31 Days of Halloween: Monsterland S01E02: Eugene, Oregon

2020, Hulu

I like the way this episode was done, though it made me even more uncomfortable than the first episode. This one centres around Nick Smith (Charlie Tahan, Ozark), the weird drop-out kid desperately trying to keep it together while working a shit job, taking care of his sick mom, having no time for friends or self-care. You can see he once had a normal (affluent?) life, and all the trappings, from his dual-screen PC, PS4 and an old macbook being used as a nightstand. But now, nothing is clean, he steals food from the burger joint he works in, and he has to cut his mom's pills in half to make them last -- the insurance company took the name brand off the plan, and the generic makes her even more sick. Nick's life is shit, and yet, when around her, he's rather well adjusted; he's good at keeping his game face on. 

Then a shadow appears behind him. Not a scary shadow, although its unnerving, but it is not all that menacing. He shouts at it, asks it what it wants, but then ends up in a chat room where others are talking about shadows as well. The show plays the chatroom really well, bringing the n'er-do-well kids into the house with him, as metaphors for chatting on the computer. They know about the shadows, have their own opinions and consequences of interacting with them, but they all share one thing in common -- the appearance of the shadow made their lives much much more terrible. Nick is not sure, but the overbearing, almost bullying kid who leads the chatroom is very clear to Nick -- the shadows are responsible for all that is wrong with his life.

There are some visual cues as to where this episode was leading us, that most would not catch onto until things become more apparent. If this series is going to be about monsters, human and otherwise, then this one is all human. We see that the monsters are not real, no not imagined, but just metaphors for something the kids see as more insidious than a harmless shadow. And the chatroom, and the bullying, and the disaffected kids, are all just... misdirections leading us to the realization that Nick was being radicalized all along, led by the nose towards a violent end again all the... all too human "shadows" in his life.

This was too real for me. Next up, we need some lighter fare. Maybe some zombies.