After two seasons on the air (not to mention seven, damn, movies), Don Mancini and his writers room have had to strive and keep the status quo fresh despite the fact that Chucky has quite a recognisable M.O.. I mean, how many times has the franchise gone back to the original concept of a doll possessed by the spirit of a serial killer bonding with a child in order to create as much mayhem as he can? On the other hand, stray too far from the original conceit and you’re in danger of losing touch with what made the Chuckster so enduring in the first place – and that includes going in too hard on the franchise’s rich, but potentially alienating, continuity.
The series’ newest wrinkle – a shift in backdrop to The White House – seems ripe for injecting some new oomph, but it wasn’t until this sophomore episode that the true potential of this location has made itself present. The American government has covered up some shady shit in it’s time, but multiple murders in the Oval Office!? Not even tricky Dick Nixon shat where he ate to this degree!
Being the bunch of plucky, go-getters that they are, Jake, Lexi and Devon realise that their key to infiltrating the White House – and thus confronting Chucky – lay with the President’s eldest son, Grant, a Tiktok obsessed teen who masks his loneliness behind his rebellious posts and after successfully baiting him in with a direct, online appeal to help find her missing sister, the gang head off to DC to follow the next phase of their plan.
However, Chucky isn’t one to sit around and twiddle his plastic thumbs when there are murders to be committed, but after claiming the President’s secretary with a spectacular beheading via letter opener, his latest killing spree has opened up a can of worms no one ever expected. Enter CIA Agent Price who has arrived at the White House in order to investigate the apparent suicide of one of the presidential bodyguards last episode and is making a detailed search of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in order to make sure nothing is going on that can harm the potential legacy of President Collins. However, the discovery of a beheaded secretary in the Oval Office leads him to correctly believe that there’s a serial killer lurking in the White House, so taking the stance that Collins requires plausible deniability, he disappears the body while roping in the horrified First Lady into helping him with investigatation/cover up.
Meanwhile, Lexi makes first contact with a slightly douchey Grant and scores an invite to the upcoming Halloween party at the White House, but the final hurdle to getting in is for their former teacher and current, loving guardian, Ms. Fairchild, to meet with Charlotte Collins to get a feel for her trio of charges. However, Chucky is never one to forget a face, or pass up an opportunity…
Maybe it’s because the current strike in Hollywood that means that Chucky season 3 has to be split into two parts, or maybe it’s because Don Mancini and co. now know the typical Chucky build up like the back of their hand, but Let The Right One In (all the titles of season 3 this year seem to be existing movie titles) lights a fire under the show’s arse in the wake of its scene-setting, previous installment. Wisely hurling plausibility to the wind, the episode fast tracks Jake, Lexi and Devon’s infiltration of the White House to gaining a socially awkward meeting with Grant Collins. Because Grant is so lonely and socially inept, he’s over eager to have them attend the party despite the fact that all three of them have been connect to the murders of countless people, including their own parents. However, despite Lexi denouncing him as a fuckboi and him describing her missing sister coming up in conversation as a “boner killer”, the episode makes great pains to show that Grant and his Good Guy obsessed younger brother, Henry, as deeply troubled and unhappy individuals due to their dead brother, Joshua. Chucky has certainly had it’s fair share of troubled children (try all of them), but there’s something extra sad about two kids being unable to process their grief despite being hugging distance of the greatest seat of power in the western world.
Elsewhere, the show makes good on its use of the potential of its surroundings with the arrival of Agent Price, whose response to the rapidly expanding body count is to get hired goons to smuggle out the corpses in order to protect the legacy of Collins’ presidency. It’s a fascinating wrinkle in the serial killer pantheon for a murderer to have his grisly deeds mopped up for him in the name of national security and it plays extraordinarily well into the ludicrously exaggerated Hitchcockian tone that the franchise has adopted over the last decade. Obviously Chucky himself is absolutely fucking stoked at this amusingly unprecedented turn of events and the effects team have visibly stepped up their game by giving us a more limber and energetic version of the killer doll than we’ve seen in ages. Thanks to Tony Gardener and his crew who have been finessing their craft since Seed Of Chucky and some advances in puppeteer removing technology, the Chuck crawls, climbs and strangles with more fluidity than ever which adds immensely to the pair of kills we get here. Not do we get an absolutely stonking decapitation that occurs in a couple of gruesome stages that not only gives us a particularly spurty throat slash, but also has her whole head come off to dangle grotesquely from a single strip of flesh, but the Good Guy scores the most genuinely tragic kill since he hurled the trusting Nadine out of a bell tower.
With a hefty spoiler alert in place, the sight of Chucky smothering Ms. Fairchild to death with an American flag is genuinely affecting, especially since the character has been around since season one. Not only is she a legitimately nice person, we’ve seen that she’s bent over backwards to create a normal environment for the orphaned Jake, Devon and Lexi to thrive, even going as far as offering awkward sexual advice to the former couple like choosing to either be the top or the bottom and offering fumbled words of wisdom involving penetration. It adds to the queer positive nature of the show and it shows how nice she truly is (she even drives them to D.C.) and her death, while admittedly awesome, actually hits pretty hard. Of course, the shows patented spiteful humor kicks in immediately as Chucky, ever the dick head opportunist, feels the need to call his trio of nemesis and after bitching about the lack in quality of the White House’s WiFi, floats about once again making them all orphans.
A nicely solid episode, we’re still left with massive questions considering virtually everything about the climax of season 2 (still no news on Lexi’s sister or the fate of Tiffany), but the most intriguing question is why is Chucky counting down his kills and what happens when he nails his target of 6? Still, more will doubtlessly be revealed as we get ever closer to the usual Halloween themed episode, but as it stands, season three seems to be hitting its stride early.
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