‘Maniac’ Episode 5 Recap: Ghost Story

There’s something that’s been bothering me about Maniac and I couldn’t put my finger on it until now, but here it is. Creator Patrick Somerville, like co-star Justin Theroux, is a veteran of The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s gorgeous existentialist SFF drama about the survivors of an unexplained mass-casualty event. Once it worked out its first-season kinks, that show blended comedy and tragedy, the supernatural and the quotidian, the real with the surreal as well as any show on the air during its run, and quite possibly ever. It’s a lot like the show Maniac seems to want to be. And for what it’s worth, which is a lot, because looking at beautiful people is one of the great pleasures of both film and television, it starred two very beautiful people, namely Theroux and Carrie Coon.

Then there’s Maniac. Its male lead is Jonah Hill. Its female lead is Emma Stone, who looks like this:

This is not to insult Jonah Hill, who as Owen and his various dream-world doppelgangers is not trying to be some kind of dashing ladykiller — not even now, in an episode set during a 1947 séance at a rich occultist’s mansion. It’s simply to say that stories in which the male lead looks like a normal guy and the female lead looks like a goddamn Tolkien Elf are, more often than not, exercises in self-indulgence by male filmmakers. They feel lopsided, to the point where film criticism has developed terminology to help describe the phenomenon. Casting one of the world’s handsomest men, Theroux, as a weird dork does not help.

Now that I’ve scratched that particular itch, on with the show, which in this episode (“Exactly Like You”) is not so bad, actually. There are certainly the usual unforced errors, like a ghastly attempt to wring comedy out of a Zany Dance Routine, which drives some people completely wild with admiration (Legion, anyone?) but is basically the comedy equivalent of steampunk or Epic Zombie Bacon internet meme shit, fancying itself clever when it’s really just corny.

But as a Pill B-induced fantasy it’s more successful than the previous outing for sure. This time around, we learn Annie and Owen’s reveries are fused together because of the soldered-together circuits inside the GRTA supercomputer, the malfunction caused when she learned her friend Dr. Muamoto had died. As Drs. Mantleray and Fujita attempt to detach the pair without interrupting the study, they imagine themselves as an estranged husband-and-wife grifter team, Arlie and Ollie, on their way to that fancy séance. GRTA shows up as the woman in charge, Lady Nerberdine, who bears a striking resemblance to Greta Mantleray, Dr. James’s real-life mom.

Both Ollie and Arlie are secretly searching her mansion for The Lost Chapter (it sounds like it’s capitalized) of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Whispered about for centuries, it’s writing of such extraordinary vividness and power that all those who read it become lost in their own fondest fantasies forever.

This concept might have seemed familiar to director Cary Joji Fukunaga: It’s like a less sinister remix of weird-fiction writer Robert W. Chambers’s idea of a forbidden, madness-inducing play, as found in his book, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, The King in Yellow. It may just be a coincidence — Fukunaga didn’t create Maniac any more than he did True Detective, leaving those duties to writers Patrick Somerville and Nicholas Pizzolatto respectively — but still, it’s a heck of a thing to see one reality reflected in another, just like what’s happening with Owen and Annie.

There’s a pleasant just-shy-of-horror vibe to many of the goings-on in this episode, actually — not, perhaps, enough to satisfy my desire for Fukunaga to become the horror auteur he was born to be, but enough to keep things interesting. There’s a brief unexplained flash of a fornicating couple down a hallway that’s straight out of The Shining, for starters.

Owen’s strange imaginary brother appears once again to taunt him, and vomits up ectoplasm in the process.

Annie has a series of visions-within-the-vision caused by Dr. Fujita’s attempts to separate her psyche from Owen’s, and these have a genuinely dreamlike quality. Set within the clinical trial facility but still markedly out of place, they involve her watching her younger self and her eerily quiet sister play as their father screams at their absent mother in the background at one point, or looking into the room’s diorama and finding the smoking wreck of a toy car like the one her sister died in.

And while we’re in credit-where-due territory, it’s simply remarkable how much better Justin Theroux is as Greta’s real-world son Dr. James Mantleray when he’s calmly, professionally questioning Annie about her experiences with Pill B instead of doing half-assed fake instructional videos or having sex with a computerized cocksleeve or whatever else. Okay, so it starts with him badly offering her his condolences — “By the way, I was sorry to hear about your sister being crushed and then burned to death in that car accident” — but after that he’s gentle in guiding her through her recollections, astute in pinpointing her hopes and concerns, and damn near poetic in describing the way his pills work on the human mind. I buy him as an eccentric visionary so much more than I buy him as a funny eccentric visionary. And I think I’d buy Maniac as an eccentric drama so much more than I buy it as an eccentric dramedy.

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 Maniac Episode 5 ("Exactly Like You") on Netflix