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Everyone can identify Ratched‘s references to one particular major horror story. After all, the entire series is devoted to the origin story of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest‘s Nurse Mildred Ratched. But if you watch closely there’s a nod to another beloved piece of horror history: Stephen King’s The Green Mile.
The nod doesn’t happen until the first moments of Ratched‘s last episode. “Mildred and Edmund” follows its two titular siblings as they escape from Lucia State Hospital, literally in Edmund’s case and more metaphorically in Mildred’s. But before Edmund (Finn Wittrock) breaks free or Mildred (Sarah Paulson) runs off to Mexico with her girlfriend, this show’s corrupt governor tries to kill the patient who’s been giving him problems all season.
The first moments of the episode see Governor George Wilburn (Vincent D’Onofrio) presiding over an execution. “When I was informed that you were facing death by lethal injection for killing that seven-year-old, I said to myself, ‘Well, he doesn’t deserve that,'” Wilburn says to a young man roughly Edmund’s age. He then rips off a sheet, revealing an electric chair. “That you deserve this.”
That electric chair’s name is Big Sparky, and it’s implied that Edmund will be its next victim. Once the death row inmate is under its hood it’s not long before things go horribly wrong. The jolts of electricity, which are supposed to kill victims instantly, are seen rippling up the inmate’s body. It isn’t long before the man is set on fire in front of Governor Wilburn, reporters, and the watching public.
Though it went by a different name, that chair is disturbingly familiar. One of the pivotal scenes both in The Green Mile novel and the adapted film revolves around an electric chair by the name of Old Sparky. Guards are supposed to wet the sponge before placing it on the prisoners’ head, ensuring that they’re killed instantly. Despite being told this the entitled and sadistic Percy (Doug Hutchison) intentionally doesn’t wet the sponge to get back at Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter). Instead of the painless, quick death he was promised Del is set on fire and essentially barbecued to death.
Killing another inmate by not wetting a sponge? Having the public watch this horrific death? And naming both of those death machines “Sparky”? That’s too similar to be a coincidence.
