Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Some shows don’t know their own strengths. Westworld, for example, is the best example of this phenomenon on the air right now. Its creators took Michael Crichton’s old sci-fi horror concept and ported it to a modern-day prestige-TV landscape where they could play up the sex and violence all they wanted, while still having the breathing room to depict the robotic theme-park attractions’ burgeoning self-awareness so slowly that entire scenes can pass featuring completely realistic conversations between “characters” who have no idea their every thought, word, and deed has been preprogrammed. The pulp thrills are right there for the taking; so is the (as far as I can tell) unprecedented experience of watching a work of fiction in which the heroes start out from a position where their interactions no more “real” than your iPhone connecting to your car via Bluetooth. And what does Westworld do? Bury both the juicy and heady stuff in boring puzzle-box narratives, pointlessly shifting timelines, and long boring conversations about What It Means To Be Human—a perennial thematic non-starter, given that all of us have a pretty good idea of what that means every time we wake up in the morning, thanks. There’s a fine show in there, but the show itself doesn’t know it.
The Rain is the anti-Westworld. As its fifth episode (“Have Faith”) amply demonstrates, it knows where its bread is buttered: in the faces and emotions of its cast of characters as they face a horrific world in which only connecting with each other keeps them afloat, and in racing through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes at a pace brisk enough to keep them feeling fresh while making each deviation from the expected path a genuine surprise rather than a “twist” so painstakingly telegraphed that redditors could figure it out months in advance and call it a day.
Written by Mette Heeno and directed by Natasha Arthy (making her series debut after the first four Kenneth Kainz–helmed episode), this installment sticks with the usual structure. While the small band of young people who’ve survived the titular apocalyptic weather try to keep together and keep moving forward in the face of overwhelming odds, a flashback reveals the troubled backstory of one of their number. But this one dials up both the overwhelming odds and the troubled backstory. It does so with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of pathos and horror, painting the world today and their lives before it with broad, slashing strokes. It reminds me of listening to, I dunno, an old Ministry record, or watching a sci-fi/action movie from the genre’s ’80s heyday. The pleasure and the power lie in the skilled un-subtlety of it all.
Let’s take the flashbacks first. This time, it’s Lea’s turn in the spotlight, as we discover the most traumatic incident in the sweet, smiling, brace-faced young Christian woman’s life. It took place the night before the Rain fell, and continued through that first terrible storm. Raised an observant Christian by an overprotective (though not cartoonishly so, thankfully) mother, she successfully pleads to be allowed to attend a rather wild party. “You make me feel like a freak,” she tells her mom before the older woman acquiesces, a heartfelt acknowledgement of how she wishes she could be a religious person without being made to feel like an outcast.
But the party itself is like a more realistic version of the prom from Carrie. Her fellow revelers invited her as what seems like a cruel prank, a chance to take the good Christian girl down a few pegs. The method is brutal simplicity itself: a roofie in her very first drink of the night, a few hours of treating her new drugged-up party girl persona like their own personal entertainment, and finally, inevitably, a gang rape recorded on cameraphones, showing a side of this kind person she herself had never seen — and wouldn’t even have without the influence of date-rape drugs — to the entire world. When she awakes the next morning, half-naked and disoriented, she finds the previous night’s incident on the web for all to see; when she calls her mom for help, that help is refused, and Lea is abandoned to her shame and isolation and danger. When she prays for help from God instead, the Rain comes, and with it the deaths of not only her tormenters but her mother, who relents and hastily dashes out the door to her own death in an attempt to come rescue her daughter.
It’d be easy to dismiss this string of events as a collection of afterschool-special clichés and too-cute coincidences, sure. But you shouldn’t. For one thing, rape culture is sometimes a clever, nuanced thing, but it isn’t always, because the power imbalance behind it is such that it doesn’t need to be. What happened to Lea is a thing that happens, and it isn’t the show’s fault if depicting it comes across as simplistic. For another, one of the purposes of genre entertainment is to use elements of unreality and spectacle to articulate intense emotions and traumas that everyday vocabulary cannot. The fall of the Rain as if in response to a prayer by a desperate, twice-rejected rape victim is a one-in-million shot, but it’s also exactly how Lea feels inside anyway.
Finally, and most importantly, any discussion of this storyline that relies solely on plot ignores the incredible, wholly committed performance of Jessica Dinnage as Lea. She is unafraid to depict the way in which the deranging effect of a repressed upbringing explodes into a sort of ugly, ravenous lust when it’s taken advantage of by predators like the people at the party. Being “sexy” in the ways that society demands, while at the same time being too abject and out of it to measure up, and having no idea of the disconnect…goddamn, that’s a high bar for any performer to clear, and Dinnage does so with astonishing power. The performance culminates in the look on her enormously expressive face — a facet of her capabilities as an actor that’s already been impossible to ignore on this show — when she discovers the video of what happened, when she’s rejected by her mother, when she prays, and when she watches her tormenters and hears her parent and should-be protector all die. Dinnage has a Laura Dern/Claire Danes–level cryface, and her grimace of agony says all that needs to be said.
Juxtaposed with all this is the series’ most over-the-top SURVIVAL HORROR material to date. Still reeling from the abduction and presumed murder of their friend Jean, the group stumbles across a large country estate with working electricity and an entire community of uniformed live-off-the-land spiritual types. (In their blue-gray linen pajamas they come across like a friendlier, more talkative version of The Leftovers‘ Guilty Remnant.) More impressive than the size and security of the group is their supply of clean, running water, which they use to do such heretofore impossible things as grow edible tomatoes and take showers. This last bit leads to a blissfully goofy and really pretty sexy scene where the group — sans Martin, skeptical from the start — strip to their underwear and shower en masse. Beatrice, actually, strips to less than her underwear, a fact that Rasmus greets with obvious interest and delight — obvious enough, in fact, to lead to some good-natured ribbing from Simone, whom he then smilingly teases in turn about whether she’d had sex before the Rain, and whether she wants to try it, presumably with her unspoken crush object Martin, now. It’s a non-explicit way of delivering on some of the promise of the series that was detectable back in the pilot: How do kids who spent their formative years in sibling-only isolation react when sexuality is on the table? (As they say on twitter, very carefully.)
Aside from Martin, who keeps skulking around the bowels of the compound looking for both secrets and his confiscated weaponry, each member of the group has their own reasons to want to stay. Patrick likes the grub. Rasmus needs a place to recuperate. Beatrice likes both the grub and Rasmus. Simone needs to protect Rasmus and investigate the connection between the group’s in-house doctor and their father’s company Apollon; like the doctor they visited and almost got killed by in the previous episode, he has an Apollon-branded syringe he tries to use on Rasmus, contents unknown. Last but not least there’s Lea, who finds a kindred spirit and a chance for confession and forgiveness in a kindly older woman named Karen. Indeed, Lea seems on the verge of joining the group in earnest when their secret is finally revealed…
Please fill in the CANNIBALISM slot on your post-apocalyptic bingo card! Turns out the group’s monthly communal meal involves cooking and eating one of their own. (This turn of events was cleverly foreshadowed by the show’s composer, Av Av Av; I kept hearing sounds in his electronic score that seemed familiar, but only after seeing the torso did I recognize them as echoes of the dissonant string screeches that accompany the opening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) Each month’s “meal” selected at random via a Shirley Jacksonesque lottery method. You have three guesses as to which of our main characters draws the unlucky straw here, and the first two don’t count, but the obviousness of Lea’s selection is belied by the power of connecting her flashback trauma with the literal objectification and consumption of a human body she’s now faced with.
But here’s the thing. It’s not that all the “we are all one” rhetoric of the group’s bearded, infuriatingly mellow leader is bullshit, necessarily. They really all seem to believe it, up to and including Lea’s friend Karen, cannibalism or no. The proof: Karen does not turn out to be the grinning old-lady fundamentalist psychopath of countless stories of this sort. She voluntarily takes Lea’s place rather than see the girl sacrificed to the needs of the group, something only someone who believed in the underlying message of love rather than merely getting off on the violent “one of us, one of us” elements of cult life would do. What’s more, the cult allows our heroes to leave after they’ve learned what’s going on, even returning Martin’s gun to them. And for his part — or, really, the show’s — Martin doesn’t lead some righteous massacre of the man-eaters they way you might expect him to. It’s never spoken out loud, but they seem to realize that this is not just a cult but a culture, a group that’s figured out something that works for them and to which they pretty much all voluntarily adhere. It’s awful, but is it really any more awful than all kinds of mutually agreed-upon shit we do in “normal” society? I’ll take your answer off the air, as I watch the white supremacist gameshow host who was appointed president by the antidemocratic electoral college bring us closer to World War III.
The ostensible climax of the episode comes when the group forces out its doctor, whose interactions with Simone about Apollon’s disastrous attempt to save the world and thus destroy it indicate he’s too stuck in the past for the collective to handle. He finds our heroes, injects himself with that syringe, and starts dying of the infection before Martin puts one through his skull.
But the real endpoint of the episode is Lea’s face, as it shifts from horror about eating and being eaten to shocked gratitude and love for the woman volunteering to die in her place. Human connection wins out in the end even as everything around them turns to shit. It’s not a happy message, no. But it’s worth hearing, and The Rain knows itself well enough to know how best to deliver it.
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.
