This is it. This is the exact kind of episode I was hoping for when I first heard what The Boroughs was going to be about. Now that all the extraterrestrial cards are now on the table the show is free to have all of its characters fully clued up and on the move without the need (mostly) to take the time to spell out all the intricate details of the central conspiracy from multiple points of view. Unbound from such necessities, The Boroughs is now fully prepped to slam a slippered foot fully on the gas and haul off with a frantic rescue attempt.
While the show has been faithfully filling the brief of merging Stanger Things with Cocoon up to this point, “Time To Go” sees everyone pushing the concept to it’s most enjoyable limits as the final pieces of the puzzle drop into place and everyone gets to pitch in and do their thing.
After being turned in by his own daughter who believes that his claims of brain sucking alien monsters are a sympton of a much more serious problem, Sam languishes in the Manor; the part of the Boroughs that supposedly cares for the more infirmed populace. Surrounded by the mentally feeble and emotionally delicate, it truly seens that his battle to avenge the death of his neighbour, Jack, has failed abysmally – but as he weighs up his options, wheels are turning elsewhere that may yet grant him his freedom. For a start, Claire is feeling pretty shitty after betraying her father in his hour of need, but after she turns on the clutch of televisions he rigged up in his home, the resulting field brings the alien out of the transition manager, thus proving that Sam isn’t crazy after all.
Meanwhile, pivoting their escape plan into a rescue plan, Judy, Renee, Art and Paz have cooked up a makeshift plan on the fly to infiltrate the Manor and get Sam out. As Art draws security away from the front desk and Paz slips behind the computer to remote open any necessary doors, Judy and Renee go undercover as residents to get their comrade out. But while all this is going on, Wally is still in the belly of the beast as he tends to the ailing, alien Mother which supplies the Boroughs’ staff with their youth restoring goo. But after coming up with a theory of how to restore her with a blood transfusion from her spider-legged spawn, sinister head honcho Blaine Shaw isn’t willing to wait for the weeks of testing needed to make the procedure safe.
Meanwhile, Sam has found something of an unlikely guiding light in the near-comatose form of the Dutchess, a fellow inmate who explains that the visions of his wife he’s been having are being beamed into his head by Mother as a call for help. Shifting his rage into forgiveness, and changing his aim, Sam is primed to be rescued by his friends while Wally is feeling his allegiance once again start to move.
“Time To Go” is pretty much everything you’d want from a penultimate episode to a show that’s mostly been reading from the Stranger Things operators manual; it’s fast, it’s funny and it deals out the answers to any lingering mysteries quicker than a Mississipi card shark. Everyone is moving in unison, yet still running around like headless chickens and now that the mystery is all but off the table, there’d nothing left but a mad, merry sprint to the end. It’s nice that the elderly characters can keep up too, proving to the Hawkins gang that you don’t need to be suffering puberty to have the cardio needed to foil weird, sci-fi shit. However, while our OAPs (some of whom are pushing 70, remember) keep the energy levels up to an impressive degree, the episode ensures that it takes the time to engage the heart before getting it racing.
Finally getting to properly join the fun is Jena Malone’s Claire, who inadvertently made the Lando Calrissian move of selling out her troubles father to the authorities while having no clue that her father’s claims were bang on the money. However, the scene where she accidently catches the condescending Kayleigh in the field of her dad’s TV weapon proves to be a telling as it is jarring – for a start, it confirms that whomever has been chugging the golden, alien goo has had their DNA fundamentally changed to something that’s worryingly close to Mother. The fact that decades of being fed human brain fluid has also caused the alien matriarch to take on a more human guise probably means that anyone who is in on the Shaws conspiracy is probably a lost cause and after leaving a highly confused Kayleigh to it, Claire races to the Manor to rectify her mistake. Of course, by this time, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard have formed quite an endearing double act as they sneak, graft and fake their way into the Manor to mount their hastily planned jail break, but while some of the episode’s funniest moments from from this random double act (watching them hurriedly bicker about who gets to ride in a wheelchair is a legitimate joy), the bulk of this episode really is mostly devoted to Sam completing his arc from a grieving husband who is quick to hate, to someone with a bit more empathy.
There’s more than a little of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in watching a defeated Alfred Molina try to assimilate with the shuffling inmates of the Manor and I suppose that makes Deadpool’s Karan Soni’s abusive Tony the Nurse Ratched of this scenario. Anyway, while there, Sam goes on something of a mini quest that takes him right to the core of his anguish by means of a karaoke session that’s equal parts heart rending and heart warming and, of course, it has all to do with Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road. We’ve already established how painful his wife’s favorite song is to hear, so watching him sing it, and even breaking in the middle, is bolstered when the other inmates join in and turn this ode to grief into an emotionally lifting moment. I would say that the moment is fairly wasted on just being used as a diversion to get cigarettes for the bizarre Dutchess (possibly should have been switched for the later bus stop diversion), but it does introduce us to a randomly strange new character in the form of Mary McDonnell’s partly comatose resident who also has a connection with Mother. OK, so it’s a little overly convenient to introduce a brand new character who just so happens to have all the mystical answers our hero needs at exactly that time, but the Dutchess is such a thoroughly odd eccentric, with her whispy grey beehive and her lesbian lover with a resetting memory, it’s tough not to be enthralled by her. And with that, all we have left is the final episode and with Wally deciding to try and bust Mother out even in the wake if discovering Shaw’s penchant for murdering the weak links in his chain.
Once again, for a show that banks so much on being a big, sci-fi mystery, I’m surprised at how much of The Boroughs I’m managing to predict in advance (of course the aliens have a Mother/Queen chaste; of course she’s been using telepathy on Sam; of course he used Thunder Road to beat his grief), but none of this has managed to halt how much fun it’s been watch these fantastic fogies stage their imperfect little jail break. All that’s left now is to wrap things up and with so many things still in play, matters should keep the high energy for this episode – but here’s hoping it doesn’t wither and fade now the end is in sight.
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