When the showdown comes, who will be there? Who can you count on to have your back? In episode six of Them: The Scare, our heroes find out the hard way.
Dawn is abandoned by her lieutenant. For all that he likes her, for all that he staked his reputation on her, for all that he went so far as to tell world-renowned asshole LAPD Chief Daryl Gates that this Black woman would one day command the whole Robbery-Homicide Division — for all that, he still doesn’t have her back when she’s thrown to the wolves.
Nominally it’s over the death of that poor boy in her back seat, but it’s not like you usually see police departments fall all over themselves to hang one of their own out to dry for killing someone. But as Dawn sees when she notices a member of McKinney’s white-supremacist cop gang on the panel overseeing her disciplinary hearing, it’s really about her failure to go along with the old boys’ network.
But it turns out it’s about more than that as well. Dawn doesn’t know it, but she’s been working compromised this whole time. It was only when she asked her new partner Detective Diaz to look into all former residents of the abusive Mott foster home that the truth came out: She, too, was raised there as a toddler, an experience she’s completely either forgotten or blocked out of her memory. When the committee hit her with this, her resolve crumbles, in large part because she’s too stunned to keep fighting. But what could she say? She is too close to this case.
And on the way to this ugly destination, Dawn is forced to go through all the humiliating and invasive procedures to which suspects are routinely subjected — the daily process of dehumanization of which she is a willing participant, whatever she tells herself about why she does her job.
But even that isn’t the terra firma it once was for her. As she puts it to Athena during a horrendous family dinner to rival the one from Hereditary, she’s following in the footsteps of a man who died so young she can barely remember him, and who isn’t her biological father like she’d been told her whole life. With her career, her reputation, her life, and her son all in jeopardy, the whole thing must seem like a sick joke, and Athena just another person who can’t be trusted.
Dawn doesn’t know it, but Athena too has seen her job go to shit and been forsaken by a boss she thought of as a friend. Kyong-ah (Sung Yun Cho), the owner of the toy store where Athena works, found the discarded Raggedy Andy dolls Athena dumped into the trash after her dissociative episode, and to her it’s a bridge too far. She can overlook Athena’s recent flakiness and her struggles with her physical condition. She could even forgive tossing hundreds of dollars of merchandise in the garbage…as long as Athena apologizes.
That’s ground Athena won’t give. For one thing, it’s humiliating to be bossed around by someone who doesn’t normally do so; it makes you feel like they were lying in wait for this moment to show you who’s in charge. For another — and whether this is the real reason she hates the doll or not is unclear — the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls are “rooted in minstrelsy,” and the store’s predominantly Black customer base won’t want them. (Close your eyes, picture a photo negative version of one of the dolls, and you’ll get what she’s saying.) Kyong-ah fires Athena, who mutters “Ten years” as she leaves. A decade’s relationship, gone in two minutes, over some kind of trauma she can’t fully bring herself to acknowledge or discuss. It’s brutal. (The fact that neither Kyong-ah nor Lieutenant Schiff is Black is hard to miss as well.)
What about Kelvin, though. Does he have anyone he can lean on? Yes and no. His mother’s job and reputation, now a matter of citywide news, has made him a pariah at school, leading him to tell her not to come to his marching band’s performance that night. But she shows up anyway, an act I’m sure she at least sees as supportive. To Kel, it’s an upsetting refusal to respect his boundaries — you can see it on his face the moment he spots her.
But there’s something way, way worse going on with Kel even than his mom getting jammed up for a murder she didn’t commit. Something has come for him.
The man with the red hair has arrived at last, a menacing entity who looks like a cross between the Tim Curry Pennywise and the nightmarish version of Dawn he saw on the couch in an earlier episode. He plays a “game” with Kel in class that leaves the kid on his hands and knees, tapping the floor, then induces a seizure in Kel in the middle of the band’s performance. (It’s really too bad — more shows should include a solid minute or so of a high school marching band playing Cameo’s “Word Up!”)
Recognizing Kel symptoms as the same ones suffered by the boy who inexplicably died in her car, Dawn rushes down to help him. What he says to her is heartbreaking: “Mommy? I think something’s wrong with me.” He’s not the angry teenager who told her not to come anymore. Now he’s a scared little boy. Now he’s her baby, and he needs help she can’t give him. If you’re a parent, these are hard, hard words to hear.
In the previous episode, an envious Edmund vowed to “break all [Dawn’s] toys.” It’s taken a while, but we’re starting to see how what seem like disconnected crimes have begun to unmoor Dawn from the people and things she cares about. She’s been suspended at the very least. She can’t trust any of her colleagues. She hates her mother. Her son’s friends hate her, and hate him because of her. Now Kel is under direct attack. God knows how he’s doing it, or what devil’s bargain he made to have the power to do it at all, but if his goal is to make her as lonely as he is, he’s well on his way. When the showdown comes, who will be there?
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.
