‘NOS4A2’ Finale: Abandon Your Dreams

AMC’s NOS4A2 has tackled a lot of big, heavy subjects in its first season, from alcoholism, to child abuse, to the greater supernatural mysteries that have plagued Vic McQueen (Ashleigh Murray). But they all come to a head in the two-part finale, “Sleigh House” and “Gun Barrel,” which brought together all of the themes of the season for one of the biggest, saddest gut punches I’ve ever seen on TV.

Spoilers for NOS4A2‘s Season 1 finale, “Sleigh House” and “Gun Barrel” past this point.

The double airing is actually two very different episodes, but they serve as nice (well, horrifying) parallels to each other — mainly due to the double losses Vic suffers over the course of the hours.

In the first, Vic finally tracks down Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto) after he kidnaps Craig (Dalton Harrod) to take him to Christmasland. It’s a trap, though, a way for Manx to discover Vic’s Inscape — a magical bridge called The Shorter Way that allows her to find things — and destroy it. He does this by picking up Vic’s bike — her Knife, the way she accesses The Shorter Way — and throwing it onto the bridge, making them both disappear. Vic collapses, absolutely physically and mentally destroyed when it happens, though it’s not apparent what this all means until later.

Vic escapes, she tracks down Manx, and sets his car on fire — with Craig trapped inside of it. She tries to get him out, but it’s too late. The car explodes, Craig dies, and Manx collapses into a withered, vegetative heap.

A win for the good guys, right? And on any other show, it would be. Sure, it cost Craig his life, but that’s the price you have to pay for taking down psychotic psychic vampires who kidnap children.

It’s not a win, however, not by a long shot. Even if you didn’t have the requisite set-up for Season 2, with the monstrous Bing Partridge (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) escaping and Manx ending up partially revived when a well meaning mechanic starts repairing his Knife, The Wraith, there’s still more horror to come. But it’s not supernatural in nature, it’s almost mundane in its sadness: Vic is pregnant with Craig’s baby.

She’s faced with some barely there protests from her father Chris (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) after she tells him about the pregnancy, but it’s clear due to a flash-forward at the end that Vic is keeping the baby, most likely to let Craig’s memory live on through the child. She’s also devoting herself to getting to Christmasland by any means necessary to save the children there (though they are seemingly far beyond saving), having now fully embraced her destiny as a hero.

So why is this such an awful, horrifying ending? Because Vic has been forced to literally and figuratively abandon her dreams. Let’s jump back to the scene with Manx and the bike, because it’s a pretty clear visual metaphor. Inscapes are lands of the mind only able to be made by Strong Creatives, people with a supernaturally powerful imagination. Manx obliterates Vic’s Inscape. It might still be there, somewhere (and since there is a Season 2 it’s reasonable to think Vic will access it again somehow), but Manx has destroyed her dreams. They aren’t accessible to her anymore. He’s blocked up her creative path, hobbled her mind, removed the part that makes her, her.

And then there’s her decision to keep Craig’s baby and hunt for Christmasland, which emphasizes this choice. She’s doing this instead of going to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she got a full ride and dreamt of attending. Not just so she could be an artist, which was her passion; but so she could escape the grueling life her mother had experienced, getting pregnant as a teenager and remaining trapped in Haverhill, cleaning houses for a living.

That’s Vic, now. Manx destroyed her dreams, and then her real world dreams were destroyed for her. Without her out, her creative path, she doesn’t see any reason to continue down the path to RISD and freedom. She’s trapped.

One could argue that perhaps that’s the path of growing up, that Vic is accepting the responsibility of being a hero. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Vic has beaten Manx temporarily, but otherwise, she’s lost. This is not a high note of a season closer. It’s the Empire Strikes Back, not Return of the Jedi (original edition, before they added in Hayden frickin’ Christensen).

It also, and I kept returning to this while watching the final two episodes, underlines why so much time was spent earlier in the season building up the importance of RISD to Vic. By sticking with the real world drama throughout the season versus non-stop scares, it makes that eventual loss, Vic turning her back on what makes her special — not her powers, but her creativity — all that more excruciating to watch.

It’s possible that when the show returns for Season 2 that Vic will have made some different choices in the intervening time. Of note, there’s a pretty significant time jump in the book, which I expect the show will parallel. But for now, we leave Vic McQueen far worse off than she was at the beginning of the season. Older, wiser, and dreamless. He may be mostly soup in a human body, but Charlie Manx won this round.

Where to stream NOS4A2