ភាពតក់ស្លុត និងការស្លាប់ដ៏គួរឱ្យរន្ធត់

យែលជែក came out of the blue. It wasn’t on my radar at all until it aired and it’s quickly become one of my favorite new shows.

If you’re not watching it yet, stop reading this spoiler-filled review and go get a Showtime subscription or trial. It’s absolutely worth it, and it’s absolutely bingeworthy now that the full first season has aired.

The show dialed up the crazy in last week’s penultimate Season 1 episode, Doomcoming, when the girls unwittingly took psychedelic mushrooms and were possessed by a wild bloodlust that almost got Travis (Kevin Alves) killed.

This week, we discover that while Travis survived that nightmare, he couldn’t escape the forest forever. A character we all assumed was dead has been working behind the scenes the whole time, and things are about to get even crazier in Season 2.

In The Haunted Forest, The First Snow Falls

Lottie (Courtney Eaton) has emerged in the past timeline as the queen bee—though not the type of queen bee Jackie (Ella Purnell) was before. More like the demon queen of a haunted forest. She’s shed her fear of the cabin and embraced the darkness, and as the episode ends—and she places the heart of a bear she kills in a hollow stump—we see her acolytes kneeling behind her.

Van (Liv Hewson) and Misty (Samantha Hanratty) have both embraced Lottie’s weird vision magic. Misty probably has some twisted plans for Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) and she’s realizing that Lottie now has more power than he does. Van still remembers Lottie’s warning about the river of blood, and wears her totem around her neck. She’s a believer to the core.

The only really adamant unbeliever in the group, outside of Nat (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis and Ben, is Jackie. She confronts the rest of the group after Lottie’s bizarre prayer, zeroing her anger in on her former best friend, Shauna (Sophie Nelisse).

It doesn’t go quite as well as Jackie planned. She’s absolutely right to confront the others over what happened. Shauna was about to slit Travis’s throat at Lottie’s behest, and was only shaken from her murderous stupor by Nat and Jackie’s timely arrival.

But she doesn’t leave it at that. She goes for the jugular herself, bringing up Shauna and Jeff’s affair and telling everyone who the baby’s real father is. This might be a Very Big Deal to Jackie, but to everyone else the whole “we have to survive in the middle of the wilderness” thing pretty much takes precedent. And even before Jackie started throwing her weight around, she had already alienated most of the group. Shauna was her last real friend and after reading her journal, that was over, too.

They argue, and instead of backing down meekly or apologizing for sleeping with Jackie’s boyfriend, Shauna fights back. She tells Jackie she’s insecure and a bully, and Jackie scoffs at her for being jealous. Shauna is clearly winning the argument, at least as far as the court of public opinion goes, but Jackie doesn’t realize just how far she’s sunk in the popularity game.

A squabble would be one thing, but instead of storming off in a huff, Jackie tells Shauna to leave in front of everyone, essentially bossing her around as though she’s her child or pet. Shauna doesn’t back down and tells Jackie if she’s free to go instead.

Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) tries to intervene (again) to help Jackie out, but Jackie just snaps her head off (again) and storms outside. It turns out to be a grave mistake.

That night, we see Shauna head out to the fire Jackie has made, tell her it’s all stupid, and invite her back inside. Once in the cabin, we see everyone lined up smiling. Immediately we realize this is a dream. They give her hot chocolate and all is right and well with the world. Even Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) is there—but she died in that plane.

As Jackie stares around, bewildered, we see a man standing behind the line of survivors, his face in shadow. “So glad you’re joining us,” he says ominously. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

That’s when Shauna wakes up. It was her dream. She rushes over to the window to look down on where Jackie had camped out by the fire the night before and her face pales. In a panic, she races downstairs and out into the cabin grounds.

Snow has fallen. It’s not deep, but it’s enough to cover Jackie entirely. The fire is long dead. Shauna brushes the snow off the blankets and screams. That night, after their final angry words, the girl froze to death alone, with safety just a few yards away. When you fall asleep and hypothermia settles in, sometimes you just don’t wake up. I think this is especially true in haunted forests.

The Belles Of The Ball

In the modern-day timeline, Nat (Juliette Lewis) brings Misty (Christina Ricci) back to the scene of Adam’s (Peter Gadiot) murder. She proves to be a disturbingly knowledgeable asset when it comes to disposing of bodies. Ricci is so good in this role, it’s unsettling.

She tasks Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Nat with chopping up the body, which Shauna does with the coolness of a very cool cucumber, and Taissa (Tawny Cypress) helps with cleanup. Misty has lots of other instructions, including destroying phones and other evidence, and where to bury the body (though she takes the head and hands to dispose of at a funeral for one of the elderly people at the nursing home she works at—which is far too clever).

The disposal is a success, and off they all go to their 25-year high school reunion. Ex-teammate Allie (Tonya Cornelisse) is running the show and manages to be about as annoying a human being one can imagine. She talks about their “shared trauma” and hops into pictures with the other girls. It takes a twisted kind of jealousy to feel like you missed out on something when that something was 18 months of horrific survival in the wilderness, cannibalism and PTSD.

With the body disposed of and the reunion a relative success, things are looking up for most of our survivors. Shauna and Jeff (Warren Kole) have somehow rekindled their marriage, much to their daughter Callie’s (Sarah Desjardins) confusion. That confusion turns into a cautious delight before crumbling into suspicion when news of Adam’s mysterious disappearance shows up on the TV they’re all watching.

Misty, meanwhile, agrees to let poor Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma) go free. She pretends like she’s doing it because she’s excited about a book deal. She gives her back all her stuff, but when Jessica goes through her purse, she can’t find her cigarettes.

“Oh, Misty!” she whines, and Misty admits she threw them out. They’re just so bad for you, she explains, but ultimately relents and gives her the smokes. Jessica goes outside, gets in her car, and lights up. She looks too tired to be relieved. I admit, I wasn’t sure if she’d call the cops, go back later for revenge, or go through with some kind of book deal she could profit on.

It doesn’t matter, though. Misty poisoned the cigarettes. As Jessica drives her vision goes blurry. The world wobbles and throbs. She looks at her cigarette and the realization hits her, just as her car veers off the road and she hits the steering wheel face-first. We get a little flashback to Misty sticking a needle in the cigarettes, injecting them with lord knows what. I’m not sure if Jessica is dead or just drugged, but it’s not looking good.

It’s over at the Taissa and Simone (Rukiya Bernard) residence where things get even crazier, however. Taissa is with her election team as the results come pouring in, while Simone stops by the house to get some of her and Sammy’s (Aiden Stoxx) things. Simone is in the basement when she notices something. A breeze, perhaps. She looks around and near a vent in the wall she sees what appears to be blood.

យែលជែក is exceptionally good at making things ominous and tense. The dread factor is just off the charts as Simone pulls up the vent and crawls inside, through to a dark stone room. A secret room she never knew existed.

A room of horrors. On a dusty wooden desk we see what appears to be some kind of macabre shrine. One of Sammy’s mutilated dolls sits against the wall, one eye missing. Half a dozen candles sit around it. Painted (in blood?) on the stone wall is the weird យែលជែក symbol that keeps popping up. A triangle with a circle at the end, diagonal lines poking like branches from its side, and one like a trunk at its base.

But the real horror is the dog’s decapitated head and the poor animal’s heart, bloody and terrifying. Simone screams in horror as the camera zooms in on the poor mutt’s head. Tai did this. In her sleep, sure, but what kind of monster is controlling her? This isn’t normal sleep-walking stuff. This isn’t even climbing up a tree or eating dirt. This looks like ritual sacrifice. What the hell is going on?

Finally, we come to Nat. She has finally accepted that the blackmail and the death of Travis are unrelated, and that Travis just got too down and took his own life. So she goes to her tiny apartment and gets her gun and puts it under her jaw and braces herself, her finger nearing the trigger, screwing up her resolve.

When the door burst open and several people rush in, grab her, and forcefully spirit her into their van. As she’s kidnapped her phone vibrates and we hear her voicemail click on. It’s the woman she blackmailed into looking into Travis’s death. She sounds angry and afraid.

“Look, I did what you asked,” she says breathlessly. “I dug into Travis’s bank account and found out who emptied it. I think someone’s following me. Who the [bleep] is Lottie Mathews?”

The episode, and the season, end with the bear heart in the stump. With Lottie leaving the offering to the dark gods of this dark forest. She speaks in the weird language and then says “Let the darkness set us free” as Van and Misty kneel in the snow behind her.

ហើយឥណទានវិល។

សាលក្រម

All told, this was a terrific finale that answers some questions and sets up some new mysteries. I really hope the writers and producers have planned ahead and really have a story that’s deserving of several seasons laid out in outline form so that we’re not left with another ការបាត់បង់ fiasco. This show has real promise and I’m really excited about what’s to come, but I’m also worried that they’ll take it too far and things will start to feel contrived and forced and dragged out.

I hope I’m wrong. This is a great, entertaining show that could go in so many different directions. It’s built up in really surprising ways, with lots of head fakes and red herrings and some surprising twists and turns. That Lottie is still alive, and apparently pulling some sort of cult’s strings, is really fascinating and I love that they saved it for the end, and didn’t even really have Lottie emerge as a major antagonist until the last couple episodes. She was weird before, but not evil.

I’m also fascinated by the man in the shadows and by the eyeless man that Tai saw as a child. So many questions about both timelines. Will the girls separate into factions? Even with Jackie gone, it seems unlikely that someone like Nat would side with Lottie. After Jackie’s death, I suspect Shauna will be much less likely to follow along also. And Tai is such a skeptic, she’ll almost certainly resist joining Team Lottie, and might even resent her for her hold over Van.

We have a good long while to wait for any of these questions to be answered, but at least there’s a season 2 in the offing.

What questions do you have about the show? What do you think they got right by the end of Season 1 and what do you wish they’d do differently? And are you as worried as I am about this show repeating បានបាត់បង់របស់ mistakes? I mean, I have lots of hope that they learned form those mistakes, but I’m so often letdown by shows that start with such stellar opening seasons and then devolve into much less interesting or compelling or exciting second and third seasons (sorry Westworld et alia).

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