The Boroughs Episode 3 Review: Right-Handed Chirality, an Illegal Autopsy, and the Crew That Finally Names Itself
Episode 3 spends a $7,000 lab budget, breaks into a funeral home, and confirms — in a single line about amino acids — that the thing in the walls of The Boroughs is not from this planet.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 3.
After the basement reveal of Episode 2, the show had a choice. It could draw out the mystery, drip-feed clues, run two more episodes of “is the old man crazy or is something really there?” Or it could move. The Boroughs moves. Episode 3 doubles the size of the misfit crew, makes the cliffhanger of Episode 2 immediately operational, and ends with every named character in this conspiracy carrying the same puncture marks at the base of their skull.
It also smuggles its title in through the most thankless character on the show, and somehow makes the geometry stick.
Wynn takes the desert
The cold open is Wally and his husband Wynn in the kitchen, and the temperature is wrong. Wynn announces he is going camping for a couple of days, to give Wally some space. Wally didn’t ask for space. Wynn says he could use some. He runs through the prescription pickups Wally is supposed to manage. He leaves.
The scene is two minutes long and it is the most painful in the hour. Wynn is not abandoning Wally. He is exhausted. The husband shopping for coffins in Episode 2 has spent six months as both spouse and end-of-life manager, and the man he loves has just spent the entire pilot week building an HPLC machine in the garage with the new neighbor. Wynn does not yell. He does not slam the door. He just takes the truck out into the desert with a tent, and the rest of the episode plays out in the silence he leaves behind.
It is the first time the show has let one of its leads acknowledge the cost of the obsession the season is asking them to take on.
Neil delivers the pyramid
The season’s title for this hour comes courtesy of Sam’s son-in-law Neil — the well-meaning Albuquerque husband who shows up to fetch Lilly’s Born to Run vinyl for Claire and stays long enough to be brushed off twice.
Neil reads. He reads in the way that people who do not work in mental health read about grief. He has been studying a new gloss on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. He explains, eagerly, that the old model treated grief as a linear progression through stages — denial, anger, sadness, et cetera — but the new model treats it as a pyramid, with acceptance at the base and the harder work above.
Sam interrupts him. Tells him to beat the rush-hour traffic. Tries to send him home.
Neil stops at the door. He tells Sam, quietly, that he gets it — that he understands Sam is not fond of him. He tells Sam that Claire is hurting too. He tells him you’re a dad, so you have to. It is the first moment of the season that Sam Cooper has actually been told something he cannot grumble his way out of, and Molina plays it as a man receiving a verdict from a man he has spent his whole life dismissing.
The pyramid is real. Sam refuses to climb it. The hour does not make him climb it tonight. But the geometry is in the room now.
Right-handed chirality
Sam and Wally’s lab work is the funniest piece of writing this season has done so far. Wally — banned from the community center for staging an orgy last month — pretends his garage hideout is for “a fundamentals of science class he’s putting together to get back in their good graces.” Renee corners him in the driveway and is not fooled. You have been spending a lot of time with Sam. Wally smiles. I like a fixer-upper.
The HPLC machine cost seven thousand dollars. Wally has spent it on a slightly used unit. Sam has spent the morning rewiring the panel for two dedicated twenty-amp circuits. When the results come back, Wally explodes into the most enjoyable monologue of the episode.
Every amino acid in every living thing on Earth has left-handed chirality, he tells Sam. It is how cells shake hands. You cannot shake hands with a left and a right; you would need two left hands. The blood from the creature Sam captured has right-handed chirality.
Which means the creature is not earthly life.
Sam, in his only good comeback of the season, says: so you don’t have shit. Wally counters: I spent seven thousand dollars, and now I know what it’s not. It is not a coyote with mange. It is not a shaved chimpanzee. It is not a figment of your imagination.
The show is being careful here. It is not naming the creature. It is not saying alien. It is letting Wally’s process — eliminate the earthly explanations, isolate what remains — do the work that genre would normally do with a wide shot of a spaceship.
Judy joins the crew
Alfre Woodard’s Judy has spent two episodes circling Sam Cooper. Episode 3 lets her catch him. She has been running his name through her old PD contact Erica — NCIC, N-DEx, a buddy at Chicago PD — and the result has come back boring. Sam Cooper is a Boy Scout. Two speeding tickets. That’s all.
So she does what reporters do. She follows him.
The break-in at the funeral home is the season’s first real action sequence, and the show treats it as the broadest possible heist comedy. Sam picks the lock from a YouTube video. Wally pretends he knows the place “like the back of his hand.” Judy ambushes them with expired 2002 pepper spray and threatens to pull the fire alarm. She lays out her ultimatum: talk fast.
Sam closes the sale with one word. Justice. For Jack. Judy hears the word, looks at the door behind which Jack’s body is waiting, and walks into the embalming room with them.
The friendship between Judy and Renee that the pilot promised gets its first real scene in this aftermath. They sit in the hallway while Wally does the work. They drink something. They wait. Two journalists from different decades have just decided to start working again on the same story.
The autopsy
Wally finds the marks. The back of Jack’s throat is dotted with puncture wounds — most healed over, some fresh — and they trace a path to the base of Jack’s brain. The thing had been tapping Jack like a keg. Feeding. Possibly for months.
Then Wally turns to Renee and Sam and tells them they have to open their mouths.
The check is the episode’s emotional pivot. Wally already suspects Sam — Edward said the owl was in his walls, and Sam moved into Edward’s old house. Renee volunteers because she spent some nights at Jack’s. Both of them have the marks. Wally checks himself. Confirms — he has not been fed on yet. Sam Cooper says the cleanest line he has had all season: it could be feeding on anyone. Wally finishes the sentence: or everyone.
The Maxwell’s diagnosis the pilot established is now a working theory of villainy. The show is not yet calling the Manor a feeding ground for the creature, but every viewer in the room can do the math the episode is leaving them to do. Edward saw the thing because the thing was inside his walls. Edward is at the Manor because what the thing did made him look insane. Everyone the company has ever filed under Maxwell’s may have been someone who, like Edward, started to notice.
Renee and Paz
The hour’s quietest love story takes place in parallel. Renee’s security camera has flagged motion at her house — but the camera caught no figure, only a knocked-over trash bin. Officer Paz Reyes comes over to investigate, finds nothing, decides to swap out the camera tomorrow, and stays.
Renee, who was Jack’s mistress — yes, the Tiger Balm woman from Episode 1 was Renee, and yes, the show plants and pays off that recognition with one perfect line — confesses the affair the moment Paz says she saw the look Renee gave Wally at the memorial. How long have you known about me and Jack? Since the barbecue. What gave us away? Tiger Balm.
The scene is the kind of quiet that streaming dramas rarely write for women in their seventies. They drink. They talk about Renee’s drummer past and her band’s Glastonbury 2010 set. They notice each other. Renee asks if she can kiss Paz. Paz says yes. The camera lets them have it.
Geena Davis is playing a woman who has spent her grief throwing herself at the case her dead lover left behind, and the show lets her have an honest, quiet, mid-conviction kiss with someone who is not going to look away from her in the morning. It is the first time The Boroughs has earned the word romance in its register.
Art’s quest, and the price of Brooks
Clarke Peters gets the hour’s most tonally daring scene. Art visits Brooks’s grave in the desert with a coffee cup full of birdseed. He tells his dead pet crow that ever since the kids moved out and Judy moved on, he has been searching for proof there’s more to life than just knockin’ about and hangin’ out. He has read books. He has tried religion. He has done psychedelics. None of it took.
Till the day you died.
Art saw something he could not explain. He saw the divine. He says it again. I’m gonna get to the end. I’m gonna look God right in the eye. Even if it burns me.
Then Hamlet. Flights of angels, Brooksy. Flights of angels.
The episode is not telling us what Art is going to do. It is telling us he is going to do something. The hike-with-a-backpack of Episode 2 has now ripened into a quest. The show is patient with his grief in a way it could only be because it has the runway of eight episodes and a Duffer Brothers’ confidence about how late an act can land.
The arrest, and the way out
The cops arrive at the funeral home before Wally can finish. Sam takes the heat. He says he came alone — that he just wanted to say goodbye to Jack — and Renee, Wally, and Judy slip out a side door. Hank, the security chief, plays at being patient. Sam plays at being a grieving widower. The show plays at being a heist comedy whose heroes won the haul they came for.
By the end of the episode, the crew has the marks, the chirality, and each other. Wynn is in the desert. Renee is in love. Art has a quest. Judy is back on the beat. Sam Cooper, who walked into this town to die alone, just spent his evening picking a lock with a doctor with stage-four cancer and a former journalist who was running his background check three days ago.
The pyramid has its base.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Wally jokes that the pharaohs tried to take it with them and got looted. He is dying. He is also being read.
- Wynn’s prescription list includes statins and Norvasc. Wally’s heart is also a problem. The cancer is not his only ticking clock.
- Judy uses 2002 pepper spray. Of course she does. The show is very clear that the misfit crew is operating with garage-sale equipment against a corporation that owns the unincorporated land they live on.
- The Glastonbury 2010 photo on Renee’s mantle is the season’s first deposit on her past. The drummer-with-no-resume hiring The Boroughs gave her becomes a different story when you remember the lineage.
- The puncture wounds in Jack’s throat are mostly healed, some fresh. The creature has been feeding repeatedly. It is not a one-time predator. It is a parasite.
- Hank’s “What? Like zombies?” on the dispatch radio is the funniest single line in the hour. He is not, on balance, taking The Boroughs’ weirder reports seriously.
Verdict
Episode 3 is the show running. Sam and Wally have a working lab, a theory, and a heist. Judy has the case file. Renee has Paz. Art has a quest. Wynn has the desert. And every named character we care about has the same scar map at the base of their throat.
The hour delivers two extraordinary kitchen-table scenes — Wynn’s exit and Neil’s pyramid — and then one of the funniest action set-pieces of the streaming year. It also lets Geena Davis and the actor playing Paz find a register for late-life intimacy that almost no American television manages without flinching.
The thing has right-handed chirality. The thing has been feeding on the crew the whole time. The Manor is not a hospital. And Wally, dying, has just become the show’s de facto medical examiner.
Rating: 9.0/10