‘NOS4A2’s Take on Addiction Is Like a Scissor in the Gut

I worry that I drink too much. To be clear, I don’t think that I actually do drink too much, but I get concerned about the amount of adult interactions that involve alcohol in some capacity that I’m involved in. A lot of that probably stems from when I was growing up watching my father drink at dinner, and being worried that he was drinking too much, far before I understood how alcohol worked, or how much was a reasonable amount to drink.

But suffice to say, tonight’s NOS4A2, which featured a scene with Vic McQueen (Ashleigh Cummings) worrying about her father ordering two beers at a time at dinner hit pretty close to home. And even if I can’t directly relate with the outcome of the scene, it underlined one of the series’ main themes: addiction.

Spoilers for NOS4A2 “Scissors for the Drifter” past this point.

It’s funny (or maybe it isn’t, I don’t know), because my first impulse about this episode was to write a jokey “here are the rules for playing Scissors for the Drifter.” If you missed the episode, the joke here is that the rules are “stab someone with scissors and then rip them apart with your bare teeth.” That’s what happens to Sheriff Bly (Chris McKinney) when he gets a little too close to Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto). Bly gets thrown in the trunk of Manx’s car, The Wraith, and carted off to Christmasland. The headline here is that we finally get to see inside of the dark, Christmas-themed park, replete with a winking moon and children with sharp teeth and ratty hair. Unfortunately for the enchanted Bly, though, he ends up losing the Scissors for the Drifter game, torn apart.

But like most episodes of this show, though the horror is one of the focal points, showrunner Jami O’Brien (who wrote the episode) gets the most meat not out of Sheriff Bly, but from Vic’s family drama.

After leaving a stay at the mental hospital last episode, Vic returns home to find that her mother Linda (Virginia Kull) sold her motorbike while she was gone. Linda means the best: Vic has been returning from her motorbike rides with one eye red and bleeding, she discovered the dead body of her friend’s mother, and then there’s the whole mental hospital thing. Speaking as a parent myself, I understand coming from the perspective of your child being in danger, and wanting to protect them. Even if Vic is eighteen, in her mother’s eyes she’s still a child.

What Linda doesn’t know is that the bike isn’t just a symbol of Vic’s dependence on her father (which is, let’s be honest, Linda’s real reason for selling it), it’s also Vic’s knife. Her knife is the way she accesses her Inscape, called The Shorter Way, a mystical bridge that allows Vic to find things. Without it, the spiraling Vic won’t be able to stop Charlie Manx and get to Christmasland in order to rescue her friend, Haley (Darby Camp). So far Vic has seen: her friend Maggie (Jahkara J. Smith) give up, and in this episode switches one addiction )her magical Scrabble tiles) for another one (pills); an older Strong Creative like her and Maggie, Jolene (Judith Roberts), die; and her friend Bing Partridge (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) betray her. The one thing she has right now is her power to access The Shorter Way — and thanks to Linda, that’s gone, too.

So she decides to head off to an annual bike festival with her dad, ostensibly in order to get a new bike. The trip is pretty much a bust — even if her dad Chris (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) thinks a bike is a better deal, it doesn’t have the same feel as her old knife — so they head off to get something to eat.

That’s where the scene in question goes down, the one that made me feel physically uncomfortable with recognition while also tying together the themes O’Brien has been playing with this week (and all series long). In it, Chris orders two beers because, according to him, “you know how the service is here.” In his mind, he’s making a strategic play, thinking ahead. Yet at the same time it’s clear he’s taking swigs from both bottles, and quickly. He’s not playing for time… He’s a drunk. And even worse, Chris is smart enough to know he’s a drunk, but can’t stop. His excuses ring hollow even to him.

Vic, meanwhile, is dealing with more supernatural issues in the form of children from Christmasland calling her on the phone, despite nobody else being able to hear the phones ring. Their taunting messages shake Vic to the core, and continue the dark journey she began two episodes back with her first drink at a party. Furious, she heads back to Chris’s table and swigs a beer while he watches, unable to do anything. Chris, in many ways, is as much a child as Vic is an adult. They’re essentially playing their own form of Scissors for the Drifter, except instead of stabbing with cutting implements it’s with words and actions. Moss-Bacharach plays the heartache of this moment excellently. How can he, a career alcoholic, tell his daughter not to take a drink? What logical leg does he have to stand on? Yet just like how the children of Christmasland tear apart the surprised Bly, Chris is ripped to shreds by Vic’s actions, unable to intervene. He loves her, wonders how something he loves could do this to him, could be happening to him. But it’s all too much. He’s already lost.

Charlie Manx is facing a similar addiction, but to his car, The Wraith. That’s Charlie’s knife, the one that allows him to cart off kids and suck their energy in order to keep himself young. Last week Jolene broke his car, and he reverted to his actual age, a decrepit crone with a bent back and hooked fingers. He’s fading quickly, and we get to see him in withdrawal. I talked a bit last episode about how there’s no redemption for Charlie Manx, and we see now that a large part of that is he’s unable to detox from his addiction to his vehicle. Without it, he’ll ultimately die.

It’s probably worth mentioning that even with the riffs and trappings, NOS4A2 is a vampire show, and vampires — among many other things — have frequently been used as a metaphor for addiction. It’s an easy fit, as they’re typically depicted as pale night-dwellers who live in dank castles and dilapidated houses, luring unsuspecting victims in order to get their nightly fix. They’re prone to violence, and will start to waste away to nothing without the blood they need.

That’s not Manx, mind you, or the kids of Christmasland. But the leap from the creatures NOS4A2 is actually dealing with, to the typical fiction used to describe Dracula and his kin is a Venn diagram so tight it’s practically a circle.

Back to Vic, she isn’t where Manx is. Not yet. She’s headed down that road for sure (and for those of us who have read the book, we know things don’t turn out well in this regard), picking up on the addictions genetically gifted to her by her father. She chugs that beer. Her friend gives her pot, and she’s finally able to sleep. All these numbing agents are whittling her down, providing her the solace she thinks she needs, giving her a blunting instrument when all she needs is her knife back.

That too is its own sort of addiction, of course, and you can see that in the way Vic spirals out of control without it. She hits things, she yells, she needs her bike, even if it’s ultimately killing her. From an audience perspective, that’s tough to deal with, because we need Vic to get her fix from her knife in order to stop Manx and save the kids of Christmasland. To be the hero. But that’s not how this narrative works, and that’s not how life works.

When I was in college, before I turned 21 (I was a very law-abiding kid), I had a conversation with my father about his drinking. He had a beer, maybe two with dinner. That was it. But he knew it bothered me, and he told me he would stop. He did. For a time. Recently, my daughter asked me why I drink beer with dinner, what I liked about it; and I could feel the gooseflesh pucker up, a stab in my gut, because she was me. And I worried, because if I had initially chided my father, and my daughter was asking me questions, what would I pass this on to her? Would it be worse? And was it already too late?

That’s what I see in these scenes, mostly the ones between Vic and Chris, and never more clearly than in this week’s episode… The idea that we all have our vices, and sometimes they veer into addiction, and despite us meaning well, sometimes those get passed along to our children. We try to gift them our best aspects, but we hand down our worst aspects, as well. Hopefully, the next generation does better. Hopefully they survive it, and make it through.

But that moment when you realize what they haven’t yet realized… It hurts. When they see you as human, and weak; when the scissors are in you, their young faces looking at you so sweetly, their teeth ripping your flesh from you shoulder, the lights of Christmasland all around? You might scream, you might try to fight. But ultimately you let it happen, because for you, it’s already too late.

NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.

Where to stream NOS4A2