What is there to say, really. What is there to say.
It’s rare to think “I will never forget watching this episode of television,” rarer still to mean it. Even within the sphere of horror, a genre dedicated in part to searing imagery into your brain, the truly unforgettable is thin on the ground.
Not this time, though. Not this time.
This short, unspeakably cruel episode of Them (“Covenant I”), which literally kept me up at night, begins with a breathtaking, first-act-of-Casino-style outline of how mid-century Los Angeles’ racist housing and predatory lending systems worked. Create neighborhoods where no white people want to live, leading to conditions that make life intolerable for the Black inhabitants who remain. Make white neighborhoods so desirable that upwardly mobile Black families nationwide will want to relocate. Lie to them about what their welcome will be like, and charge them obscene interest on their mortgages. Flip the houses surrounding them at a tidy profit as white flight begins to take place. Voilà—you’ve made a fortune both from selling the houses and keeping Black families trapped within them. Helen Koistra, our favorite real estate agent, goes along to get along, peer-pressured out of her moral qualms by her preposterously sexist colleagues. (It’s an echo of last episode’s sexual-abuse sideplot for Betty, a reminder of how patriarchy and misogyny go hand in glove with racism, overlapping latticeworks of power and prejudice that build up to become a whole oppressive system.) She bribes faux “good cop” Sgt. Wheatley to keep the peace in exchange for a cut of the profits, and he reminds her that if they go down for her bank’s illegal contracts, it’s her ass on the line, not his. Then she gets jumped in her car in a parking garage by a violent racist for selling homes to Black families in the first place.
By the end of the episode it’s hard to remember any of that.
What we witness in the Emory home on “that day” back in North Carolina, the day of the singing woman and her gaggle of predatory men, is…I was going to say indescribable, but that’s not it. I could describe it very easily, if I could bring myself to do so. If I could put aside the wide-eyed horror on the face of Livia because, even as she’s being gang-raped, she’s watching her assailants cheerfully, even playfully, murder her baby boy. If I could shake the phrase “cat in a bag” from my memory. If it weren’t one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen, one of the most horrific things ever filmed, by anyone, for anything.
But that’s about as much of it as I can muster.
The rest of the episode I remember in a daze, woozy and disconnected. This is the state of Livia, too, so badly traumatized by what she experienced and witnessed that her two surviving children become scared of her. So badly damaged that Henry up and moves the family thousands of miles away, hoping that only her happy memories of little Chester Emory come along for the ride.
The point, to the extent there is one, is that Livia’s psychic wound is still gaping and bleeding and raw when she arrives in East Compton, where horrible things begin to happen to her all over again. This is not an event from the long-buried past. This just happened, recently enough for the move to be a direct response to it. Recently enough to haunt everything Livia does or says or sees. Recently enough that Henry naturally believes that the supernatural events Livia claims she’s experienced are part and parcel of the same devastated mental state that left her clutching a bloody pillowcase and talking to her baby in the dirt of their cellar.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
There is no escape in this episode. There is no escape from this episode.
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 THEM Episode 5 (“Covenant I”) on Amazon Prime