‘Them: The Scare’ Season Finale Recap: A Family Affair

It’s not that I mind happy endings, it’s that I don’t trust them. Not on horror shows, anyway, and certainly not on a horror show like Them. This is a series that ended its first season playing Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” after ending with a shot of an innocent family emerging from their haunted home surrounded by flames and the stares of their ghastly white neighbors. 

This doesn’t mean that the lives of Dawn Reed, her son Kel, and Kel’s nice-guy dad Corey have to be shitty forever — not even now that we know Dawn is the daughter of Ruby Lee Emory (Shahadi Wright Joseph), eldest child of the Emory family from the first season. There’s conceivably a version of this story that ends with Dawn and her family alive and intact, if shaken enough to avoid giving the impression that they just bounce back from all this insanity a-okay — the Poltergeist ending, the Exorcist ending, that kind of thing. Dawn and her family’s skin color doesn’t automatically damn them, in other words. 

But a show explicitly formulated to excavate fictional horror from America’s non-fictional anti-Black racism, of which there remains no shortage, would kind of be lying to you if it said all’s well that ends well. So the awful sight and sound of the loathsome Tap Dance Man (Jeremiah Birkett), who is to minstrelsy what the Cenobites are to BDSM, approaching a horrified Dawn at the end of the episode makes a dreadful kind of sense for that reason alone.

It works in other ways, too. For one thing, the nature of the “Raggedy Edmund” entity — why it chose that particular form in reaching out to Edmund before employing Edmund’s rage and resentment to provide it with targets — called to mind the vengeful spirit’s use of racist iconography in the first season, as well as its penchant for targeting childhood neuroses and anxieties. Establishing a firm, in-story connection above and beyond an overlap in what creator Little Marvin was interested in from season to season seems reasonable.

It’s also an unexpectedly dramatic way to pull off the tried-and-true anthology-TV technique of unveiling hidden or not-so-hidden links between different seasons. Noah Hawley’s Fargo is the king of this kind of thing, in ways both large (the main character of Season 2 is the dad of the main character of Season 1) and small (a mob enforcer who plays a major role in Season 2 turns out to have been playing a secret, initially unrecognizable minor role in another season all along). 

The revelation rings true to Them’s preoccupation with a venerable horror theme: the recurring power of evil. This stuff has long been Stephen King’s stock in trade, and unlike many of his forebears he made his bones by locating this tendency not in tainted or cursed bloodlines, but in haunted locales, from a hotel in The Shining to entire towns in ‘Salem’s Lot, It, and the Castle Rock novels. The idea that the centuries-old Satanic racist bedeviling the Emorys and other Black newcomers to Compton in Season 1 would stick around to harry their grandkids and great-grandkids decades later, like an even more racist Randall Flagg, is a solid one, as well as a depressingly persuasive one.

Which leads to the final reason the return of Da Tap Dance Man and the Covenant storyline feels bleakly right here. By the end of the episode — directed by X/Pearl auteur Ti West, returning from the first season — Dawn has freed her brother’s spirit from that of the entity. She’s killed her nemesis, Detective McKinney, in self-defense, as eyewitnessed by Detective Diaz, who betrayed her only to think better of it when he got an eyeful and earful of the kind of cop McKinney really was. 

She’s embarrassed the force into clearing her of all charges with her recording of McKinney’s almost comically racist and incriminating final few minutes of life; the site of milquetoast Lieutenant Schiff choking on the knowledge of how wrong he was to hang this woman out to dry, and how little defense he has when she shoots daggers at him with her incredible eyes, is particularly satisfying. McKinney even posthumously takes the rap for all the murders committed by the man with the red hair, which is more satisfying still. 

Now out of that rotten job, Dawn is regularly seeing her ex again, much to the delight of her incredibly cool son Kel, whose Fishbone t-shirt would have made me want to be his friend real bad once upon a time. On a deeper level, she’s finally come to grips with the full truth. She remembers her time in the Mott house, where in a genuinely harrowing flashback we see the grown Dawn and her toddler twin Edmund run and hide from their berserk foster mother, who keeps Dawn locked in a literal box for misbehaving. Many of the details she recorded at the crime scene turn out to have been erroneous because they were memories rather than actual observations; now she’s reintegrated them into herself.

(I’ll note here that Deborah Ayorinde has delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, amid competition that’s already very stiff. The dynamic range of emotional intensity she can convey with the way she holds her eyes, her nose, her mouth alone is astonishing, all the more so for how simple she makes it look. At the drop of a hat she can be a mother driven to reckless anger, an abuse survivor seeing the true story of her young life play out, a doppelgänger embodying only her worst qualities, a horror-movie character watching as a malevolent creature slowly approaches.)

But here’s the thing. The Scare is set in 1991, after the beating of Rodney King but before school is out for the summer. Its epilogue takes place six months later. Considering the prominence of the King assault, I’d wondered if the riots that followed his police attackers’ acquittal would play a role in the story. But that miscarriage of justice and the dozens of deaths that followed are just a few months into the characters’ future when that repulsive creature comes creeping up the stairs. Dawn may have escaped the LAPD, but she can’t escape the world they’ve helped make. That particular hell is always sitting around, waiting to be unleashed.

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.