The Boroughs Episode 4 Review: A Trap, a Wolf, and the Warden Named Mr. Smile
Episode 4 sets the season’s first real ambush, gives the creature a nickname, and quietly hands the audience the historical paper trail that Shaw has spent three episodes pretending does not exist.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 4.
The cold open is the show finally showing the creature do something other than feed. An armed kid robs a Boroughs gas station, threatens the older couple at the register, demands the safe. There is no safe. The thing in the dark drags him out of the room. The couple does not flinch. That was awesome, the man says. It is the first time the show has framed the creature as something other than a parasite. It is also a quiet announcement that the residents who know about it have already learned to live with it as a household pet.
Then the hour widens out and the season starts laying down its first piece of historical paper trail — a warden named Milton Hauser, his son Tim, and a 1975 car crash in the desert that the show is taking great pains to suggest was nobody’s accident.
Boy Who Cried Wolf, told wrong
Sam wakes up in Hank’s office expecting to be arrested. Instead Shaw arrives, sits across the table, and tells him a fable. The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Shaw’s version. A boy in a perfect village sees a wolf at the edge of a dark forest. He tells the villagers. They believe him. Day after day, they form hunting parties. They find nothing. Eventually the villagers stop believing him. The boy could walk away. The boy could have a long and happy life. But his pride pulls him into the woods and the wolf eats him.
Do you see what I’m saying, Sam?
Sam, in the only piece of literary criticism the show is likely to land, corrects him. You forgot the ending. The villagers avenge the little boy. They kill the wolf.
Shaw smiles. Lets it go. Tells Sam he is free to leave. Then he drops the news he came to deliver. Edward — the man who broke into Sam’s kitchen with a knife, who gave Sam the owl is in the walls mantra, who pointed the season at its mystery from the cold open of Episode 1 — passed away in his sleep the night Sam visited the Manor.
He wasn’t well. He kept talking about seeing monsters. Got himself into all kinds of uncomfortable scrapes. Only one way that story ends.
The threat is precise. It does not require an arrest. It does not require violence. It requires Sam to keep going.
Renee and Paz fight about being seen
The morning after Episode 3’s love scene, Renee and Paz are negotiating what to do with what just happened, and the show writes the fight that any audience over fifty-five could see coming. Paz wants to take her to a Nosotros concert. Renee says no. He suggests Sunday. She says no. He proposes she come to his place for dinner. She offers her place instead.
He calls her on it. He says he feels like a sneaky link — the guy you don’t want your friends to see you with. She tells him, gently and not gently, that it isn’t worth the bullshit of being out together. That the looks they would get. That the assumptions. He says he doesn’t care. She tells him he will. He leaves.
Wally arrives at her front door minutes later because she texted SOS, then forgets which crisis the SOS was about. He lectures her. You treated him like a child, and now you’re upset he’s acting like one. He prescribes a king bed in Sedona, with a desert view, and tells her go be a whore in Sedona. It is the most Wally line of the season so far.
Renee almost books the room. Then she sees Paz from her kitchen window, security cart, headed somewhere he should not be going, and the booking call ends abruptly. The hour has more important business with Paz tonight.
Sam takes Renee to Albuquerque
The longest road segment of the hour is Sam driving Renee out to his daughter’s house in Albuquerque to liberate his collection of vintage CRT television sets. Wally believes — and the audience will eventually believe — that the cathode ray tubes in old televisions interfere with the creature’s blood. Sam’s old TV-restoration hobby has just become weapons R&D.
The drive lets the show give Renee and Sam an actual two-hander. He talks about Lilly. She asks if he believes in ghosts. He says he would have said no two days ago. He says he feels Lilly just around the corner. He says he saw her at Jack’s memorial.
Geena Davis lands the moment because she does not push. Renee has just lost the man she was sleeping with and the man she might have started sleeping with in the same forty-eight hours. She listens.
Then Claire arrives. Sam’s daughter, who has been calling him for days. She catches him with a pretty neighbor in the garage. She asks him to explain. He says he can’t. She says fine. She says I lost her too, Dad, and walks out. Renee waits in the car. Sam closes the garage door knowing he has just chosen the misfit crew over the daughter who came to bury her mother.
Molina lets us see him know it. The show does not let him fix it tonight.
Mr. Smile and the Hauser file
The hour’s quietest scene — and the one that will eventually matter most — is Sam tracking down the son of a man named Milton Hauser. He has gotten the name from somewhere, and the show is being careful about not telling us where. Milton Hauser was a prison warden. The inmates called him Mr. Smile because the only time he smiled was when he was hurting someone. He died in 1975, body burned beyond identification, casket closed.
Sam shows Tim Hauser an old photograph. The picture has Milton in it, and someone else.
Tim cannot place the other man.
The Duffer Brothers are doing the thing they do best — they have planted a black-and-white photograph in a kitchen in a town the audience has never been to, and they are letting it sit on the counter for the rest of the season. We do not know who the other man in the picture is. We do not yet have the certainty that he is Marcus Shaw — the miner who, the show will later tell us, founded The Boroughs in 1949 and grew it into a 75-year-old company empire. But we have the shape of it. And we have the only kind of evidence that matters in a Duffer plot: a missing patriarch, a closed casket, and a desert.
Tim Hauser’s other contribution to the hour is the worst date-night advice in television history. He tells Sam to punish Judy for her affair — to stab her in the front. The scene reads less like backstory and more like a moral fork in Sam’s road. Sam excuses himself before the speech is over. The show is making sure the audience understands that Sam is choosing not to be a Hauser man tonight.
Wally builds a date for a monster
Back at Sam’s house, Wally has been busy. The trap, when it comes together, is the funniest piece of mad-scientist staging the show has yet attempted. Wally has rigged a humidifier to disperse cerebrospinal fluid through a dummy. He has staged the dummy on the bed, with candles, with sheets pulled back. We’re gonna get you a date, baby.
Sam and Renee return with a car full of CRT TVs and bags of toy magnets — magnets Wally will use to focus the particle stream from the picture tubes into a directed beam. The kitchen has become a sci-fi armory built out of garage-sale equipment.
Judy seals the house. Wally explains the four-hour shift rotation: one person in the bathroom with the controls, one across the street sleeping, one watching the sleeper, and rinse. Could take days, could take weeks.
It takes hours. Something gets in anyway. Judy is positive she sealed the doors and windows. Sam tells her nothing’s impossible anymore. The breakers trip. The lights cut. The creature is on top of the closet, watching them, in the dark.
Wally tells them not to look at it. He tells them to turn the TVs to aim, casually. Sam fires the CRT beam. It hits something. Judy fires Wally’s borrowed handgun. She thinks she hit it too. The creature flees.
The trap does not catch it. The night does not deliver the body. But the trap proves the principle — cathode rays affect the creature — and the crew now has a working weapon they have to learn how to aim.
Hank, and the missing kid
Two parallel plots resolve in the same fifteen minutes. Hank has been getting calls from someone above him about the missing kid — almost certainly the gas-station robber the creature dragged off in the cold open. He guesses out loud that Scar (the show’s first name for the creature) is collecting shiny rocks. He goes to the storage room behind the office. Something is waiting for him there.
The show cuts away. The next time we see Hank is in the dark with quartz in his hand — quartz the crew has been tracking — and a voice saying you should learn to mind your own business, amigo. The phrasing is Paz’s. The episode is staging Hank’s death as the company finally enforcing its own rules on the security chief who has been getting sloppy.
But the framing is also ambiguous. Did Paz kill Hank? Or did the creature kill Hank while Paz watched? Or did Paz arrange it? The show is not telling. The hour ends on Iggy Pop’s The Passenger playing over a body Sam will have to make sense of in Episode 5.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Shaw’s Boy Who Cried Wolf misremembering is the show telling you which fairy tale it is reading you. The villagers do kill the wolf. The show has just announced its endgame.
- Hank’s missing kid on the radio is the gas-station robber from the cold open. The company is being held accountable by somebody for residents the creature takes. Note this.
- The crew calls the creature Scar casually now. Episode 1 had no name. Episode 4 has a name. Pay attention to when the show gave you the word.
- Tim Hauser’s lemonade is sugar-free because Doctor says. The show is being relentless about the cost of bodies on its older characters. Even the bit players are talking about their meds.
- Sam’s collection of old TVs in his daughter’s garage was a hobby. The hobby is now an arsenal. The Duffers have a thing about hobbies that become weapons.
- The closed casket in 1975 is the season’s first concrete promise that someone is buried in The Boroughs’ desert who should not be.
- I am the passenger, and I ride, and I ride. Iggy Pop is being used here exactly the way Should I Stay or Should I Go was used in Stranger Things. Note which character the song is being played over.
Verdict
Episode 4 is a procedural ambush of an episode and the show pulls it off. The cold open establishes that some residents have already domesticated the creature. The Shaw fable lands. The Renee-Paz fight earns its hurt. The Hauser scene is the first piece of historical paper trail the season has put on the table. The trap at Sam’s house pays off three episodes of build-up with a real night-action set piece. The hour ends with Hank dead, the creature wounded, and the misfit crew alive with a working weapon.
Wally is in his element. Judy is back on her old beat with a borrowed handgun. Renee has a conscience and a desire she cannot reconcile. Sam Cooper, who six days ago could not get out of bed, has just chosen the conspiracy over his daughter and held a particle beam steady on a thing in the dark.
The wolf is wounded. The villagers know how to hunt. And somewhere in 1975, a closed casket is waiting to be opened.
Rating: 9.1/10