OUTCAST - Ep. 2 (I Remember) When She Loved Me - A TV Review

Spoilers - I'll be discussing things that could be construed as spoilers both for the show and the comic. FYI.

After the startling and pretty rapidly-paced premiere of Cinemax/Robert Kirkman's 'Outcast' last week, it was probably inevitable that this week's episode would pull back on the throttle a little bit. Not that a lot didn't happen - oh, shit happened - but it didn't have the same self-contained nature as the pilot. We spent more time with the characters, got to know who they are a bit more, and made some disturbing discoveries about the overarching mystery behind just what the hell is happening in Rome, WV.

The episode starts and is peppered throughout with flashbacks about Kyle's mother, Sarah. An idyllic tableau of a single mother and son playing around in their backyard is terrifyingly interrupted by what appears to be the exact moment that Sarah is possessed. Her smile fades, her face is awash in sudden sadness and confusion, and then she begins frantically clawing at the dirt and covering herself in mud. But what really caught my attention though was the sight of Kyle's bike parked against the tree. Kyle is in the yard, playing, reading Homer Price and then his mom calls him over and he leans his bike against the tree.

There's an old picture floating around the internet (and right here...on the left) about a similar bike that was parked by a tree for so long that the tree itself grew around the bicycle, lifting it from the ground and pulling it into its trunk. The story was that a boy parked it there before going off to war, and never returned. Certainly, that is the idea Kirkman and co. are trying to evoke - Kyle's war began at that moment, when his mother was possessed. His childhood ended, and he's never returned. Through more flashbacks, we see the abuse he endured, Sarah's manic attempts to harm him, and a climactic fight that we actually end up seeing from two different points of view.

In the present, though, Kyle has cleaned up the house, gotten the water turned back on and is hurriedly wrapping a present. Almost everyone in the town either doesn't like him or trust him, but he does have a few loyal allies in Reverend Anderson, his sister Megan, and Chief Giles. And they've all got his back in this episode.

The Reverend spends the day trying to more or less muster an army he can use to try to protect the townspeople from demonic influences. He preaches fire and brimstone to a mostly apathetic audience, because they don't know that the Reverend isn't preaching from faith - he's preaching from firsthand knowledge. He knows demons exists, he knows possession is real, and he knows the threat against Rome isn't over. But the people aren't hearing it. Instead, they sit listless in church, chastise him for saying "butt" and vandalize the walls. Anderson preaches patience in the last episode, but this one shows us exactly what he's thinking now: shit just got real.

So much of the episode is about people operating under erroneous assumptions - Kyle assumes that the demon is still inside his mother, because he never saw it exit her body the way it did for Joshua, in the last episode. Deputy Mark (Kyle's brother-in-law) assumes Kyle's just a bad guy who beats up kids, an assumption Giles and Anderson have to refute, to doubting audiences. Megan assumes that Kyle is at fault for what happened between his wife and his daughter, and hesitates to deliver his present for his daughter's seventh birthday. And the rest of the town assumes that Anderson's preachings about the devil and demons are just general church fear-mongering. But they're all wrong.

Megan attends her niece's party, and delivers the gift. Perhaps she is driven to break the rules of the restraining order by seeing Allison with another man (even if it wasn't overtly romantic, that was an assumption or implication that Megan could draw, and one that might make her take Kyle's side). And certainly Megan was heartbroken to see another man teaching Amber to ride a bicycle. She sneaks Kyle's present* into the party and doesn't confess who it came from when both Allison and Amber wonder.

*The book Kyle sneaks to his daughter as a gift is "Homer Price" a children's book about a young boy who has various adventures in a small town, often acting as a sort of good samaritan, which draws a pretty obvious parallel to Kyle himself. But it also acts as a sort of tether to Kyle's youth, which he spends this episode trying to recover, in a way.

In a weird subplot that probably has more to do with the main storyline of the season/series, Mark and Giles go out to the woods to investigate what they discover as a series of animal mutilations and a creepy-ass trailer out all by its lonesome. While they're walking, though, Giles defends Kyle from Mark's accusations, and lets his deputy in on the fact that Giles trusts Reverend Anderson completely. Which makes you wonder what exactly does Giles know about the demons floating around the town? Has he had any previous experiences with it? Giles is disturbed by what they find out in the woods, but his concern betrays some kind of knowledge, too. Curious...

The saddest part of this week's episode is when Kyle visits his catatonic mother in a nursing home. Kyle sits and talks to Sarah about how he'd previously felt like she deserved to be there; he was angry and he wanted nothing to do with her. But now he knows better. And it seems like in an instant he's determined to have his mother back exactly the way she was. After sorta kidnapping her from her nursing home, Kyle and Anderson try to exorcise her again, with Kyle going so far as to reopen the wounds on his hand so he can drip his blood into her mouth. He's hoping, begging for the same reaction as Joshua. The desperation Kyle works with as he's frantically to drive a demon out of his mother is heartbreaking, and shows just how driven Kyle is by both the events of his past and his guilt for not being able to save her earlier.

But then, the "sadness" turns to "absolute fucking tragedy" when we see how pointless Kyle's attempts really are. In another flashback to the climactic fight we saw earlier, Kyle lies there unconscious and just isn't aware that the demon did exit his mother. It gurgled out of her mouth, and then physically tried to strangle the boy while his mother watched, unable to help.


After Kyle gives up hope that he can still save her, the audience is finally introduced to the Big Bad. Sidney. He hasn't got a name yet, but on the surface he's a congenial older man in a simple black suit and hat. And he's played with lip-smacking hammery by Brent Spiner. He visits Sarah just long enough to mock her anguish and failure to save her son. He gloats that Kyle will never know how hard she fought against them and then sinisterly tells her "we have him anyway". She cries, letting us know that this poor woman is still trapped in there, a prisoner in her own body.

Oh, Sidney is a fuck, all right.

So that's where things are left at the end of this emotionally train-wrecky episode. It was damn good, and it continues (through two episodes at least) to be a pretty faithful adaptation of the comic. Patrick Fugit and Wrenn Schmidt had particularly strong performances this week, and I'm really excited to see what happens next.


FINAL SCORE 8.5/10

Outcast airs Friday nights on Cinemax at 10/9c