The Boroughs Episode 5 Review: A Photograph from 1972, a Peach Orchard, and the Resurrection of Anneliese Shaw
Episode 5 is the show telling you, plainly and on the table, what the company has been doing for 75 years. It uses a photograph and a peach tree to do it, and it leaves the misfit crew at a closed diner with the rules of their universe fully rewritten.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 5.
The cold open is the crew in a basement they were not supposed to find — a windowless storage room underneath The Boroughs’ security office. Wally drops down a ladder while Sam, Judy, and Renee call up. Any monsters? Not yet. On the wall is a board with the addresses of every resident in their cul-de-sac. Renee, Art and Judy, Sam, Jack, Wally. The whole cul-de-sac. A blood trail leads out toward the desert.
The misfit crew has stopped being the people the show is happening to. They are now the people the show is happening through.
The husband who will not let her die
The hour’s other cold open is the season’s structural reveal, and the show is careful to disorient the audience first. A man calls Anneliese? Darling? into an empty house, then weeps over what is clearly a body. What a shame. She was so young.
Then the next time the show comes back to that house, the man — and the audience now knows he is Blaine Shaw — is feeding the body something blue from a glass. Just drink. Just drink. You’ll be good as new in no time, my love. Her eyes open. He asks what happened. They hurt me, she says. He promises whoever it was will pay.
The smoking woman from the side door of Señor Cocinas in Episode 2 — the woman who told Wally that the desert can hold it all — is Anneliese Shaw. She is also, by the math the rest of this hour will lay out, somewhere between 90 and 150 years old. The show is not playing coy about which marriage we are watching. We are watching the marriage that built the company.
A photograph from 1972
The midpoint scene is the misfit crew in Renee’s house with a snapshot they have liberated from somewhere they should not have been. Black-and-white. 1972. A man in a tan jacket with one arm around a younger woman.
Renee recognizes the jacket. Judy recognizes the woman. Oh God. I had that jacket. That would make both of them over 80. Or older.
The man in the photograph is Art Daniels. The woman is Anneliese Shaw.
Judy says, quietly, Anneliese was talking about doing stuff in 1949. Wally floats the theory. They must have a grove of Art’s peach trees somewhere. Sam frowns. No, I don’t think so. Sam — who has, since Episode 1, been seeing Lilly just around the corner — looks at the photograph and starts doing the math out loud.
Anneliese had told Judy she hoped Judy had found another way. Sam thinks the way Anneliese means is not the way Art tried. Art ate a peach. His hand healed. He felt young. He saw Brooks. He glimpsed the divine.
Wally lands the line. So whatever was in the peach is in the monster’s blood.
Renee, who is the only one not pretending to be slow on the uptake: Blaine and them are drinking monster blood to stay young.
The hour does not pretend to be embarrassed about its own pulp. The mythology has clicked. The company is harvesting creature blood from the things in the walls, which feed on residents like Jack and Renee and Sam. The cul-de-sac is the larder. The Manor is the abattoir for the residents who notice. The peach orchard is the company’s flagship product line, distilled and bottled. They feed on us. And they feed on the creatures.
Wally finishes the equation: Yeah. The circle of life.
What Hank was drinking
Sam adds a wrinkle the show needs you to notice. The creature blood is blue. But Hank — security chief Hank, who Paz may have killed last week, or who Paz may have only delivered to the creature — was drinking something golden and begging Blaine for more.
There are two tiers of the pyramid. The Shaws drink the high-octane stuff. The middle managers drink whatever is left, and they are grateful for the dregs. Hank’s can I have a raise? scene earlier in the hour pays off here. Shaw refused. Hank tried to push back. Shaw threatened to demote him to babysit the kids downstairs full-time — meaning the Manor — and Hank folded. The Manor functions as a forced-labor compound for the residents who notice the wrong things and survive long enough to talk about them.
The show has spent five episodes building a metaphor for elder care and is now using it for everything: dementia diagnoses, prescription-pill schedules, the small humiliations of being talked to as if you are forgetful when you are not. The Shaws are not just hoarding eternal youth. They are running a system where the only people whose memories are believed are the people who drink the bottle the company sells.
The 75th anniversary
Shaw walks through the town in the middle of the hour and the residents greet him by name. Morning, Mr. Shaw. Good morning, Mr. Shaw. Have a wonderful day, Mr. Shaw. A song plays in the background — about Belshazzar building Babylon, about a kingdom divided, about the wall that couldn’t stand. The Duffer Brothers do not waste their music cues. The show is announcing what is about to crack.
It is also the company’s 75th anniversary year. Marcus Shaw founded the town in 1949. Anneliese was talking about doing stuff in 1949. The math of the wedding photograph from 1972 means Marcus’s wife was already there at the founding. The company has been running this game since the original deal.
Whatever the original deal was, the season will tell us. The crew will spend Episodes 6, 7, and 8 finding the orchard. The show, for now, is content to let the audience hold the photograph and feel the weight of it.
Art finds the shirt, Judy lights a cigarette
The hour’s other heartbreak belongs to Art. He has been off-grid since the desert. Wynn (who Wally still hopes survived his desert trip) is not yet back. Art arrives at the diner with his Eagle Scout backpack and a face that has been holding something in for half a season.
Judy steps outside for a smoke after she tells the kids — Spencer might, Nayera no, she never even believed in Santa — they should not be told what their parents are running from. Art joins her.
I know about Jack.
I found his shirt, Judy.
The Alfre Woodard / Clarke Peters two-shot under the diner sign is the cleanest grief moment of the back half. Judy does not pretend. Art does not soften. He tells her you all go wherever you want. I’m going my own way. And then someone’s coming.
Security carts pull up. The misfit crew is found. Sam, with his last working line of the night, says so we fight. Wally finishes the sentence with the line the show needed to land its cliffhanger: it’s too late for that, Sam. We’re beat.
Paz, the meds, and the question of whose side
Paz volunteered to go back to The Boroughs to get Wally’s heart meds, and the parallel cut in the diner is the show asking the audience to read his absence two ways. Either he was caught and turned. Or he turned without being caught. Or he is still on his way and the company found the crew before he could come back. The show withholds the answer. Episode 6 will have to do the work.
Renee’s smallest line tonight is the one that lands hardest. He wouldn’t. It is a sentence she is saying about a man she has known for three days. The faith is the thing the season has been earning, beat by beat, since the locked-in-with-pepper-spray standoff in the funeral home. The crew has become a family by accident, and now the family is being tested in the only way Duffer Brothers families ever are — by separation, betrayal, and the question of who comes back when the lights come on.
Mrs. Shaw, alive again
The last image the audience holds of Anneliese Shaw is a woman in a slip taking a glass from her husband and drinking from it slowly. She is centuries-old. She is the company’s largest secret. She tried to smoke a cigarette and tell a doctor with stage-four cancer that she sometimes feels she is going to explode.
The Duffer Brothers are doing something specific here. Anneliese is not the show’s villain. She is the show’s sin. The marriage that built The Boroughs is the marriage that has consumed seventy-five years of people who came here to die quietly. The show is letting Wally meet her once and not letting him meet her again. By the time the cul-de-sac figures out who she is, she will be back inside a house in a slip drinking a blue-glass restoration. The cost is borne by everyone outside the kitchen.
Tiny details worth clocking
- The board in the basement has every cul-de-sac resident’s address. The company picks who gets fed on by where they live. The cul-de-sac is the larder.
- They feed on us. And they feed on the creatures. The line is delivered casually. It is the whole show.
- The song playing under Shaw’s morning walk is about Belshazzar. The Babylonian king who reveled while the writing appeared on the wall. The Duffers do not pick that hymn by accident.
- Hank’s golden goo vs the creature’s blue blood. Two tiers, two products. The peach is the company’s retail line. The blue is the family reserve.
- Anneliese’s I’ll let you know when asked where the family should run is the smallest line in the diner sequence and the saddest. She has been somewhere before. She does not want to name it.
- Art’s I’m going my own way is the season setting up his Episode 6 isolation. He will not be at the diner when the crew makes its escape. He is on a quest, and the quest is alone.
- We should go to Argentina. Hide out. It’s classic. Renee’s joke is the show winking at every fugitive premise in the room. The Boroughs is, at scale, an Argentina for Nazi-adjacent industrialists, run by 1940s Americans who built a town and a product line on top of the bodies they were already harvesting.
Verdict
Episode 5 is the show pulling the curtain back. After four episodes of carefully calibrated dread, the season says the words out loud. The Shaws are old. Anneliese is the oldest. The product is a peach distilled from creature blood that the company harvests by farming residents in a cul-de-sac the company designed for that purpose. Hank gets the dregs. Blaine gets the reserve. The Manor is the prison the family runs for the residents who get loud.
The hour delivers a wedding photograph from 1972, a downstairs map with every protagonist’s address, a moment where Mrs. Shaw drinks blue from a hand-blown glass, and a closing shot of every protagonist except Paz cornered at a closing diner by company carts. Art has named Judy’s betrayal. Judy is going outside to smoke. Wally is reading the bill. Renee is naming Paz’s loyalty. Sam is calling for a fight.
The mythology has cohered. The crew is split. The 75th anniversary is one week away. And somewhere in 1949, a coal miner named Marcus Shaw opened a town for people his wife had already learned how to outlive.
Rating: 9.3/10