‘The Underground Railroad’ Episode 4 Recap: Origin Story

The Underground Railroad is cutting to the chase. In this short episode (“Chapter 4: The Great Spirit”), which clocks in well below 40 minutes if you don’t count the credits, we see the origin story of Arnold Ridgeway, the implacable slave-catcher who’s been on Cora’s trail since she escaped. The brevity is, in part, the point. There’s nothing terribly complicated about how Arnold became the man he is when we first meet him in the series. There’s not a complex story of cycles of abuse. There’s no painstaking indoctrination in the ways of racism, colonialism, anti-Blackness, or the “merits” of slavery as an institution. There’s simply a weird, angry young man, and a father who loves him too much to see the monster inside until it’s too late.

Young Arnold (Fred Hechinger) is the son of a blacksmith, played by Peter Mullan, the Scottish actor who’s become prestige TV’s grizzled patriarch of choice. (He’s played similar roles on Ozark and Westworld.) Ridgeway Senior is a gentle man, possessed of a belief in the Great Spirit, which he describes in almost Force-like terms as a sort of spiritual fire flowing through the veins of everything under the heavens. Life, for him, is a measure of seeking and finding that Spirit, heeding its call. He found it in his late wife. He finds it in his work. And to the apparent chagrin of the locals, he finds it in the freedmen he’s hired to work for him.

Arnold, though? The only time he’s felt the Great Spirit is after a terrible accident when he impaled himself on a rake in the workshed. Seeing his own blood for the first time, he felt he also caught a glimpse of the Spirit—but it’s gone now, and, he tells his late mother at her grave, he’s worried he’ll never find it again. It’s also worth noting here that he sucks as a blacksmith, though his father offers him nothing but encouragement.

In a way, that’s the problem. His father is so kindly, so supportive, that Arnold seems to resent his patience and serenity. Why wouldn’t he, when he himself has so little of either?

Things take a turn for the sociopathic when Arnold encounters Mack (Danny Boyd Jr.), the young son of one of the freedmen, playing with matches by a well, hoping to glimpse the Spirit that Arnold Senior talks about by watching the flame fall all the way to the bottom. But the matches keep blowing out before they arrive. So Arnold suggests that Mack fall with the flame, to keep it kindled with his own spirit. Mack dutifully obeys, and breaks his leg—but the match stays lit, something I don’t think is lost on Arnold.

Arnold has bigger dreams than his dad’s smithy can offer him. He covetously eyes a fancy new coat in the local shop, but the owner refuses to let him buy it using his dad’s credit. Then a chance glimpse of a slave-catcher arriving in town changes his fortunes, and the course of his life.

Arnold approaches the catcher and his men to say he knows of a patch of forest where a runaway slave they’re searching for is likely to hide. And sure enough, Arnold finds the man…tending to his infant son, left to him when his wife was sold to another master, prompting him to run away in the first place. Arnold brains the guy with a branch, and the catcher hauls both father and baby away, referring to the latter as “it.” “How come you call him ‘it’?” Arnold asks. “Why not,” the catcher replies.

Arnold’s brief adventure with the slave-catchers gives him extra pluck at dinner that night, when he confronts his father about the perceived moral difference between freedmen, who’ve “earned” their rights, and runaway slaves, who have not. He does this within earshot of Annie (Charity Jordan), the freedwoman who prepares their meals for them, a fact his father tries to point out. Mullan is fantastic in this scene, his dark eyes glowing with increased dismay at the young man his son has turned into. Director Barry Jenkins’s camera gives us Arnold’s point of view, first as he stares down Annie while grilling her about freedmen and slaves, then as he looks into his father’s horrified eyes. “Please don’t break my heart,” the old man tells him pitifully.

In the end, Arnold gets his fancy coat with the money he made from helping to catch the slave—two coats, actually, one of which he offers as a present to his father. Ridgeway Senior rejects it. “Well, look at you, son,” he says. “Two coats. That’s a mighty fine thing.” The way he says it he might as well be talking about his son’s two pet rats.

And that’s a wrap on the origin of Arnold Ridgeway, all-powerful slave-catcher—just a bitter failson who turns his anger at being unworthy of his father’s love, of the Great Spirit, outward against others. (It’s reminiscent of the origin story of the spectral antagonist in Them; he too was motivated by personal failures, the loss of a loved one, and a feeling of disconnection with the deity.) How many Arnold Ridgeways are out there right now, plotting to punish the Other for their own failure to find meaning any other way?
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 The Underground Railroad Episode 4 on Amazon Prime