‘The Midnight Club’ Season 1, Episode 3 Recap

It’s Family Day at Brightcliffe! But that means something different for everyone. At the beginning of The Midnight Club, we learned that lots of foster children have found their place at Brightcliffe. Now we get to learn a few more specifics about the home lives of these eight teens.

Everyone’s in a different situation. Natsuki, whose father died in an ambush on his military unit, gets to know him through old photos her mother brings her. Amesh has only been able to communicate with his parents over the phone since they were deported back to India; his aunt and uncle are speaking to immigration lawyers, but who knows if they’ll even make it back in time to see him?

Even the patients who do have healthy parents are in their own complicated situations. Like seemingly every Family Day for Cheri, she gets fancy soaps and a giant stuffed bear in lieu of her starlet mom’s company. (Luckily, sweetheart Mark is there to remind her she has family here and calls out the egregious lie that her great-grandfather invented liquid soap.) Meanwhile, Spence’s parents can visit whenever they want, but because of his diagnosis, only his father can bear to see him — and his idea to pay his mom a surprise visit for her birthday gets shot down immediately. It’s devastating to see the gulf between Spence and his parents continue to widen, knowing how little time they may have left together.

But “The Wicked Heart” is especially focused on Kevin, whose mother, brother, and girlfriend, Katherine, come to visit him. In an embarrassing moment, Ilonka mistakes Katherine for Kevin’s sister, but you can’t really blame her. Kevin never mentioned a girlfriend when they were pulling off flirtatious office heists together — and it seems like there’s a reason for that.

Broadly speaking, Kevin is weighed down by the unrealistic expectations placed on him, both growing up and now. He may never have devoted all his time to a passion like Anya/Dana did with ballet, but his family thinks of him as the perfect son, the perfect student, the perfect boyfriend. He’s under pressure from his mom to make up for his father’s misdeeds (she mentions that he somehow “shit on the Carter name”). And even with his terminal diagnosis, those high expectations remain. If anything, they’ve only shifted to his poor little brother, who’s joining the track team to “carry the torch” instead of pursuing his own interests.

At the Midnight Club that night, Kevin vents his frustrations through his ongoing story about a psychopathic teen serial killer named Dusty Shane. Like Kevin, the kid does well in school and is generally liked. But the mundanity of his average high-school existence has pushed him somewhere darker. Instead of trying to appease his mom athletically and academically, like the real Kevin, Dusty kills girl after girl to make her proud.

One of those girls is Nancy, Dusty’s current girlfriend, whom Kevin imagines as real-life girlfriend Katherine. Casting himself as the killer doesn’t seem to imply that Kevin himself is a murderer, or that he wants to kill Katherine (though the episode is helpful in adding some spice to an otherwise blandly likable character). It’s more of a perverse manifestation of his constant need to please. Still, perhaps there’s something liberating for Kevin about imagining this alternate self, even though he’s still under his mom’s control. When you spend all your time living for other people, it’s hard not to snap eventually. Maybe imagining himself hurting people — especially his own girlfriend, a human symbol of that picture-perfect life he doesn’t actually want — is a way of pushing back on those impossible expectations.

In terms of horror, the most indelible images of “The Wicked Heart” are the ghosts of Dusty’s victims, all standing together and silently screaming at the boy who did this to them. The earlier ones stopped screaming after a while and now just stare, Kevin notes, but they’re still there. “That’s what hell is,” he says gravely. “Knowing stares, not lava or brimstone. Hell is everybody knowing.” The story ends on a cliffhanger, with Sheila — Dusty’s new love interest, played, of course, by Ilonka — coming to Dusty with her suspicions about Nancy’s disappearance: This might be a murder case. To be continued!

As The Midnight Club progresses, Ilonka has filled the primary “detective” role. Her motivations, in a way, are the simplest: She wants to survive cancer, and the easiest way to do that is by following the mysterious example of Julia Jayne. But the desire to survive is one that every character shares, and Ilonka’s ongoing journey to uncover the secrets of Brightcliffe is starting to get a little in the way of developing her as a character. Family Day should be a big occasion, but Ilonka’s scenes with her foster dad, Tim, lack the emotion they should have, especially since this first Family Day is falling so early in the season. A nice visit to the library becomes another place for Ilonka to speculate about Julia.

There’s still some solid emotional material here, especially for Anya, whom Ilonka invites to hang out since Anya never has any visitors. Ilonka earns some goodwill with her testy roommate by mentioning that she told Tim that Anya was the toughest person she’s ever met. And, Anya returns the kindness later in the episode, assuring Tim he shouldn’t worry about Ilonka’s obsessiveness. Everyone goes a little crazy at Brightcliffe, but they all take care of each other.

Let’s unpack the newest revelations, even though there isn’t much to speculate on. There are no new insights about Ilonka’s brief dip into the past in “The Two Danas,” but Julia’s patient record contains some interesting art-therapy drawings mentioning the number 292.13 and depicting the same hourglass-like shape Ilonka saw on the tree. (Kevin uses the same shape for his story, making it Dusty’s calling card.) And she’s continuing to dream about robed figures at the Midnight Club.

“The Wicked Heart” ends with another last-minute horror sequence, as Ilonka and Kevin notice the same hourglass symbol on the elevator control panel. It’s a secret button, activated only by holding the basement button at the same time — and it takes them down below the morgue, to a strange room with a large hourglass symbol on the floor. There’s also someone else there: an old lady, presumably the same one Ilonka encountered at the end of the last episode.

As horror, this latest cliffhanger ending doesn’t leave a superstrong impression, and not just because it reminds me of young Luke getting trapped in the descending dumbwaiter with a ghost in The Haunting of Hill House. It feels likely that Ilonka will just wake up on the floor again come next episode, or leave this secret room without learning much about its origins. As thrilling as it can be to watch these mysteries slowly unfold, I’m more interested in the people solving them.

• RIP Tristan, whom we never really got to know independent of Natsuki. There’s a lovely scene where an orderly quotes Jim Morrison to Natsuki, assuring her that pain ends at the point of death. She thinks she saw Tristan for a split second, a potential sign from the afterlife, but everyone agrees the encounter was too short and vague to qualify.

• People continue to explain their bizarre visions by blaming them on the meds they take, which sounds pretty credible, even if patients rarely experience these types of hallucinations.