Caution: lots of spoilers ahead.
Three years after what we believed to be the end of a brief horror series, the Prime Video decided to present us with the second season of the ambitious ‘Them’.
Subtitled ‘The Scare’, the plot introduces us to an anthological narrative that takes the audience almost four decades after the events of the predecessor iteration. Here, we follow Detective Dawn Reeve (Deborah Ayorinde) and his investigation of a brutal murder in Los Angeles that may be linked to his own story. As the episodes unfold, we realize that the murder, in fact, is just the beginning of a communion of horrific events that involve an inexplicable supernatural force that begins to target his family.
During the plot, we are also invited to meet the insane Edmund Gaines (luke james), an aspiring actor who navigates between insanity and madness as he is constantly rejected from all the dreams he has ever had – not just professionally, but in other spheres. A priori, we do not understand how the two plots are connected; however, as the horror grows, things begin to fall into place in the most harrowing way possible and guided by a chronological play that we could not have predicted at any point.
As Dawn realizes, there is no serial killer physicist taking the lives of innocent people in Los Angeles, but a demonic creature that seems to be after inexplicable revenge. What she didn’t imagine was that a collection of dark secrets would come to light little by little – like the fact that she, in fact, had been adopted by Athena (Pam Grier) from the orphanage where she had lived since she was a baby, where she was mistreated by the caregiver (who, in turn, mistreated her day and night with threats and reprehensible punishments). But that’s not all: Dawn had been adopted by Athena along with her twin brother, who was returned to the system after showing strange behavior bordering on psychopathy; His adoptive mother, in this way, separated them in a hasty decision that would give rise to the main plot. After all, Dawn’s twin brother in question was none other than Edmund.
The truth is that the season is divided into two timelines that only begin to make sense when the iteration enters its third act and we are taken to 1989, when Edmund and Dawn meet again. However, after all the trauma suffered, Dawn ended up repressing what she went through with her brother and in the orphanage, building a new life alongside her husband and son. It is no surprise, therefore, that the protagonist did not recognize him immediately, but Edmund knew exactly who she was and used that encounter only as a final trigger to commit suicide and transform himself into the ruthless and spiteful creature who needs to hunt and punish those who represent your unfinished business.
And that’s not all: the twins come from a lineage that is marked by trauma and has been persecuted by very similar monsters. As revealed in the closing chapter, Edmund and Dawn are the children of Ruby Lee Emory (Shahadi Wright Joseph), the eldest daughter of Lucky (Ayorinde) and Henry (Ashley Thomas) in the debut season – which, taking into account what the family went through confined in a horrible suburb dominated by whites in the 1950s, decided to give the best possible chance for their newborn children without them having to carry the burdens of something that did not belong to them.
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Upon discovering who her biological mother is, Dawn believes that she is free from all the ties that blurred her genealogy – but, what she didn’t expect, is that the ghosts of a remote past would come back to haunt her in a spectacular final scene that brings the return of Tap Dance Man (Jeremiah Birkett), one of the demons that plagued the Emorys (in particular, Henry, as he emerged as an executioner who induced him to surrender to his anguish and impotence in protecting his family). The sequence in question can even prepare us for a well-deserved third season that should conclude this multigenerational and very welcome arc.
Remembering that both seasons are available on Prime Video.
