‘Maniac’ Episode 8 Recap: Gangster’s Paradise

“The entire world’s mad, but you’re not. Is that what you think?” Thank you for this summary of the dilemma facing our hallucinating main characters, Ellie the Elf Princess, but as we cliché-say in the trade, that’s a bit On The Nose.

Titled “The Lake of the Clouds,” after a mythical location in Annie and Ellie’s fantasy world — one that doesn’t really exist even within those illusory confines — Maniac Episode 8 picks up directly where the last one left off. Annie is still stuck in the identity of a half-elf ranger guiding a dying princess in the form of her late sister, trying (and eventually succeeding) to convince her that this is all a mental simulation. Owen is still the tatted-up, sensitive son of Gabriel Byrne’s crimelord, worrying his status as a rat for the NYPD will get him or someone else killed, trying to form some kind of connection to Olivia, the avatar of the young woman he melted down at during his first real-world psychotic break. And at the behest of her son James, Dr. Greta Mantleray is embedded in the electronic mind of her depressed computerized doppelganger GRTA, where the good doctor’s truculence over being boiled down to computer code leads to disaster.

Yep, it’s time for Maniac to earn the title. After several references throughout the season, the concept of the “McMurphy” — a reference to the unfortunate state in which Randle Patrick McMurphy, the mental patient played by Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, finds himself — rears its ugly head for real. Despite the best efforts of her now self-aware sister (who brings her to the cliff where she died in an effort at confronting the trauma head-on) and Owen (who transforms first into a giant and then into a hawk, like the long-ago bird he rescued before his awful brother Jed beat it to death with a hammer for eating his hamster), Annie chooses the path offered by her fantasy world’s wicked queen, who bears a striking resemblance to you-know-who.

But she soon learns it’s a trap, and she’ll still be separated from her sister even if she choose to remain permanently embedded in the recesses of her own brain. Owen’s fate, meanwhile, is even more uncertain: He gets zapped back into “the globular cluster” of overlapping realities by the evil queen GRTA, and we don’t see where he winds up. You transform into a bird and fly from one reality into another, and this is the thanks you get, huh?

I’ll say this for these past two episodes. First, it’s great, and by Netflix standards positively groundbreaking, that they are two episodes. There’s really no reason for them to be — they’re both set in the same two fantasy worlds created when Annie and Owen ingest the C-pill and tell one continuing story about them from start to finish.

But Maniac is a half-hour dramedy, give or take a few minutes from time to time (mostly take, lately, which is also frankly incredible), and by god they’re sticking to it. Thus what would be a dense hour of TV becomes two breezy sitcom-length installments. It’s amazing how much easier the result goes down. I mean, can you imagine powering through 60 minutes of the fake Lord of the Rings world? Fortunately, you don’t have to!

I’ll say this for these episodes as well: I’m kind of shocked by how much I enjoy Owen’s gangster fantasy, and Jonah Hill’s performance in it. Combine that Soundcloud-rapper look in a mafia environment, which I haven’t seen before, and that weird blend of taciturn and terrified that’s Owen’s default way of interacting with the world, which I also haven’t seen in this context before, and you’ve got something…well, that I haven’t seen before.

That’s the first time Maniac has done anything original. It’s amazing how much easier the show’s magpie tendency to pluck ideas from other films works when there’s something genuinely unusual going on. I mean, the plot mechanics of the gangster fantasy are just remixing The Departed — more so now than ever, with Owen’s lost brother Jed/Grimsson appearing as a deep-cover gangster working with the cops to rescue him at the last minute, and high-ranking guys in the outfit secretly working with the Feds, and all kinds of out-of-nowhere murders and whatnot. But with that oddball take on the rogue-prince gangster archetype at the center, I didn’t mind.

Also, murder on TV is kind of fun sometimes.

And Owen’s date with Olivia, in which they discuss the Gnostic Gospels as a metaphor for how your brain interprets reality and weeds out conflicting data, and in which Olivia reveals she had a paranoid ex-boyfriend who sounds a lot like Owen himself, is a strong scene. Okay, so lines like “For people we’re supposed to love unconditionally, families seem to have a lot of conditions” is some very writerly shit, but oh well. At this point it’s clear I’m never gonna be deeply embedded in this show’s fantasy, so I’ll take whatever blips of enjoyment I can get.

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 8 ("The Lake Of The Clouds") on Netflix