Midnight Mass Episode 4 Recap: Problem Drinking
Addiction comes in many forms. For some, it’s an addiction to a substance, like alcohol—that’s the affliction of Riley Flynn and Joe Collie. For others, it’s ruinous personal behavior, like Bev Keane’s need to be in the right at all times. And for others, like Monsignor John Pruitt/Father Paul Hill, it’s the need to consume large quantities of human and vampire blood. Everyone’s got a cross to bear!
The fourth episode of Midnight Mass (“Book IV: Lamentations”) centers on the rapid dissolution of “Father Paul” into vampirism in the absence of his so-called guardian angel, the original vampire creature who’s been roaming around the island killing cats and drug dealers and whatnot. As his supply of the creature’s blood—which he’s obviously been dosing his parishioners with, hence their miraculous healing and de-aging (and, in the case of Erin Greene, the sudden termination of her pregnancy and any signs she’d ever been pregnant with it)—dwindles, he’s become sicker and sicker, even if he was able to recover from “dying” at the end of the previous episode. He can’t eat regular food. He can’t be exposed to the sunlight without burning.
And when the chance for a meal finally comes, when poor old Joe Collie shows up at the rectory looking for support and busts his head wide open in an ensuing struggle to be free of Father Paul’s clinging arms, the priest does exactly what any good vampire would do under those circumstances: He drinks the guy’s blood, first slurping up the puddle on the floor, then sucking it down straight from the tap, as it were.
But eventually the “angel” returns, which is too bad for poor Riley. Returning to the rectory to question Father Paul about an obvious lie he told regarding Joe’s whereabouts that evening—he claimed Joe went to go visit his sister on the mainland, but Riley knows for a fact that the woman died months ago—he surprises the priest and his sinister benefactor, who immediately attacks him. Father Paul closes the door on the scene, and on the episode.
One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around, in terms of the show’s status as horror, is its willingness to tug on the heartstrings like a weepy primetime soap. I’m perfectly fine with, say, the lengthy pair of monologues in which Riley and Erin outline their different ideas about what happens after we die, with Riley celebrating his eventual dispersal into the ecosystem and thence to oblivion while Erin imagines an afterlife for her disappeared daughter (very firmly a daughter in her mind, though the doctor never ascertained the sex of the baby) in which she is surrounded by love and never alone. I have a harder time with it when it’s underlaid with syrupy music designed to make us feel a certain way about all of it. Think of how much more engaging, riveting even, it would have been had these monologues passed in silence, leaving the words to rise or fall on their own strength.
Other than that, the show’s biggest problem remains Bev Keane. I don’t know how else to put it: This character is dead weight. She’s pure self-righteousness, pure zealotry, pure petty cruelty, pure obnoxiousness—a brick wall where someone who really lives and breathes on the page and on the screen could have been placed. Did you have any doubt in your mind that she’d become more of an acolyte and defender of Father Paul/Msgr. John when she discovered he’d murdered someone? Did you have any doubt she’d cow relatively soft figures like the handyman and the mayor into obedience, as if they were mere schoolchildren? It’s such a boring dynamic! Every second with her is wasted.
Please note that mere predictability isn’t the Keane character’s mortal sin. Plenty of stuff in this show has been predictable—the death of Joe Collie, the one older character who wasn’t an obviously younger actor slathered in makeup; the reversion of the aged-up cast members into their younger selves (Anne Flynn doesn’t need glasses any more, and Ed’s hair looks a lot less salt-and-peppery than it used to); the likelihood that Mnsgr. Pruitt is in fact Dr. Gunning’s real father (hence her mom claiming she saw “your father” at the window when it was really just the vampire wearing the Monsignor’s old coat and hat); you get the idea. But these things are predictable in that pleasant way that familiar horror stories tend to be. They’re not predictable because the writers lacked the imagination to surprise, the way they seem to with Bev Keane.
The good news is that the pace seems to be picking up, rather rapidly if the sudden surprise assault on Riley by the vampire creature is any indication. Before long it’ll be hard for the rest of the island to deny that supernatural forces are at work, and it seems safe to a guess that a struggle for the island’s soul will ensue. It also seems likely that the recovering alcoholic Riley will soon fall victim to another addiction entirely.
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 Midnight Mass Episode 4 on Netflix
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
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