Shadows House S1E8: "In the Palm of His Hand"

I was wrong about this episode being the big payoff. It's still not the end of the debut plotline, though, and my predictions were based on the expectation that it would be. We learn a little bit more, some that supports my inferences and some that invalidates them, but overall this episode is just more incremental progress through the debut arc.


One of the subjects that we learn (or at least, are hinted) more about is the peculiar nature of Rum and her mistress Shirley. The first thing that happens in the episode is Lou and Ricky navigating toward the nearest black spot on the map in the hope of discovering one of their shadows, but it turning out to be Louise. It appears that each of the shadows is restrained in a different manner, representing a different sort of problem for their faces to solve. Shirley's is possibly the weirdest.

She's tied up tightly in place with some kind of thick strings, and positioned behind a dense curtain of stinging nettle plants. I don't think shadows can be hurt by nettles, but humans can be, and in particular these are likely to put a visible rash on someone's face.

Shirley doesn't say a word to either of them. Doesn't move. Doesn't register their presence, as far as either they or us can tell. She doesn't seem to be giving off any soot, and the plants, strings, and clothes around her body are unmarked. She similarly is unbothered, perhaps even unaware, when they leave again without trying to help her.

Ricky confesses that he's scared of Shirley. He's scared of a lot of people around this place, including his physically powerful and short-tempered companion Lou herself, but Shirley scares him the most. She's just too quiet. Too ghostly. Even her slave Rum kinda scares him, despite the latter appearing to be even more afraid of even more things than Ricky is, mostly on account of her proximity to Shirley.

It almost seems as if Rum - while an amnesiac prisoner like the rest of them - might actually not be a slave. If Shirley is a vegetable, and faces spend most of their time tending to the whims of their masters, then that means that Rum is basically masterless (except for when it's her turn to help sweep the common areas with the others, of course). There's power and opportunity in that. If Emilico can just encourage her to realize this and use it, there's potential for an eventual big play here.

Or is Shirley just luring everyone into a false sense of security? Perhaps. If so, though, she's keeping it even from Rum herself, as a corresponding scene with the other group establishes. A conversation about how masters feel about their faces, with Emilico and the now-departed Shaun both having as good a relationship with their own as you can possibly have in these social conditions, prompts Rum to break down and start crying about her own situation with Shirley.

I won't lie, Rum's initial sentence here had me expecting something way more dramatic and intrigue-filled than what she actually ends up meaning:

No, she hasn't replaced anyone or anything like that. Which, ngl, was sort of a disappointment to me, I thought the plot was about to thicken, but oh well. Rather, what Rum means is that Shirley has never spoken a word to her. She didn't even name her; Rum was a name she picked for herself. Shirley does little beyond dress herself and walk around to where shadows are expected to walk around. She barely produces any soot, so there's very little cleaning up after her to be done. Rum spends most of their time together sitting in the corner talking to herself while Shirley barely does anything.

Rum may or may not have been a nervous wreck from the beginning. The loneliness, isolation, and fear of someone discovering that there's something "wrong" with this shadow and this living doll has made her much worse, though.

This also hasn't played well with their indoctrination, which has led Rum to blame herself for what should be pretty obviously a (much more severe than her own) mental problem on her mistress' side of things. The resulting lack of care and affection she feels for her effectively nonexistent mistress is, also, something Rum sees as a personal defect. After all, a living doll's first and only concern is supposed to be their master.

So, that's depressing. And also makes me wonder what Shirley's actual deal is. And makes me wonder, again, if the shadows and their human slaves are actually created from the same captives, two halves of a personality given autonomous life. If so, maybe Rum being emotionally unstable and Shirley being semi-catatonic are a result of something in the process having gone wrong? Or maybe just a mental health issue in the captive exacerbated on both sides by the separation? Not sure, but definitely curious. As I said, I don't think that Rum's issues are *entirely* because of her difficulties living with Shirley.

The other character we learn the most about in this episode is Ricky. I may have spoken too soon when I attributed his malice mostly to his master Patrick. Or, then again, depending on what exactly the shadows are and where they and their "faces" come from, that could be a meaningless distinction.

Well, back to Lou and Ricky for now.

Ironically, Lou and Ricky have the exact combination of items best suited for rescuing Shirley (the hazmat suit and the garden shears). However, Ricky doesn't want to help anyone else win, and Lou has learned that the best way to get by is just focusing on her own responsibilities. Also, Ricky is creeped out by Shirley and doesn't want to get close. So, they continue on their own ways.

They even have some cute moments together, despite Lou being oblivious to them and Ricky being snarky about them.

Eventually, they find Lou's mistress Louise. Their progress is aided by the sight of a soot-plume winding up into the air above the maze, and Lou is able to recognize it as her own mistress specifically based on the shape it takes on as it floats upward.

Apparently, each shadow's soot behaves differently when released from their body. Most of the slaves haven't noticed this, but Lou with her quiet hypercompetence has.

When they approach Louise' location, the latter hears the sound of Lou's voice calling for her and immediately the curling ash stops rising. Realizing they can no longer see exactly where she is, Lou then shouts that they'll be going away now, and the ash starts rising again, allowing them to find the well that Louise is stuck in.

Watching Louise embrace her slave, and express admiration rather than irritation or outrage when she realizes that Lou manipulated her emotions in order to rescue her, fills Ricky with an envious rage. His own relationship with his master seems decent-ish from what we've seen, but given Patrick's general ego and selfishness I can't imagine that it's nearly as good. He certainly wouldn't be praising Ricky for using his emotions like that, even if he was doing so to help him.

When Louise is annoyed at Ricky for even talking to her, and says that she doesn't even like his master either and isn't interested in any secondhand messages Ricky may be bearing her from Patrick, that just rubs it in harder. Lou noticed things about Ricky's master that Ricky himself hadn't. She's more beloved by her mistress than Ricky is by anyone. And now she's rescued her mistress before Ricky has even gotten close to his own, despite all the sabotage and skullduggery he and Patrick engaged in with all the associated social costs.

Ricky is strongly considering it.

So, he's basically caught in a venom-spiral. Not good.

The real star of this episode, though, is Emilico. Oh my god, Emilico. I didn't have very strong feelings about her one way or the other for the first handful of episodes, but this episode is the point at which I really got attached to her.

When Rum tells her about everything in a cathartic crying fit, Emilico - seemingly with total honesty - proposes that maybe the reason Shirley never says anything to Rum is because she's already totally happy with how she does everything. After all, she barely gives off any soot, right? Doesn't that mean she's in a state of bliss and contentment? If a doll's first concern is their master's happiness and wellbeing, then doesn't that make Rum the most successful of the lot of them?

I don't think she's correct, but she thinks she's correct, and Rum is - if not totally persuaded - then at least willing to accept it as a possibility. Which cheers her up immensely, and has her acting more like a friend and less like a desperate hanger-on from that point onward.

Unlike many relentlessly optimistic, cheerful characters, Emilico also isn't played as some kind of oblivious fool. Despite her ADHD, she retains an incredibly capacity for noticing details of whatever she's currently looking at, and her mind is razor-sharp when it comes to applying what she knows to a given problem or situation. Like when the two of them happen on the holes that Lou has been cutting through the hedge walls, puts it together with one of the group having chosen the shears, and instantly divines that Lou has been through here.

Or, more impressively, when she and Rum are trying to make their way through a maze of stone walls that doesn't seem to match what's on their maps at all. Rum's eidactic memory does very well to keep them from forgetting the way they came, but it's no help at actually getting them through it. Then Emilico remembers John saying that when he came through this way, he crossed over a bridge over some kind of stone gutter, and she realizes that they're not in the maze, they're in between the lines of the maze.

They have to fight their way through a crowd of aggressive scorches to make it to a staircase that takes them up, but they manage. Enabled in part by Emilico realizing that the bags their maps and some other basic supplies came in can be used as aprons or air filters a la Lou's discovery, and also that the handbar of her cart can be removed and combined with some string and twigs to make an improvised broom. Once they're up on the "walls" of the maze, the map shows them the paths to walk along to get where they need to go.

Emilico reminds me a lot of Chihiro Ogino from "Spirited Away." To a degree that makes me suspect there was some direct inspiration there. The difference is that, apart from being a couple years older, she's got some really impressive cunning to go along with the boundless kindness, empathy, and positivity. I really want to know what she was like before she was brought here and convinced she was a "living doll."

...

Two other plot developments come near the end of the episode. The first of these is concerning Kate, and what is almost certainly a piece of sabotage by Edward (though it's one that would be very hard for him to deny, so I'm a bit confused). Her cage is held up by a bunch of chains, and there's a mechanism that slowly releases the chains as its entry-fan sucks in soot from above her head.

Putting a time limit on her rescue until the cage falls, presumably killing or at least severely injuring her. A concern that none of the other masters, no matter how uncomfortable their respective prisons might have been, and how much risk of ruining their clothes it put them in, have to worry about. And of course when she realizes it, the knowledge of the danger she's in just makes her produce even more soot.

The final scene gets back to Edward, showing a conversation he had with two of his peers. Specifically, the faces of two members of the Shadows peanut gallery we briefly saw in the previous episode. I don't quite understand everything they say to each other here. Part of it due to deliberate vagueness by the story, and part of it (I suspect) due to translation issues. But, the gist of it is that the Lord Grandfather and his close confidantes within the Shadows clan appreciate a good show, putting neophytes through the ringer is considered totally acceptable by them, and that providing a thrilling and exciting enough performance will be good for Edward's own political prospects going forward. And, seemingly, the prospects of the other two humans he's talking to, who apparently are part of his own cohort from back when their own masters debuted.

There's nothing about why he might have wanted Kate and Emilico, specifically, to be the ones who fail. They talk around it a bit, but not about it.

Then, in a cut to the present at the end, we see Edward alone at the entrance playing his piano to calm his nerves again. The upside-down hourglass is almost full, and nobody's emerged yet as best we can see. While giving a title drop about how all the children's fates are in the palm of his own hand, Edward throws a major curveball at my understanding of how anything works by shifting into Shadow form. After which point, he begins referring to himself in the third person, like the shadows all do.

Is this the future that awaits all of the debutants? Some kind of fusion of shadow and face into a single being? Perhaps an altered re-assembly of the original abductee, if the shadows were originally separated from them to begin with?

Or is Edward something unique? A shadow that can disguise itself as human. If so, then are the other two he was talking to similar? If not, do they know which of him they were actually talking to?

Ominous. Mysterious. But, that's the end.


I'm invested in Shadows House now. I want to see where this is going, and to know if Emilico makes it through with her kindness and inner strength intact. I wouldn't necessarily say that this is the strongest episode of the series so far, but it's the one that finished the process of pulling me in.