For a second there I thought I’d have to withdaw my claims of The Boroughs not simply being Stranger Things with old people…
I mean, with a cursory glance at the second eposode it certainly looks like that certainly could be the case as the individual characters are now starting to slowly approach the central mystery from multiple angles as they unknowingly pick away at an otherworldly conspiracy that’s all around them. But while The Boroughs seems to be taking a familiar route, the very fact that it’s old age pensioners that we’re following is what makes all the difference. While it’s regrettably true that there’s a more than equal chance the elderly would be ignored just as much as overstimulated kids, the fact that they’re near the end of their lives adds a sense of poignancy to proceedings that shines ever brighter in episode 2. I mean, if they’ve killed Bill Pullman off already, surely no one is safe.
In the wake of Jack’s death, Sam is understandably uncertain about how to proceed. You see, while the official cause of death is a heart attack, Sam can’t seem to find the ways to explain the inhuman lifeform he fought with last night after he discovered it feeding off of his neighbour’s life force or something. After his shaky claims of an animal attack are ignored, he tries to get answers by visiting the mentally frail Edward to try and discover what he meant when he blurted out “The Owl is in the walls” during that earlier home invasion.
Meanwhile, it’s become fairly apparent that Jack was having an affair with Judy who is taking his death incredibly hard, but can’t show it unless her husband Art finds out. But what’s doubly tragic is that not only does Art know, but he had accepted it despite worrying that she had fallen in love with him. But while he sneaks away from the Boroughs every day under cover of a golf trip in order to grow magic mushrooms, he experiences a bizarre phenomenon that sees thousands of crows commit mass suicide as they drive themselves into the ground. Elsewhere, Renee discovers that not only does she have an ally in new security member Paz when trying to figure out who’s been stealing quartz items from residents, but she finds that he’s looking for a bit of romance too. But slightly less upbeat is the fact that Wally is desperately trying to look into other, alternative treatments for the stage 4 cancer he’s slowly dying from.
But bringing things back to Sam, after Edward tells him that he “caught one” and that “the key is in the light”, the newest resident of the Boroughs tears his house apart looking for clues. However, his biggest breakthrough comes from screwing around with a sample of blood he got from the creature when he belted it with a hammer. With Wally looking on, Sam discovers that remarkable things happen when it’s placed too close to his television set – things that are seemingly out of this world.
So I suppose we should start with the rather surprising twist that Bill Pullman’s Jack has been killed off already after only the first episode. While it’s always good to keep an audience on its toes, I have to say, taking out President Thomas J. Whitmore from Independence Day so early managed to genuinely catch me by surprise, so I guess that’s a point to The Boroughs already. However, while the death manages to keep things moving a little different to that “other” Netflix show, the loss of a seemingly major character before the sci-fi plot even gets started manages to hit home that feeling that becomes prevalent whenever you reach a certain age – death will come for you eventually, and not at the hands of a spidery alien thing.
This gives us the chance to get to know our group of mature citizens a little more intimately as they all react to Jack’s “passing” in different ways. Obviously, what with there being a conspiracy to unravel, Sam snaps into detective mode as his engineer brain struggles to make sense of the things he’s seen and thus it compells him to return to the Manor and question Edward, despite his brain having all the cognitive powers of a sloppy blancmange. All he gets for his troubles are seemingly nonsense phrases that he manages to decode as Edward once managed to capture one of these creatures and that the clues lay within one of the light fixtures in Sam’s house. From here he resorts to some Joyce Byers house remodelling as he rips his house apart to make sense of whatever the hell is going on. But while Sam is busying himself with making sense of it all (him finding the idol from Raiders Of The Lost Ark in Edward’s storage locker is a beautiful nod), the rest of the cast deal in their own way.
While Renee strives to solve a mystery of her own (stolen quartz trinkets), her life-loving attitude and sassy smile has attracted the attention of Paz the security guard, who is already going over the head of his shady boss, Hank, and trying for a dinner date with the amused woman. Elsewhere we find Wally struggling with his own mortality as he grasps at various straws concerning his treatment and even goes so far to purchase his own coffin (why the fuck would a casket need a memory form lining?), but most tragic of all is Judy.
It seems that our hunch was correct as she really was having an affair with Jack and the way Alfre Woodard portrays her grief is nothing short of heartbreaking. Unable to mourn in public due to the secrecy of their relationship, she’s forced to carry this late in life tragedy all on her own. But while we discover that her husband’s frequent “golf trips” were mere cover stories in order to steal away and tend to his magic mushrooms, it turns out that Art’s known about the tryst all along, but has seemingly allowed it in order to allow his wife to be happy. However, it seems to have backfires as he openly wonders if she was in love with him and it a perfect example of the strange, intertwined drama that occurs when you’re in the winter of your life cycle.
Of course, we can’t leave until we’ve had that last minute burst of extraterrestrial wonder, and in true Spielberg fashion we end on a blast of awe as Sam and Wally’s experiments on the alien blood causes a light show that’s one part Close Encounters to two parts Prometheus and it ends up being the perfect cherry on the cake to an episode that not only turns the mystery up a notch, but has us already genuinely feeling for these characters as their various mature problems and coping methods are a damn sight more moving than a kid getting upset that his friends won’t play D&D anymore.
While things are understandably still moving slow, the familiarity of the mystery plot is enlivened by the surprise of Pullman’s premature exit (a common problem of men his age), the determination of Alfred Molina’s Sam and the sheer sadness of Woodard’s Judy. However, as the pieces will soon start connecting, hopefully we’ll get the ensemble together and moving in the same direction soon. After all, none of us are getting any younger…
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