NOS4A2 :: Bats

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Aside from this season’s first episode, NOS4A2 really delivered some strong and gripping storytelling that made it a much more enjoyable experience to watch than anything the first season gave us. And now we’re at the season finale and … well, it starts out with a bang and then returns to the moroseness of the first season before giving us an interesting cliffhanger.

The episode picks up right where Episode 9 left off, with the lights going out at Christmasland and Vic forcing Wayne to leave before it’s too late. But she had to leave Maggie behind with the promise that she’d be right back. Delivering Wayne to Lou and Tabitha, and being forced into handcuffs because of his aggressive behavior, Vic heads back for Maggie. Wayne runs off into the grove and stares at his ornament, and it clicks in Tabitha’s mind — Maggie’s last reading of the tiles when asked if they could save the children: ‘When Souls Fall’. The childrens’ souls are in the ornaments. They smash Wayne’s and his appearance and demeanor return to normal, so Tabs begins smashing all of the ornaments, releasing the children from Christmasland. What they don’t know is that Millie is still out there with her ornament intact.

Vic rescues Maggie from a horde of children about to ‘operate’ on her, and as they get to the Shorter Way, they hear the Wraith coming after them. Vic takes off with Charlie in hot pursuit, although still in his aged state. Vic stops in the middle of the bridge, Maggie tells her that the tiles chose Vic as the one who would kill Charlie and the tiles never lie. They stand defiantly on the bridge as Vic conjures up bats, a large swarm that smack into the Wraith, obscuring Charlie’s view. Vic also manages to use her power to weaken some of the planks and the front end of the Wraith falls through. More boards weaken and the Wraith tumbles into the Great White Static with Charlie inside. Concluding that Vic accomplished her mission, they see the entrance to the Inscape begin to collapse and turn to static so Vic and Maggie take off, making it back to Lou and Tabitha in the nick of time. All this happens within the first ten minutes of the episode, which makes the remaining time a bit of a drag.

Vic and Lou are trying to return to a normal life with Wayne, but there’s something off about him, refusing to eat a decent meal, preferring sugar for dinner, and nearly stabbing his mother with a fork. After finding Wayne standing on the kitchen counter, eating from a bag of sugar and then snapping out of his stupor, Vic puts him back to bed, but he sneaks off, after having a nightmare of a dead rabbit, a dead father, and his mother looking like her head is about to explode, and heads to the grove. There he finds Millie. Okay, so Millie wanted nothing more than to be human so she could grow up and now all of a sudden she wants to go back to Christmasland, rebuild it with Wayne, and gather up all the children to take them back. Her main impetus for this change in her desire seems to stem directly from Vic killing her father (although we don’t really know if he’s dead yet). Wayne does try to tell her that she could be normal again and get adopted by a good family but she’s no longer interested (perhaps he should have said that she could be his sister because Vic did promise to help her leave Christmasland). Vic pulls up to find Wayne and Millie flees, but this whole incident drives Vic back to Haverhill with Lou and Wayne in tow.

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Linda convinces Vic to stay for a while, and she agrees that Gun Barrel, Colorado is probably not the best place for her mentally, nor for Wayne but he’s not happy to be leaving his friends (Wayne has friends?). At one point he draws a picture, very well, of himself and Millie that he tries to hide from Vic, but he lets her see it and she tells him it’s okay. Wayne finally comes to the realization that there might be something wrong with him, which only reinforces Vic’s decision to stay in Haverhill, turning to her art as therapy.

Even though Tabitha said she had come to Colorado for Maggie, the two are still separated a month after returning to Haverhill. Maggie, who had lost her tiles in Christmasland, is back to work at the library, spending her time looking for various supernatural events and sightings that she and Vic can investigate. Just because the Shorter Way disintegrated doesn’t mean there aren’t more Inscapes out there they can use. Vic’s not really interested though, wanting to focus on her family. Tabitha surprises Maggie with a visit, dropping the tile bag on the counter, found on one of the children in custody after leaving Christmasland. Maggie is happy and obviously wants to patch things up with Tabs, but now that she’s got the tiles back, Tabitha knows Maggie will be more focused on them than their relationship. Maggie later asks the tiles where she can find what she’s looking for and pulls out ‘HOTEL’, which sends her back to the place she met The Hourglass. He’s not there, but she’s led to an elevator that’s marked ‘Out of Service’. She enters and pushes the button, perhaps traveling back to the penthouse where she left The Hourglass to die. But did he survive?

In an interesting turn of events, we do seem to get an answer to Charlie’s fate after some teenagers come across the wreckage of the Wraith and Charlie’s body in a river. In Haverhill, the explanation being that the Inscape was Vic’s so it was tied to Haverhill (even though she was in Colorado at the time of the incident, so it just seems like a convenient explanation to put all the pieces of the puzzle back in Haverhill). Vic, Lou, Wayne, Linda, Maggie and Tabitha are present for the demolition of the Wraith, and Tabitha says that Charlie’s body was cremated … but you know what they say about these things — if we didn’t see the body going into the cremator then we can’t confirm Tabitha is telling the truth … but why would she lie. So it seems that Vic’s journey is complete, and Lou is even going to legally adopt Wayne! But …

Millie is still out there, and a couple of horny, unfortunate teenagers who decide to park at the grove to make out discover that the ‘ghost’ of Charlie Manx may real. It’s no ghost that smashes their windshield though. It’s Millie, and she’s hungry.

And that’s it. That’s brings Season 2 of NOS4A2 to an end. Now, the show and the book have some vast differences up to the point where the season ends. In the book, Vic kills Bing, but on the show he’s now in prison and we haven’t seen him since he told Vic where to find Wayne. Maggie was killed by Manx before Vic took everyone to her father’s cabin at the lake, and Chris was killed by a police officer when he attacked one to protect Vic. In the book, Charlie has two daughters and one of them mortally wounds Vic, and all of the Manxes die when the bridge implodes. Vic dies shortly after returning to reality, and the story advance a year which finds Lou having lost a lot of weight and in a relationship with Tabitha, and it’s only at this point that they figure out that smashing the ornaments will restore the humanity of the children, including Wayne who was still having nightmares about turning into one of Manx’s creatures. A special edition of the book has an alternate ending which finds one of Manx’s children still alive with an unsmashed ornament along with some other vampire children who escaped into the real world. That certainly sets up a starting point for a potential third season but would they have the guts to kill off Vic and Maggie? That’s a question that will remain unanswered until we learn if the show is renewed.

NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10:00 PM on AMC.

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