The Boroughs Episode 8 Review: Mother Gets Her Cave, Sam Gets His Wife, and Blaine Shaw Learns That Everybody Dies
The finale gives Mother a cave, the cul-de-sac a backyard, and Sam Cooper a dance with his dead wife to “Thunder Road.” It is the most generous closing hour Netflix has put on a sci-fi pilot in years, and it earns every grace note by killing the right people first.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major events from The Boroughs Season 1, Episode 8.
The cold open of the finale is the misfit crew in Claire’s car arguing about audibles. Renee wants to save Mother. Sam corrects her. I’m calling an audible. Renee corrects him back. You can’t double audible. Then Art calls in from a stolen laundry van with the season’s best line — I kind of sort of kidnapped Mother — and Renee declares it. Triple audible. Everybody hold on.
The plan is now four-way. Wally is inside the Manor with Mother. Art has the van. Renee, Judy, Sam, and Claire have Claire’s car. Paz is walking back to the cul-de-sac. The 75th-anniversary parade is happening in the town square. The plan is to converge on the community center — closed for the celebration — get Mother out, drive her into the desert, and let her go home.
It is a closing hour built like a Stranger Things season finale and paced like one, and the show pulls it off.
The Shaws name what they actually want
The episode lets Blaine and Anneliese have the morning together one last time. The wound that would not heal in Episode 7 has gotten worse. Anneliese is fading. The kids’ brain fluid is no longer enough.
Haven’t we endured enough?
Don’t worry, my love. Time is on our side.
It is the season’s quietest line of villainy because it is, finally, true. Time has been on their side. For seventy-five years. The cost has been the cul-de-sac. The cost will continue to be the cul-de-sac unless the misfit crew can finish what they started before sundown.
Wally has Mother
Wally’s defection has been the season’s slowest payoff and the finale lets it land in one sentence. He has taken Mother from her cell. He has the laundry van. He is meeting Art at the community center.
When the crew finds him there, he is already crying. Wally has Mother. Renee, who fought with him on his porch one week ago about which deal was the right one, says he does? Wally nods. He has spent the morning watching the kids feed, watching Mother weaken, watching Shaw promise to smile while she drinks the joint dry. The defection from his defection was always going to happen. The show just made us wait long enough to want it.
The reunion at the community center is the season’s best ensemble shot. Sam, Renee, Judy, Wally, Art, Paz, Claire. The Grey Rebellion has six members again. Mother is on a gurney in the back of the laundry van, weakening, breathing slow, and the crew has eight episodes’ worth of received wisdom to do exactly the right thing.
Judy on the floor of the laundry van
The finale’s first real loss is staged as a near-miss. The convoy gets out of the community center and the company catches up at the gates. There is a firefight in the most literal sense — Judy with her borrowed handgun, Paz with security training he has chosen to use against his former employers, Art with the laundry van’s bumper. Judy gets shot.
Alfre Woodard plays the dying scene the only way an actor of her register can. She tells Art they never made it to the Grand Canyon. He cradles her on the floor of the van. He calls her baby the way he has been calling her Judy for eight hours of television. Renee is in the seat above them screaming for someone to drive. Sam is in the passenger seat holding a flashlight on Mother.
Then Mother — who has been silent on her gurney since the convoy left the community center — sits up.
She wants to help.
Sam, who has heard her voice since Episode 7, translates. She wants to help. Art looks up. Hey, Art. It’s okay. You can trust her.
Mother heals Judy with her blood. Well, that’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.
The show is doing something specific with the word. Wally said it about the creature back in Episode 2 when he first put on the goggles. Renee said it about her kiss with Paz. The Shaws have been weaponizing it for seventy-five years. The finale lets Judy be the one who actually receives one. The blood that should have been a luxury good is, in the right hands and given freely, the cure Wally has been chasing since 1985.
The cave
The crew’s last leg is Sam driving Mother into the desert alone. The cave is the place Mother has chosen. The show withholds what Mother is — the egg of 1949, the creature whose blood holds time in suspension — and lets Sam simply receive her instruction.
Claire wants to come. Sam asks her not to. I couldn’t help your mom. And I wasn’t good at helping you. But I can help her. I need you to trust me, Claire.
Then the Bye-bye, Butterfly / See you soon, Raccoon exchange that the pilot taught us to read as childhood ritual. The line is the same line. The meaning has been earned.
Blaine arrives at the cave
The finale’s only proper fight is inside the cave. Blaine has tracked Sam there. He delivers the closing parry to a season’s worth of corporate threat. You know, on second thought, I’ve decided to cancel your contract. You’re just not Boroughs material, Sam.
Sam tells him I’m gonna bring her back — meaning Lilly, meaning Mother, meaning every wife and mother The Boroughs has stripped to feed itself.
Blaine, in the season’s most fitting last line: Everything you think you’ve accomplished can be undone.
Mother starts to glow. The show telegraphs the explosion. Sam runs. Blaine clings to Mother because his own life has been tied to her blood for seventy-five years. The cave begins to come apart.
I can’t die!
Everybody does. Welcome to the club.
It is the season’s thesis statement, delivered as a one-liner from Alfred Molina with the most dignified rage television will produce this year. The cave collapses. Blaine is gone. Mother is gone. Anneliese, in a parallel cut, ages. Her wound becomes seventy-five years of damage in three seconds. The peach orchard somewhere goes dark.
Sam and Lilly on the porch
The finale’s most surprising sequence is not the explosion. It is the moment after.
Mother — in her last act, with her last cup of blood — grants Sam a gift. She gives him time. He looks up and the screen door of his old Chicago house opens. Lilly is there in the dress she wore the day they bought the house. Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road is playing on the porch radio.
Hey, you old grump.
Is it really you?
It’s me.
How?
Mother’s voice, the last time the show lets us hear it: Time is a gift.
Sam asks how long they have. Lilly answers the way Molina’s wives in every romantic drama of the last forty years have answered, but the line lands because the show has earned it. Are you gonna stand there asking questions, or are you gonna dance with your beautiful wife?
They dance. The track plays through. Climb in back, heaven’s waiting down on the tracks. Come take my hand, we’re riding out tonight to case the promised land. Sam Cooper, the engineer from Albuquerque whose daughter committed him to a retirement-community asylum nine days ago, gets to hold Lilly Cooper for the length of a Springsteen song.
We’ll be together again.
We are together always.
It is the most generous closing image a sci-fi finale has handed an audience this year. The Duffer Brothers and Addiss and Matthews are not telling you Mother is a wish-fulfillment machine. They are telling you that the company has been hoarding a creature whose blood, in the right hands, could let people who have lost the things they cannot get back have them for a song.
Sam wakes in the cave. Claire is there. Hey. Sam. What are you doing here? We were supposed to meet at the cave, remember? Oh, right. Is that Mother? Yes. She’s at peace.
What do you say we go home?
The backyard
The finale closes with a backyard barbecue that the season has been earning since the pilot. Art is at the grill. Judy is alive. Wally has charcuterie. Renee and Wally are planning a trip to Rome and Florence and yes Wally is coming. Claire and Neil are there with the kids. Paz is somewhere being a normal boyfriend. Sam, in the season’s last image, asks for a burger and a hot dog and walks toward his daughter.
Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.
The song the pilot was named after — the album cover Sam could not find for his daughter — plays over the credit roll. The Duffer Brothers, who have spent eight hours building a Hawkins in a senior living complex, hand the season’s final beat to the cookout that the pilot’s barbecue could not be.
Tiny details worth clocking
- The 75th-anniversary speech happens in parallel with the cave sequence. Anneliese ages on screen as Blaine ages, dies, falls. The town square watches a CEO die without knowing they were watching. The Duffer Brothers do that beat in three cuts.
- The peach orchard is offscreen for the entire finale. We never see it. The show knew the better image was the cave.
- Mother’s voice is heard only by Sam in the back half. The blood has tuned him. The blood, the season seems to suggest, has tuned him permanently.
- Anneliese’s withered-by-polio body returning at the moment Mother dies is the show’s cleanest piece of mythology hygiene. The Shaws bought time. The time runs out the moment Mother goes home.
- The Springsteen track playing over the porch reunion is the same one Lilly was dancing to in the kitchen in Episode 1. We’ll be together again. We are together always. The show has been telling you this story since the first scene.
- Wally crashing Renee’s Rome trip is the funniest single beat of the back half. He has been the season’s quiet third wheel since Episode 3. He has earned the airfare.
- The grill is Art’s. Sweetheart, you are all the magic I need. The 44-year marriage, broken in Episode 6 over Costco burrata, did not need a reconciliation scene. It needed a barbecue.
- Sam asking for one of each hot dog and burger is the most Sam Cooper line of the season. The engineer optimizes for redundancy. He is also alive, and he is also home.
Verdict
Episode 8 lands every promise the season made. The misfit crew survives. Mother gets her cave. Blaine learns that everybody dies. Anneliese ages with him in real time. Wally redefects. Art catches Judy. Judy is healed by the creature that has been farmed by the company that built the town. Claire and Sam are a family again. Lilly gets one song.
The Duffer Brothers have made a Stranger Things for a different demographic and pulled it off without ever losing the warmth that distinguishes their work from every other sci-fi/horror premise on Netflix. Alfred Molina anchors an ensemble that includes Geena Davis, Bill Pullman (for one episode), Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, Denis O’Hare, Jena Malone, Carlos Miranda, Seth Numrich, and Alice Kremelberg — and every one of them gets at least one scene to actually act in.
The 75th anniversary is over. The Boroughs has a new sky. And Sam Cooper, who came here to die alone, just got to dance with his wife to Thunder Road in a desert cave, and he is home for dinner.
Rating: 9.6/10