I wish I could just freeze them. Keep them like this forever.
Hello lovely readers,
Here it is, the penultimate episode of The Haunting of Hill House. “The Screaming Meemies” is Olivia Crain’s episode, and many of the underlying questions are answered, and many of my own assumptions of what has happened through the course of the series have been challenged. A lot has been revealed, but many of the important details are waiting to be unlocked.
The episode delivers on the “The show hasn’t really shown Olivia’s changes very much yet” (paraphrased from myself :P) complaints that I’ve had up until this point. Living at Hill House has made it difficult for Olivia to discern between the real and the imaginary. As the days go on, the dreams become so vivid that the two aspects might as well be one and the same. Oliva begins to crack as the whispers from the house begin to take hold in her mind, and before long, she is lost.
“Screaming Meemies” takes place entirely in the past, her present. Olivia finds a friend in the deceased Poppy Hill. Poppy is the devil on Olivia’s shoulder, setting her along the path to tragedy.
I’m going to start talking about specific spoilers… right… about… now!
Interestingly, the episode is the only one to take place entirely during one time period, namely the past. Generally speaking, the episodes have a constant flow between the events of the past and the present. It makes sense though; we get to finally see what happened to Olivia.
I was left with a bunch of thoughts regarding the nature of what I had come to believe. In a way, I am reminded of The Turn of the Screw in the sense that my original ideas about what was happening may be wrong.
I originally figured that Olivia had been possessed by whatever was in the house. The originally shown evacuation from Hill suggested that she (I originally thought it was her at the beginning) was a monster. Combine that with the corruption that the apparitions of Nell and Olivia exhibited, I assumed that Hill was evil.
One of the most surprising reveals about this episode was that of Abigail’s identity. The filmmakers originally created the expectation that she was a ghost: Luke was the only one who saw her; she “lived” in the woods; she walked upstairs with Olivia during the climax of “The Bent Neck Lady;” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. However, she was a real-life girl. She is probably the Dudley’s daughter (Mrs. Dudley never allowed her child to enter Hill House, her child was the same age as the twins). It would explain why the Dudleys are still living near Hill, and how Mrs. Dudley discovered Nell’s body in the first place. It also explains the mention of the other body when Hugh was at the police station.
The minds behind the series completely misled and obfuscated the truth from us, but I ain’t mad. In fact, I dig the way that the story has been chopped up. It’s kept me on my toes, so to speak, as I tried to suss through the tragedy of the Crain family.
As an aside, I just realized how much the show teases at future events (I know, I know. It’s episode 9, and I’m dumb for just realizing it :P). I’ve mentioned that the show has this tendency to answer any questions that I have in the proceeding episodes, but for some reason I never put 4 and 7 together. Now it all makes perfect sense… you’re really sneaky, show creators.
Being that this was Olivia’s episode, the theme could be said to be “motherhood,” or at least the corruption thereof. “Screaming Meemies” takes all of the themes and motifs that are typical of the calling and brings them to the worst possible outcome. Really, when you look at everything that has transpired so far, you could say that all of the tragedy is based on the perversion of what is normally seen as noble. I wonder if this is ultimately the theme of Hill House. When season two comes out, it would be interesting if the writers examine and stretch fatherhood in a similar way.
Aspects of motherhood like nurturing, protecting, and love are distorted into something much more dangerous. The tragedy of the Crains might be boiled down to what happens when motherhood is gnarled into something sinister. The end result is not merely just “Olivia died and the family couldn’t handle the pain of her death.” It’s more that they lost a guiding force in their lives, and the Crains were left in disarray. It’s the symbolism of the thing, you know? ;P
During “Bent Neck Lady,” Olivia tells Nell to “Wake up” before she died and in this episode explained what was meant by that: as Olivia ran headlong into her doom, she could never quite tell if she was dreaming or not. In a perverse way, Olivia’s desire to kill herself and her children was her way of ending her nightmare. And if you think about the lives of the Crains, it’s almost as if they’ve all been living in a dream (or nightmare) since Olivia died. Hence the title of the episode.
I do have a couple of questions now that we’ve nearly reached the end. What is truly in the red room? Even though it was opened, I don’t think that Poppy was the one inside because she was tormenting Olivia while the door was still locked. The show established that there was something in the room earlier in the season. Oliva also made the comment that they (at least her, Nell, and Luke) were the keys that made the door open… What does that mean?
There is also that last piece of the puzzle that will explain why Hugh never razed Hill House to the ground. We have almost all of the parts of the past save for that three hours when Hugh was in Hill which will explain why Aunt Janet was the one who ended up raising the children and why Hugh wasn’t an important part of their lives.
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The next parts are rapid-fire thoughts 😛
And another thought comes to mind… during the episode, there is a moment when Poppy is in her corrupted form directly behind Olivia. What if Hill differentiates between one’s death state. Maybe the house corrupts those who perish in a heightened emotional state. Olivia was absolutely distraught and Nell went from extreme happiness to an equal amount of pain and betrayal. I suspect that Poppy killed her two children and then killed herself. I bet the kid in the wheelchair we saw during “Two Storms” is her son, and we probably saw the daughter at some point… I just can’t recall her from an earlier episode.
I also think that Luke is dead 😦 When Olivia sees into the future, she sees Nell on table and Luke, in his suit, on the floor. I was rooting for Luke to survive 😦 What’s interesting is that she doesn’t see anyone else in her vision. Maybe that means that the rest of the family will survive and that it’s only because Luke and Nell are connected that it was inevitable that the two would share each other’s ultimate fate.
Another part of the episode that I think will come into play is that as Hugh is evacuating, he sees the ghosts. It has to be important.
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The success of this episode ultimately came down to Carla Guigino’s descent into madness. Although I still think that it might have been better in terms of the narrative structure to show more of her spiraling out of control earlier in the story, I have to admit that there is something incredibly painful seeing a character whom we had, over the course of the first eight episodes, seen as a generally good and caring woman, wife, and mother. Whether it was filtered through the lens of Hugh Crain in the present or the recollections of the past, Olivia was truly beloved. In terms of emotional impact, presenting Olivia’s tragedy all at once was a strong choice, especially in a series that prides itself on its strong emotional resonance.
If I may… I absolutely love the way that they closed out the episode. After Olivia’s tragic choice, the camera stops at the front door for a moment and transitions to the past when the family first moves into the house. The family is laughing and happy, but there’s that sad and melancholic music just underneath. It’s an effective contrast, especially because of what just happened. The episode closes with Olivia by herself downstairs as the rest of the Crains run upstairs. We linger on her and then cut to black.
Now, let’s go onward to the last, and I really hope that they stick the ending. I really really really hope it lands.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again on the other side.
All the best,
Kevin
Oh! If there’s any series that you might want me to take a look at after this one, just let me know!
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