The Boroughs Episode 7 Review: Polio, a Daughter Returns, and the Crew Decides to Save the Monster Instead of Killing It
Episode 7 is the show’s penultimate hour and the one where Sam stops being the protagonist alone. Claire comes back. Wally hears the actual stakes. The crew, in the season’s most morally interesting reversal, decides not to kill Mother at all.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 7.
The cold open is Blaine and Anneliese Shaw at the breakfast table on the morning of the 75th-anniversary celebration. She has a wound that should have healed by now. Mother’s blood is not working. Anneliese cries. What if Mother dies? Blaine reassures her. Our new doctor — he’s gonna make her right as rain. The audience knows the new doctor is Wally, and the audience now knows what Wally has been asked to do.
The other thing the cold open names, in case anyone missed it, is the relationship. Anneliese wants to kill Sam, Renee, Judy, Wally, the whole cul-de-sac, now, today. Blaine says no. Whole cul-de-sac dying all at once raises a few too many questions. The strategy stays. Be patient. Pick ‘em off one by one. Nobody will care. They never have. They never will. And when the dust settles, it’ll be you and me. Forever.
It is the most relationship-honest sentence the season has produced. The Shaws have been doing this for seventy-five years. They will do it again. The only thing keeping the cul-de-sac alive this morning is Blaine’s preference for slow administration.
Sam in Edward’s old room
Three days have passed. Sam wakes in The Manor with the worst headache of his life. The room is a 1950s diorama. The wallpaper is the same as Edward’s. Hank — alive, irritatingly so — is leaning against the doorframe. This actually used to be Edward’s old room. Ironic, right?
The company sedated Sam, brought in the kids, and tapped your brain like a keg on spring break. Sam’s daughter signed the papers. Honestly, I think she was relieved to be rid of you.
Hank is wrong. He is also the season’s most reliable narrator of cruelty. The line lands because Sam, for the first time, hears it as plausible. The audience has watched Claire drive her father to this room. The show is making us sit with the possibility that the company has fully won.
Then Sam hears something the orderlies cannot. Help me, Sam. They’re hurting me. I’m running out of time.
The voice is Mother. Sam has been fed on enough times to be tuned to her frequency. His brain has been drained six pints’ worth, and the receiver is on.
Wally inherits Dr. Mansour’s duties
Wally arrives at the company office expecting a workday. Shaw is waiting for him with a dead body on the floor. He’s lying dead at my feet.
Shaw explains the new assignment. Wally is to fatten the kids up, increase the feedings, squeeze the residents, prep Mother for transfusion. The plan, when it finally becomes legible, is the season’s central horror. Anneliese’s polio-survived body is failing again. Mother’s blood is no longer enough. The cure for Anneliese is a single complete transfusion — and Mother has to die for it to work.
Wally protests in the only way he can. People will die. Mother will die. The suffering—
Shaw cuts him off with the story Anneliese has been waiting one century for someone to retell out loud. She was so young when polio struck her down. But she survived, barely, but her limbs were left withered. She has suffered enough for a thousand lifetimes.
Then the line Shaw has been preparing since 1949. So you and I, Wally, are gonna smile while she drinks the joint dry.
Wally nods. He has nowhere else to go in the moment. He has chosen the cup, and the cup chose this. The show is being precise. Wally cannot say no to Shaw in this room. The audience is being told that whatever the rebellion is going to look like, it is going to need Wally to be more than a defector, and it is going to need him to act fast.
Judy and Renee in the Manor
The infiltration sequence is the season’s first proper extraction comedy. Judy and Renee, in disguise, push a wheelchair through the Manor’s halls trying to find Room 157. They pretend to be old. Renee jokes about odds and evens. Judy slaps her own arm to fake a medical emergency to lure the nurse off station. The two-shot is gold. Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard playing two retirees pretending to be more retired than they are is the second-best joke this episode lands.
They find Edward’s old room. It is empty. Sam is somewhere else. They follow the hint of the call he is hearing in his head.
When they find him, the show stages it the only way it could. Sam is in the basement holding cells where the kids live. He is hearing Mother. He is too disoriented to walk. Renee tells him to come. He says did you hear her? She was in so much pain. Renee says who? Sam says the monster.
The crew gets him out. They trigger a fire alarm. They trip the lockdown. They get to the door and find the fire exit. They head for the van. The van has been booted by The Boroughs’ parking enforcement, because The Boroughs’ parking enforcement is The Boroughs’ security. Oh my God, you’ve gotta be kidding.
Claire is the cavalry
The hour’s emotional pivot is the arrival of Sam’s daughter Claire, in a car the security van cannot follow, at the very moment the misfit crew has no exit.
Claire, what are you doing here?
Saving you. Can’t you tell? Go! They’re coming!
She has driven from Albuquerque. She has watched her father’s call get traced. She has put together — over six episodes of refusing to believe him — that the man she institutionalized was telling the truth.
I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.
I wouldn’t have believed me either.
It is the apology the season has been earning since the kitchen scene in Episode 1 when Sam offered the boxes labels and his children offered him no questions. The Duffer Brothers know exactly when an apology should land. The fact that Claire has to apologize for the worst thing she has done to her father, mid-getaway, with security carts in the rearview, is the kind of writing that makes the network turn the noise back on.
Paz gets left behind — he has to walk back to the cul-de-sac to grab his truck — and the show stages the family-of-found-people loading into Claire’s car like the final shot of an old heist movie. Renee in the front. Sam in the back. Judy holding the seatbelt for Sam because he is still woozy. Wally is somewhere inside the company building, still on shift, still wearing the lanyard.
“Now we save one”
The plan changes on the drive home. Sam — who is still hearing Mother’s voice — tells the crew what Mother is saying. She is dying. She is in pain. She wants out of her cell.
Renee, who an hour ago wanted to stack bodies, says so what’s the plan? Now we kill a monster. Sam — Molina, in the line of the season — corrects her. No. Now we save one.
The reversal lands because the season has earned it. Mother is not a thing. Mother is a creature whose blood has been farmed for seventy-five years to keep a 1949 marriage going. Mother has had children inside a tunnel under The Boroughs because the company forced her to breed. Mother is the only resident of The Boroughs who has been there longer than Anneliese, and Mother is the only resident who has spent every one of those seventy-five years in solitary confinement under a security office.
The crew is no longer hunting a wolf. The crew is breaking out a prisoner.
Time to go
The episode ends with the misfit crew driving back into the chaos of the 75th-anniversary celebration. Adios, fuckers is the line Renee yells out the rear window at the company van that just got disabled. The closing track is Heart’s Barracuda — a sister-song to Born to Run, the Springsteen vinyl Sam has spent six episodes trying to find for his daughter — and it plays over Sam looking at Claire across the front bench seat as if seeing her properly for the first time since he buried his wife.
Time to go.
The episode’s title is also its directive. The 75th anniversary is tonight. Mother is dying tonight. Anneliese is dying tonight. Wally is inside the building tonight. And Paz, who has been the show’s quiet outside man for four episodes, is walking back to the cul-de-sac in security uniform with two episodes left to be reunited.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Anneliese’s polio. The show has finally named the trauma that built the company. She survived polio in roughly 1940 and has been preserving her body ever since. The thing the Shaws are running is, fundamentally, a refusal to accept disability.
- Hank’s spring break metaphor for what the kids did to Sam’s brain is the show’s grossest single line and one of its truest. The kids are the company’s interns. They drink because the dorm is open.
- Sam hearing Mother is the show’s first proper supernatural beat for any of the protagonists. The blood has changed him. The blood may change others.
- Wally’s people will die, Mother will die, the suffering— shows the audience exactly what he is going to do. He is not buying it anymore. The defection in Episode 6 was a hedge. The redefection in Episode 8 is now scheduled.
- Claire’s I’m sorry I didn’t believe you takes the place of the I love you, Claire that Sam delivered in Episode 6. Both characters land the line the other one delivered first.
- Barracuda is the season finally allowing one of its women to drive the getaway car. Geena Davis has been waiting for this song since the writers’ room handed her the stack bodies line. The song belongs to all of them.
Verdict
Episode 7 is the show in full possession of its mythology and its register. Anneliese’s polio is the season’s missing piece. Wally hearing Shaw promise to smile while Anneliese drinks Mother dry is the season’s clearest moral line. Sam in Edward’s old room hearing Mother’s voice through the wall is the season’s first true supernatural beat from inside a protagonist.
The misfit crew, which Episode 6 dismantled, has reassembled in a getaway car with Sam’s daughter at the wheel. The crew has stopped being a rebellion against the company and become a rescue mission for a creature the company has been farming for seventy-five years. The 75th anniversary is tonight. The triple-audible is ready to be called.
Adios, fuckers.
Rating: 9.5/10