The Boroughs Episode 2 Review: A Funeral, a Crow Named Brooks, and the Blood of the Thing in the Walls
Episode 2 spends most of its runtime making the audience think the show is one kind of K-drama-of-grief and lands on a basement reveal that confirms it is something much weirder, much braver, and much closer to Stranger Things in disguise than the pilot let on.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 2.
The morning after the pilot’s barbecue, Jack is dead. The EMT calls it heart failure from sleep apnea — not uncommon, very tidy, please sign here. Sam Cooper, who saw something with his own eyes the night before, knows it was not a heart attack. He says it was a thing. The EMT offers him a free ride to the hospital. Sam declines. The hour does not, because Sam will spend the rest of his day refusing to be talked out of what he saw.
If Episode 1 was the Duffer Brothers letting the audience settle into Hawkins-via-retirement-community, Episode 2 is them flipping the lights off so we can see what was always in the room.
Lilly stops dancing
Sam’s grief-flashbacks return in the cold open, and this time the show finds a new gear for them. The kitchen-dance to Springsteen is identical to the one we saw last week — wife in the kitchen, husband in the doorway, Born to Run on the turntable — but this time, Lilly stops mid-step. The record keeps playing. She turns away. Sam says her name. She does not come back.
Molina plays the moment as a man whose grief has started bending the rules of his own memory. The pilot’s Lilly was a perfect snapshot. Episode 2’s Lilly is half-snapshot, half-haunting. The show is being careful to never quite tell us whether Sam is sliding into Maxwell’s, sliding into a creative kind of mourning, or — the option the pilot is daring us to entertain — being shown something on a frequency the rest of The Boroughs has been told not to see.
His daughter Claire calls. He brushes her off. He hears tapping in the wall and says, almost involuntarily, there’s an owl in the walls. He hangs up the moment he realizes whose phrase that was.
Art makes pancakes Judy can’t eat
The episode’s best two-hander is the scene between Art and Judy at breakfast. He has picked raspberries on a hike, made her special pancakes, like the old days, quoted a John Gunther line about happiness depending on a leisurely breakfast. She is allergic to raspberries. The discovery is staged as a tiny shock — she has only been allergic for a year or two; he forgot. He covers, pivots to bacon, leaves for “golf with Womp,” and walks straight past his golf clubs to a hiking backpack he has been quietly preparing all morning.
Clarke Peters plays Art with the smallest possible adjustments. His face when he realizes the pancakes won’t be eaten is the face of a man losing a battle he has not yet admitted he is in. The episode’s later scene with the crow named Brooks puts the early breakfast scene in a new light: Art is preparing to do something alone in the desert, and the rest of his day is one long checklist of farewells.
Renee finds the pattern in the quartz
The mystery seedling of the pilot — Renee’s stolen bag of rose quartz, dismissed by security chief Hank — sprouts into a working investigation. At Pilates class, she discovers Betty’s chess set is missing all the white quartz pieces. The schoolteacher Paul has lost his quartz jewelry. Another resident’s quartz coasters have disappeared. The show is establishing that the thefts are not random or senile — they are targeted to a mineral.
Geena Davis plays the recognition beat as a woman who has spent her entire late career not being believed and is now watching the pattern click into focus across a Pilates studio. She corners Officer Paz Reyes — Hank’s reluctant subordinate, who has been doing his best to keep his job — and offers a deal: file the report, even if Hank fires you for it, and I will buy you dinner. With candles. With wine. No Applebee’s. Paz takes it. The scene is the season’s first hint that the misfit crew has a structural ally inside The Boroughs’ security apparatus.
Edward gives Sam the riddle
The hour’s most patient scene is Sam visiting Edward at The Manor. The interior is dressed to comfort residents with Maxwell’s — fake mid-century kitchen, a fake retro café, a fake newspaper on the table — and Edward keeps slipping out of the present and into 1973, when his son Joey was still alive. He calls Sam “Joey.” He talks about flying kites. He apologizes to a kite that is not there.
Then he comes back. The clarity arrives on its own clock and stays for exactly seven words. I caught one. I locked it up. When Sam pushes, Edward gives him the mantra: the key is in the light. The owl is in the walls. He repeats it until the orderlies wheel him out.
It is the cleanest scene the show has built so far. Edward is not a vessel for exposition; he is a man whose interior weather is unstable on the show’s terms, and his lucidity costs him. The mantra is the closest thing the season has yet given the audience to a key, and the show makes us pay for it.
Wally and Wynn argue about miracles
Denis O’Hare and the actor playing Wally’s husband Wynn carry the hour’s emotional ballast. Wally is dying of stage-four prostate cancer that has now spread to his liver. He has tried surgery, radiation, chemo, even proton-beam therapy. His Santa Fe oncologist has stopped returning his calls. He is reading studies on apricot seeds and Chinese herbs and hypnosis, and his husband is begging him to stop.
The argument lands because both of them are right. Miracle cures aren’t real, Wynn says. Well, miracles are all I got, Wally answers. Later, when Sam asks Wally what he would tell a patient just like himself, Wally answers without hesitating: I’d tell him to try the apricot seeds.
The hour stages a coffin-showroom scene around this disagreement — Wynn shopping pre-grief, Wally cracking jokes about a Bluetooth-speaker coffin and “afterlife DJ” privileges — and the show refuses to make either of them the villain. The coffin scene is funny because they are both still flirting. It is devastating because they are flirting in a furniture store full of caskets.
The memorial at Señor Cocinas
Jack’s send-off at a Mexican restaurant is the funniest sustained sequence in the season so far. Blaine Shaw delivers a eulogy invoking a line Jack “used to say” — in every life, a little rain must fall — which Renee leans over to inform Wally Jack never said in his life. The masters-of-ceremonies pivot to Toni, a very, very special friend of Jack’s, who steps to the mic and starts singing what the audience eventually realizes is the soundtrack of Jack’s mistress’s audition tape. Wally is high on watermelon kush. Renee asks Art for a contact buzz the moment she realizes Shaw is speaking.
The memorial is the show doing what Stranger Things never had to do — write a comedy of small-town hypocrisy under a faux-sincere CEO eulogy — and it works because the misfit crew is hearing the same dishonesty we are. Toni is great. The grandstand cries. Blaine Shaw remembers Jack from when he was thirteen. None of it can possibly be true, and everyone in the room is letting it be true anyway, because that is what funerals are.
The woman in the smoke
The hour’s quietest scene is Wally outside the restaurant lighting a cigarette and being joined by a woman who introduces herself only by what her husband would say about her if he knew she was smoking. She tells Wally that she goes to a lot of these. She tells him the price you pay for living in The Boroughs is that the funerals stack up. She tells him sometimes it’s too much and then, after a long pause, you feel like you’re going to explode, and the desert can hold it all.
The show is careful to not name her. We never see Blaine Shaw’s wife in Episode 1. The CEO mentions her exactly once: as my wife likes to remind me, time is a precious commodity around here. If this is the same woman, the season has just signaled who its real ally on the inside might be. Wally clocks her. The show holds the scene long enough to make sure the audience clocks her too.
The crows and the divine
Art’s hike-with-a-purpose ends with him watching his pet crow Brooks attack something invisible in the desert air. Brooks dies. Art finds the place where Brooks died and stares at the sky. Then the sky fills with crows — thousands of them, a Hitchcock cloud — and Art whispers I glimpsed the divine. He returns to Renee at the memorial high on it.
The show is being beautifully precise about how it doses its supernatural register. Brooks the bottle-cap-loving psychopomp is not played as ominous. He is played as a friend. His death is staged as grief, not horror. The cloud of crows is allowed to be a religious experience for a man who has spent his hour discovering his wife was unfaithful. The thing in the air is not a monster yet; it is whatever Art needs it to be in that moment.
Sam and Wally in the basement
The episode’s last scene confirms the season’s premise out loud. Sam — who has spent the day at home, building rigs and running tests — drags Wally to his trashed living room. He shows him a smear of dark fluid he has collected. He says it is the blood of the creature that killed Jack. He hands Wally a pair of goggles. He turns out the lights.
Wally puts on the goggles. The Seraphim’s pre-recorded ad chirps in the background — there’s always something to do in The Boroughs — and on a sentence break, something registers in the room. Wally drops his shoulders. Wally says yes. Wally says he sees it.
What is it?
A miracle.
The pilot established the bones. Episode 2 names the body. Whatever is hunting old people in The Boroughs is not visible in the light, and it bleeds. The show has officially stopped withholding its genre.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Kayleigh, Sam’s transition manager, drops by to test his story. She uses the words confusion, agitation, disassociation in the same sentence Sam says aging. The show is teaching us the company’s preferred language for what they do to inconvenient residents.
- Edward’s “the key is in the light” pairs with the Seraphim’s hardwired install. Each home’s Seraphim has a light. The next episode will almost certainly test this hypothesis.
- The woman smoking outside Señor Cocinas tells Wally she “puts it out there in the desert.” Note this for later. The desert is being established as a containment vessel.
- Renee’s quartz thefts now include chess pieces, jewelry, and coasters. Quartz is the connective tissue. Whatever is collecting it is collecting it on purpose.
- Art’s golf clubs go untouched. The hike-and-Brooks sequence is staged as a man preparing for a final goodbye, then interrupted by grace.
- Wally’s hallucination at the memorial is Little Shop of Horrors’ “Mushnik and Son” sequence. The episode is putting a “monstrous plant fed by neglect” image directly into your head before the basement reveal. The Duffers do not waste hallucinations.
Verdict
Episode 2 is the show stepping confidently into its own register. The Lilly-stops-dancing flashback is the cleanest grief beat the series has produced. The Edward-as-oracle sequence pays off Episode 1’s exposition with hard-won lucidity. The Pilates-investigation, the coffin-showroom-flirtation, the desert-crow-revelation, and the Toni-at-the-mic memorial set-piece all earn their seats at the table.
Then the hour ends with Wally putting on goggles and confirming that the thing in the walls is real, visible only in darkness, and bleeding. The pivot is enormous and the show lands it. After two episodes, The Boroughs is no longer a grief portrait disguised as sci-fi. It is sci-fi, dressed in the most disarming grief portrait Netflix has aired this year.
The misfit crew is forming. Officer Paz is on the inside. Mrs. Shaw, almost certainly, is on the verge of being recruited. Edward has a key. And the desert can hold it all — until it can’t.
Rating: 9.1/10