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AMC’s NOS4A2 has been a real rollercoaster ride as far as the storytelling goes. It took its sweet time climbing a hill to give us one interesting episode and then went on another slow climb last week as basically nothing happened. This week we hit the crest and are racing down that second hill with an episode that’s interesting and gives us some great insight into Charlie Manx. And thankfully we didn’t have to deal with Vic’s parents outside of her mother coming to the hospital to bring Vic some necessities for her stay. We also didn’t have to deal with Maggie either until the very end.
What we did get was intriguing. A flashback to the past, the 1950s, and the young version of the old woman at the facility Charlie visited a few episodes back, Jolene July. Working as a rollerskating waitress at a drive-in, Jolene knew Charlie way back when. The two were actually involved in a relationship and Charlie popped the question to Jolene … and she promptly turned him down because she knew he had been lying to her about his various business travels. And she knew because she’s a ‘strong creative’ and she used her skates to take her to wherever Charlie was supposed to be. Even then she knew about the children and Christmasland but now she fears that Charlie is more insidious than she ever believed. He didn’t take the rejection well and tried to run Jolene down with his Wraith when she got off work but she was able to get her skates up to speed and vanish, causing Charlie to crash into a parked car.
In the present, Vic is undergoing psychiatric investigation, pressed to answer questions about her parents and any abuse that happened between or with them, but the main question Dr. Janes wants to know is ‘who is Charlie Manx?’ Vic insists that (1) her father has never laid a hand on her (she can’t say the same for her mother, but the doc doesn’t seem to believe her), and (2) she’s not talking about Charlie Manx. But refusing to comply with questioning or meds could extend Vic’s ‘voluntary’ stay at the facility. And somehow she just happened to get the bed in the same room with Jolene, and when the radio starts acting up out of the blue, Vic knows something is up … especially when the previously noncommunicative Jolene waves her over and whispers ‘Charlie Manx’ in her ear.
Vic now knows that Jolene has some connection to Charlie and tricks the nurse into not giving Jolene her meds, supposedly for paranoid schizophrenia. Jolene suddenly becomes quite talkative and active, concerned that she’ll be late for work and needs her skates. Vic tries to help but all she can find is a wheelchair … and then it clicks: this is now Jolene’s ‘knife’, the vehicle which allows her now to travel The Shorter Way. All Vic has to do is get them up to speed to break the barrier, so she and Jolene fly down the hallway and disappear, ending up in The Dark Tunnels.
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Now Jolene is completely lucid and relates her story about Charlie all those many years ago, but she has a little bit of magic to show Vic as well. Staring at what appears to be a large, static-filled video screen in the cave, the two women collapse, their souls apparently whisked to Charlie’s current location. He can’t see them, but he can feel Jolene’s presence especially after she blows in his ear. Vic watches as Jolene torments him and then suddenly the engine of the Wraith catches fire, almost trapping Charlie inside. He manages to get out but dramatically ages and is barely able to pick up a hose to put the fire out. He knows Jolene is behind this but while he thinks that’s who he’s talking to, it’s actually Vic standing in front of him. The pair return to their bodies, and Jolene says she only had the strength to set the fire. She’s been waiting for a younger, stronger ‘creative’ to take up the mantle and kill Charlie, but she also has to destroy the Wraith. Confused and conflicted, Vic realizes that this was Jolene’s last trip and the old woman dies, leaving Vic to bring her body back to the hospital and then ponder all that she’s just been shown.
Vic is then able to visit Maggie, who has had surgery for the injuries she sustained by the attack of the Wraith. But that attack has undone everything Maggie has been pursuing since the first episode. She tells Vic to tell the doctor what he wants to hear, she’ll get a prescription and she can go on with her life. But now Maggie wants nothing to do with Vic, Charlie or the Wraith. She’s even done with her Scrabble tiles bag, tossing it in a garbage can as she boards a bus back to Iowa. Vic ‘admits’ to the doctor that Charlie is a figment of her imagination and that she just wants to get back to art school because art is her outlet. Dr. Janes seems satisfied and is willing to release Vic with a prescription and the order that she have a safe place to live. He does not want her going to her father’s even though she was quite blunt about her mother’s physical abuse — but it wasn’t all the time, only when she was on a bender. Somehow that made it okay with the doctor? Anyway, it seems that’s where Vic is at the end, but she’s not following the doctor’s orders completely, dumping the pills down the drain.
But now that both Jolene and Maggie have assured her that Haley is gone, and Jolene urging her to kill Charlie to save the next child, will the burden of all of this new knowledge — and hopelessness she feels with her failure to find Haley — give Vic the push she needs to defeat Charlie, even without the help of Maggie, or will it completely break her?
NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10:00 PM on AMC.
What did you think of this week’s episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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