This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers
The Twin Thing
At the end of the last piece I mentioned the motif of a tertiary character telling a ghost story every episode. Oral storytelling is the preferred medium of ghost stories, after all. Specters can be inherited, and words are their DNA.
This time the story comes from a military veteran. He recalls gouging his own eyes out on an acid trip because of a charred Iranian girl whose corpse he encountered while overseas. She was all he could see. The eyelessness of the corpse he couldn't forget demanded the eyelessness of the body he cannot escape. Luke is the audience for this story, and the setting is an AA meeting. Why this particular tale from this particular person? The symbolism doubles up when child Luke explains the way he protects his family with little green army men. You have to count them out, a lot, and you have to keep doing it, and you have to believe it will work. Adult Luke is like a disabled veteran, cast off by society, whose PTSD and abandonment issues result in debilitating drug use.
Much like the teller of the ghost story, Luke's problem is that he sees too much. His follow-up problem is that nobody believes him about what he sees. When he was young he was dismissed as an innocent kid. Now that he's older he's dismissed as a cynical junkie. He just can't win.
The sting of misunderstanding is all the worse because he really does have the best intentions in mind. He is willing to go to dark places to help those he loves; we see this as he instructs little Nell on how to protect herself, and we see this as he tries desperately to keep fellow addict Joey afloat.
Luke and Joey forged their relationship in rehab, an environment too volatile to achieve intimacy. Joey seems to think she's manipulating him romantically, but Luke uses Joey as a surrogate for Nell: a person he can understand and protect in such a way that lets him avoid worrying about himself. These twinned twins both slip from his grasp in the same apocalyptic moment. Really they were lost to their own baggage, but Luke can't help but feel that their dual exodus is connected by one factor: him. Now he is left on the road to recovery alone, and recovery, as Joey herself says, is the same thing over and over and over again. It's not flashy, it's not uplifting. It's numbing, dispiriting, and frankly insane. Maybe this is why Luke so badly needs to see progress in those around him; he doesn't feel any for himself.
This episode evokes Flanagan's then-upcoming project, Doctor Sleep. Maybe it's what got him the job. Doctor Sleep is an adaptation of Stephen King's embarrassingly bad sequel to The Shining. Ewan McGregor plays an adult Danny Torrance, who copes with his childhood trauma and ongoing psychic sensitivity by entering an Alcoholics Anonymous program. The film is sharp, the better version of this episode. We've seen stories of addiction before. Luke's story doesn't add anything new. Fortunately, as far as the siblings go, Oliver Jackson-Cohen gives the best performance in the least interesting role. He has a certain hangdog quality that makes us root for him to work through his wretched misery. This sympathy is most crucial when we revisit the scene between him and Steve from the pilot. What seemed to be a clearcut dynamic of grubby exploitation is now reversed. Like so many people, we couldn't see Luke for what he was in that moment because of our assumptions about what he looked like.
Luke's road to recovery may be played out, but Flanagan inserts enough peculiarities to keep us invested. The most effective of these is the spectral manifestation of the monkey on his back, Bowler Hat Cane Man, who begins terrorizing child Luke the moment he inherits that hat. It's fitting that the mother is the one who offers this cursed gift, with a crucial caveat from the father: you can only have the gift if you understand the difference between what's real and what's fake. Nice parenting, Dad. Here's a cool hat with a heaping helping of repression on the side.
I don't know who hat man is, or why he likes his hat so much, or why he is so scoldy about drugs. But I do like the way he floats through the episode punctuating Luke's insecurities. If you have to be a grown up to wear a hat like that, as his father suggests, perhaps Luke would rather just not.
7 / 10
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