughter Ruby, who buries her mother’s axe in the back of Earl, one of his would-be murderers. His buddy Marty makes a run for it and almost gets away before Henry shoots him in the street. Everyone gathers to watch the incident unfold, including Marty’s wife, who lets fly with perhaps the most ill-advised slur ever uttered. He’s about to turn the gun on her, at Da Tap Dance Man’s behest, when he realizes what he’s doing and makes a tactical retreat back into his infernal house.

Marty doesn’t get away quite so easy, though. Safely back in a nearby home, he berates Clark Wendell with a homophobic slur for failing to attack the Emorys for their nonexistent crimes. Clark shatters Marty’s leg in like three different places and drives away for, if you’ll pardon the expression, greener pastures.

“Them is a staggering achievement in television horror. It’s vital as it is violent.”

Unlike her would-be nemesis Betty, Livia does make it out of her prison alive. She gets the jump on an orderly by asking to use the restroom before her “procedure,” knocking him out with the syringe he was about to use on her. On her way out of the asylum, she makes a brief detour to beat the head doctor to death. (“No great loss.”) She’s stopped short when she makes eye contact with a Black orderly stationed at the front door on her way out; he simply goes back to reading his magazine and lets her go, perhaps the most cathartic “guy looks up and then looks back at his magazine” ever filmed. Clark Wendell, too, lets her go rather than, like, running her over with his car. They’ve both got better things to do.

Then Livia returns to her home, and finds each of her family members in the clutches of the demons who’ve haunted them from the start. She bursts into Miss Vera’s “classroom” and is nearly throttled to death, until Gracie tears up a page with an illustration of the sinister teacher in her book, rescuing her mother.

Ruby is in the bathroom, made to look like the girls’ room at her high school by Doris, her illusory friend. Doris tries to convince her that Livia killed baby Chester, that she herself will turn into her mother unless she does something to stop it. Doris transforms into an evil version of Livia and tries to suffocate Ruby with the pillowcase. Ruby fights back, shattering the mirror, cutting herself. But the real Livia stops her, with Gracie in tow.

Henry is the last of the Emorys to be rescued. He’s trapped by Da Tap Dance Man in a phantasmagoria of his own guilt—a recreation of the movie theater to which he took the girls on the day Chester was killed and Livia was assaulted, which is why he wasn’t home to save them. With his face so badly injured he almost looks like one of the half-burned incarnations of the Black Hat Man, he’s nearly been driven mad, forced to watch the attack and goaded into suicidal violence. But Livia and the girls save him, forgive him for not being there, forgive him for moving them to this godforsaken place in an attempt “to make it alright.” He shoots Da Tap Dance Man instead of himself or anyone else, then wipes away the makeup to reveal a white man. Henry nods, as if this is what he expected all along.

By now, there’s nothing the Black Hat Man can hold over Livia’s head but a promise of a reunion with Chester in death. But she’s no longer afraid, and she’s not buying what he’s selling. Her defiance, her final refusal to break, shatters the covenant he made with the devil, who returns to claim his burning soul.

The spectral fires that had spontaneously erupted from the pavement outside the Emorys’ home, holding the neighbors and cops at bay, go out. The Emorys emerge, staring at their enemies through the guttering flames.

And that’s the end.

It’s not an ending that will please everyone. Open endings, from The Birds to The Sopranos, rarely do. Real, lasting catharsis and triumph to offset the ten-episode onslaught of brutal horror imagery and breathtakingly cruel racism is not offered. There’s no escape—only survival, and an uncertain future.

But to offer more than that would be to undermine the strength of Them‘s central metaphor, its parable of racial animus as literally infernal in nature. Them is agnostic about God, maybe even outright suspicious of the concept; certainly He never intervenes in the Emorys’ favor, and most of the characters who refer to Him turn out to be devils in disguise. Livia herself treats promises of “a better place” with the contempt that, in her circumstances, they deserve.

What Them does believe in is evil, manifested in white supremacist racism. The supernatural element merely recreates, as a parable, the evil that men do. You might be able to walk away from that alive, but you can’t walk away from it unscathed, or unchanged. The same can be said of the show itself. Them marks the arrival of a major new talent in showrunner Little Marvin and a staggering achievement in television horror. It’s vital as it is violent. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch THEM Episode 10 ("Day 10") on Amazon Prime