The Boroughs Episode 6 Review: Wally Takes the Deal, Claire Drives Sam to the Manor, and the Crew Loses Almost Everyone
Episode 6 is the show’s structural nadir, and the cleanest piece of writing the season has produced. It names the mythology in one Dixie cup of blue fluid, lets the doctor with stage-four cancer take the deal anyone in his shoes would take, and ends with the daughter we have been waiting all season to come back driving her father to the place the company puts the residents who notice.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 6.
The cold open is the misfit crew under arrest in the Manor — Sam, Renee, Judy, Wally, all in chairs around a table in a fake mid-century rec room. Wally has been allowed out of the holding area to deliver a deal. You have five minutes. The deal has four conditions. Give up the monster hunt. Never tell anyone. Don’t leave The Boroughs. And Wally — Wally is the catch — goes to work for the company.
The crew refuses. Wally takes it anyway.
Because look around. We lost. The more we learn about The Boroughs, the less anybody’s gonna believe us. He tells them to play pickleball. He tells them to take a class. He tells them to enjoy the rest of their lives. If you don’t, the only sky you’re ever gonna see is the one painted on these walls.
It is the season’s first time someone in the crew has chosen the company. The show makes sure the audience cannot dismiss it.
Mother and the Dixie cups
The hour’s central revelation arrives in a kitchen scene that is staged as a 1950s Father Knows Best sitcom — Welcome home, Ward. Nice to be home, June. — and delivered in the most appalling exposition dump the season ever could have asked for.
Wally is now visiting a couple inside the company. Ward and June. They pour him a Dixie cup of blue.
In the spring of 1949, a local miner named Marcus Shaw found a strange egg buried deep beneath the ground.
The egg hatched a creature they call Mother. Drinking Mother’s blood holds you in time. You do not age. You do not get sick. You will never die. The world can fall around you, and you just stay.
Marcus Shaw — the founder who, the company has been telling everyone since 1949, was Blaine’s grandfather — is Blaine. The man has been running the same town under a new first name every two generations. He needs human cerebrospinal fluid to keep Mother fed, especially since Mother has now had kids. The kids live in tunnels under The Boroughs. At night, the company lets them loose, and they crawl through the tunnels and out our ovens, into our bedrooms, where they suck out brain fluid they feed to Mother.
The image — small parasitic creatures crawling out of mid-century ovens at three in the morning into the bedrooms of retirees — is one of the cleanest pieces of horror invention American television has done this year. It is also the cleanest possible visual metaphor for what elder care actually does to the people inside it. Their pension comes out of the company’s gold mine. Their fluids go back in.
Wally drinks. Like tasting the sun.
Why Wally takes it
The show is careful not to make Wally a villain. Denis O’Hare lands the longest single speech of his career as a man explaining why he is going to work for the Shaws. Because I have lost enough. Friends, patients, lovers. An entire generation, gone. But not this time. This time, I win. This time, I save everybody.
The AIDS-generation pain is named for the first time. Wally was a doctor in the 1980s. He watched his patients die. He outlived the cohort that should have outlived him. He is dying of prostate cancer that has already metastasized. He has been begging the universe for a miracle for an entire season.
The Shaws gave him one in a Dixie cup.
Renee, who walks into the kitchen at the end of the scene to recruit him for Paz’s escape plan, can see exactly what is happening. Wally, don’t do this. Paz has a plan to get us out. All of us. Wally looks at her with the face of a man who has already crossed the room. You should go. I have work tomorrow.
The hour does not punish him for it. It lets him keep the Dixie cup. The show is making sure the audience understands that this is what dying men do when offered the bottle the company sells.
Art ends a forty-four-year marriage over a wedge of Costco burrata
The episode’s second exit is Art’s. Clarke Peters and Alfre Woodard get a kitchen scene that does for old marriages what Marriage Story did for young ones, and they do it in five minutes.
Judy has tried to feed them both back into the past. She brings out the Kit Kats from Halloween. She brings out the Camembert. She tells him to remember the burrata at their daughter Nayera’s wedding. We could try it again. We certainly have the time.
He says no. He pushes the cheese back across the table. He says I’m not doing this.
Art, we have banked 44 years, man. Spencer’s diagnosis. The Ivyhurst house.
Bullshit. I fell in love.
The line lands because the entire season has been waiting for Art to say it. The hike, the crow, the bottle caps, the flights of angels — all of it has been Art mourning Jack as much as Judy was. I broke the rule. And that’s not nothing.
Then the line that breaks her. The burrata. It came from fucking Costco. I just didn’t have the heart to tell you.
A forty-four-year marriage ends on the rumor that one of them was lying to keep the other one happy about cheese. Peters and Woodard play it as a couple who have always known. Art leaves to his office. He is going his own way. Judy lights a cigarette outside the diner and the camera holds on her until the next thing happens.
Renee’s audible
The other half of the hour belongs to Renee, who has been the season’s quiet engine since Episode 2 and who in this episode becomes the captain of what is left of the crew.
Paz has a plan to get them out. Renee changes it. I’m calling an audible.
The new plan is to use the chaos of the 75th anniversary — coming in three days — to sneak into Shaw’s basement and kill it. Mother. The golden goose. Without their golden goose, Blaine and his cronies, they’re dead meat.
Judy: This is a bad idea.
Renee: If we run, we never stop. I’d rather fight. I want to kick some ass. Stack some bodies.
Judy: Stack bodies?
Renee: That’s right.
Both of them join. Paz, who has been quiet, signs on. The three of them name what is left of the crew. The Grey Rebellion rises. Such as it is.
The reference is to Wally’s barbecue toast from Episode 1 — back when there were six of them at the table. The show is being very careful about how it counts.
Sam calls his daughter
The hour’s most devastating sequence is its last. Sam — who has spent five episodes trying to be a father by remote — gets out at the desert diner, finds a stranger’s phone, and calls Claire.
Your life, all our lives, they’re in danger. The Boroughs, Blaine, they’re all in on it. The tunnels. The monsters. They’re in the ovens, Claire.
He tells her to come pick him up. He tells her no one else can know.
Claire arrives. She lets him into the car. She tells him she loves him. She lets him fall asleep on the drive.
She drives him back to The Manor.
When he wakes up — are we there? — he sees Kayleigh, Sam’s transition manager, waiting on the curb with two orderlies. What did you do? I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.
Claire’s hands shake. She knows. She does it anyway.
Sam — Molina, in the single best minute of acting this show has had so far — looks at his daughter, who has just turned him over to the company that is killing him, and says it’s all right. I love you, Claire.
Then they put him in the Manor.
Anneliese’s other secret
Renee shows up at Claire’s house after the orderlies have left. She asks Claire if something has happened. Claire tells her. We had to put Sam in The Manor. He was wandering in the desert, rambling about monsters.
The hour does not let us see Claire’s face when Renee delivers the line that should land. The episode ends with Renee on a porch, knowing she has lost the fourth member of the rebellion to the same machine that took everyone else.
Kayleigh and another company woman hug Claire in the kitchen of Sam’s house. You did it. The phrase the company says to a daughter who has just committed her father is you did it. The implication — that Kayleigh has been working Claire for weeks, calling her, building a case, framing Sam’s grief and the Edward incident as a slide into dementia — is the entire plot the show has been holding in reserve since Shaw told Sam I’ve already put in a call to his daughter in the last episode.
The transition manager’s job in The Boroughs is not to onboard residents. It is to turn their adult children against them.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Marcus, who you know as Blaine. The first time the show has said this out loud. The CEO Blaine Shaw is the founder Marcus Shaw. He has been running the town under a rotating first name for seventy-five years.
- The kids come out of the ovens. The Duffer Brothers have chosen the most domestic appliance in American suburbia to be the show’s portal of horror. Watch for an oven shot in every kitchen for the rest of the season.
- Like tasting the sun — Wally’s first sip of the blue. The line will, the season is telegraphing, also be his last sip when the show decides to take the cup away.
- Anneliese was at the founding. The 1972 photo and the 1949 origin story confirm she was there in the spring of ‘49. The wife who tells Wally outside the funeral that the desert can hold it all helped build the town that put the desert to work.
- Hank’s golden goo is the diluted retail product. Mother’s blood is the blue family reserve. Two tiers. Two clienteles. One peach orchard somewhere.
- Wally’s AIDS, heart disease, prostate cancer speech is the season’s clearest statement that the company’s secret could end suffering for the entire planet if it were not being hoarded by the Shaws. Wally is not wrong to want this. The show is making sure we know.
- Stack bodies is the Renee battle cry. Geena Davis has been waiting six episodes to deliver it.
- They’re in the ovens, Claire. Sam’s phone call. The phrase Claire will spend the back of the season unable to forget.
Verdict
Episode 6 is the show breaking the crew apart deliberately, and the hour earns every loss it stages. Wally takes the cure. Art names the affair. Judy lights a cigarette. Claire commits her father. Renee, Judy, and Paz are now the entire Grey Rebellion, and the company knows it.
The mythology has been named — the Mother, the kids, the ovens, the 1949 egg, Anneliese’s age, Marcus-who-is-Blaine. The show is now playing with all the cards face up. What is left for Episodes 7 and 8 is whether the three remaining members of the rebellion can break the rest of their friends out, kill Mother, and walk away.
Sam’s it’s all right. I love you, Claire is the most generous line a parent has been written this television year. Molina lands it as a man choosing to absolve the child the company has trained against him. The image of him being walked into the Manor under his own power, holding his daughter’s gaze, is the season’s first proper tragedy.
Rating: 9.4/10