Midnight Mass (part one)
This review was commissioned by @Humble-Bee
The 2021 live action series "Midnight Mass" was created by Mike Flanegan, a veteran writer and director whose filmography includes a number of Stephen King adaptations. He reportedly had the idea for "Midnight Mass" while working on those pictures, and the series wears its influences on its sleeve. After watching the first episode, I was surprised to learn that this wasn't an actual Stephen King project.
That said, this series isn't just a 'member berry. It might have a particular late twentieth century style, but the substance is fresh, modern, and relevant. That's not to say there aren't substantive criticisms to be made (and I will definitely be making them going forward), but the sincerity and vision behind the show easily make up for its derivative and occasionally overcooked elements.
The structure of this review is going to be kinda weird. It's the sort of show that benefits from bird's eye analysis, but it's also seven full TV length episodes long. So, I'll be writing a multi-part review that *broadly* follows the episode order, but flashes back and forward a fair amount.
Part 1: the Master of this World
Theodicy has been a multi-millennia bogeyman for the Abrahamic religions. In the parent religion of Judaism, the problem of evil is at least somewhat mitigated by there not really being a hard consensus on whether God is actually omnibenevolent to go with the omniscience and omnipotence (and even then, there's still been furious intra-Jewish controversy over the exact degree of God's less-than-omni benevolence after major disasters, from the Babylonian exile all the way to the holocaust). Christianity and Islam have it harder with their greater focus on the ultimate goodness of god and (especially for Christianity) the central idea of a duality between a sinful mortal world and an unsullied divine state of being that should be aspired to.
There's one passage in the New Testament that I always think about, in regards to this problem. In large part because I've heard it quoted and paraphrased so often in real life.
“And the devil said to him, “I will give to you all this authority, and its glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I wish.””
There are some denominations that interpret this passage as the devil simply lying about having this authority. But there are also a great many that don't. Both Christians and Muslims of various denominations refer to the devil as "he who is within this world" or "the master of this world." Whenever I've heard one say that, the question that I have to bite down is "If the devil was given free reign over the place we live in, what the hell does that say about God?"
The teaser for "Midnight Mass" asks this question in nearly as many words. Drunk driver Riley Flynn has just killed a teenaged girl, and is staring in disbelieving horror at her glass-filled body as the police prepare it for the morgue and himself for the cell. Coming from a devout Catholic background, Riley puts his hands together and begins saying the Lord's Prayer, but a policeman interrupts him and asks "Hey, while you're at it, why don't you ask Him why He always takes the kids but lets the drunk fucks go with scratches." Riley stops his prayer mid-word as he realizes how little his own relationship with God has to do with what just happened to the girl, and how little reason he has to be praying when the focus should all be on the victim.
He doesn't pray in jail that night either. Nor does he for the next four years until he's let out on parole.
Every night, his sleep is troubled. The dead girl with her face filled with broken windshield glass has been permanently burned into his vision.
...
Riley left his native Crockett Island during its heyday, when the island had somewhere in the neighbourhood of five hundred inhabitants. Shortly after he left for college, an oil spill poisoned the water and all but killed the fishing community in one stroke. Coming home after prison with his degree unfinished and his hopes of a finance career cooling behind him, he returns to find a rotting village with less than three hundred sad, angry souls in too many dilapidated houses. The isolation and claustrophobia of island life that he'd hoped to escape is intensified by the smaller-than-ever population. The comfortable working-class lifestyles given way to poverty, debt, and foreclosure. The alcoholism that already ruined Riley's own life has conquered his home while he was away. "Midnight Mass" is relentless in showing that poverty is a public health problem, with many of the island's remaining people suffering from diseases and injuries they can't afford to take care of. Everyone who can move away from this 21st century Roanoke-in-the-making already has.
Along with decay, a major theme running through the first couple episodes of Midnight Mass is abandonment. Every bird's-eye shot (and this show really loves its bird's-eye shots) shows empty houses left to the salt and the moisture, lawns take over by weeds, empty church pews and beaches with only years-old garbage left above the high tide line. That's how the people struggle to not see themselves, as well. Years-old garbage, left half-buried in the sand above the tide. Only a few children, destined to leave the island as soon as they can and never return. Their elders are corpses tossed into a tomb, waiting to finish dying.
There's a feral cat colony living on an uninhabited corner of the island. This section of the island was abandoned much earlier, for reasons that aren't gone into, but a bunch of cats were left behind. They've lived on rats and birds and whatever else the island can provide them with since then, largely forgotten and ignored by the humans except for the occasional group of teenagers (there are still a few) that slip out into the wilderness at night to smoke or smooch, and even they mostly just complain about the noise the cats make. It's doubtful that the island can support their population growth for much longer. No one who cares about them has the time, money, or vision to do anything about it.
...
The oil company paid a settlement to the town of Crockett Island, covering their estimated lost income for the projected time it would take to finish cleaning the water. Two years after the spill, the water was declared clean. The fishermen still came home from it reeking of diesel every night, though, and dead sea life kept appearing on the beaches without any live ones coming up in their fishnets or crab-traps. The EPA still isn't letting them fish at all in some of their historic waters, even though the settlement money and disaster relief subsidies ran out long ago.
The oil company, though? It's still free to move its tankers through those waters. No policy changes. No restrictions on its operations. A few tens of millions of dollars in fees and reparations once every decade or so is just the cost of doing business. The EPA - and environmentalists in general - draw the ire of the remaining, ailing townsfolk, but the agencies that should have punished the oil company never even gave them a face to shake their fists at.
There was a brief time when it looked like things didn't need to go this way. The city council didn't have to accept the out-of-court settlement that the oil company offered them. But, it sounded like a lot of money when they were told how much they'd be getting all at once, and they believed the overly optimistic predictions for how long the cleanup and repopulation would take. In particular, one influential city councillor pushed heavily for them all to take the deal and get the legal anguish over with. No one can prove that she later embezzled a big chunk of the settlement money, but no one can prove that she didn't either.
For some reason, most of the islanders don't hate her more than they hate the EPA either. After all, she's not the one stopping them from fishing again right now. And also, the town priest is old and senile, and without that lady helping him run the church they probably wouldn't be able to hold services at all. And she's been on the island with them since they were all children, she's one of them.
...
"Betrayal" is another theme that runs through the series, albeit a bit more subtly than the other two. It's less the stab-in-the-back kind of betrayal, and more the misplaced trust kind. People and institutions are given trust that they very obviously shouldn't have been given in the first place. To the point where it's almost hard not to blame the faithful victims nearly as much as the faithless betrayers. Wrongheaded, I know, but just...what the hell did you think was going to happen?
This comes back in a big way when we get the main antagonist reveal in episode 3, but I'll put a pin in it for now except to say that corrupt city council church lady is an early telegraphing of it.
...
Riley's return to Crockett Island introduces us to a number of local players. His parents, Annie and Edward, who are visibly fraying from the stress of reconciling their neighbourly rural values with the misfortune of their circumstances and the disappointment surrounding their eldest son as he returns to them. His younger brother, Warren, who's clearly going nowhere fast as he attends his crumbling high school with his handful of classmates and has little to do with himself besides be an altar boy, crush on the mayor's wheelchair-bound daughter Leeza, and smoke the weed regularly smuggled onto the island by a shady ferryboat crewman. Joe Colley, the patient zero for the island's post-oilspill fall to alcoholism, who was responsible for putting Leeza in a wheelchair in a drunken mishap; being stuck on a small island with the girl whose life he ruined and the people who will forever know him as "the guy who handicapped the mayor's daughter" has driven Joe even deeper into the bottle. The new sherif Hassan and his teenaged son Ali, pretty much the only recent arrivals on the island - who also happen to be the only non-Catholic residents and two of the only three or four nonwhite ones.
I have very mixed feelings about these two characters, but I'll get to that in part three.
Also, the sheriff's office is just an extra room in the back of the town's lone grocery store. Which is pretty much a direct shoutout to the identical setup in Stephen King's "Storm of the Century." This isn't the last SotC parallel that we're going to see in this show. Not by a longshot.
More surprising to Riley is the coincidental return of his own high school sweetheart, Erin Greene. Like him, Erin left the island after high school with the intent of never returning, though in her case it was less that she had a dream career to pursue and more that she had an abusive mother to escape. Her mother died shortly afterward, and she ran away from an abusive marriage (in her own words, "I married my mother") and returned to the island for want of anywhere else to go a few months ago. She's become the new schoolteacher, filling the position once held by her abusive alcoholic mother. She's also pregnant with her ex-husband's child. This leaves her in an ominous position, living in the house and working the job of one abuser, while preparing to raise the child of another. Still, she's keeping it. Both because of her faith (she's not as gung-ho religious as the older islanders, but she still takes her Catholicism seriously) and because she wants to break the cycle and give her child the upbringing she wish she had.
Erin's reunion with Riley is an unexpected source of joy for both of them, broken and regretful as they are in their different ways. They're not the same people who they dated in high school, but in many ways they have much more in common now than they did then.
Still, they aren't the same. For all that they've both made mistakes and had to come crawling back to their mouldering hometown with their tails between their legs, Erin is a victim with some kind of hope for the future, and Riley is an (unintentional, but still) victimizer who can't even imagine the future anymore. She endured suffering, and kept her faith. He inflicted suffering, and - over the course of his time in prison - became an atheist.
Erin is in a position where she can hope that the misfortunes she's endured might ultimately have some good outcome. Riley knows that the girl he hit with his car isn't coming back; it's too late for her to have any good outcomes, and she was as important as anyone else.
...
Also, some of Riley's musings about how prison life itself also did a lot to ruin his ability to envision a different future is almost paraphrased from Stephen King's "The Shawshank Redemption." This isn't the last reference to TSR we're going to see in this show-heh, just kidding, that's pretty much the only Shawshank Redemption bit.
We really are going to see a lot more "Storm of the Century," though. And "The Mist." And "Salem's Lot." Among others.
...
And then, lastly, Father Paul Hill. Another new arrival. Very new, in fact. He got to the island just the day before Riley.
The town priest - the elderly Father Pruitt - recently went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He fell ill during the trip, and the Diocese has sent in a replacement. Father Hill hopes that this arrangement will be strictly temporary, and that Father Pruitt will soon recover and come back to his church, but in private conversations implies that he doesn't think that's likely. Hill is strange. Charismatic and fiery at one moment, mumbling and apprehensive the next. Above all else, though, his faith in the redemptive power of his mission and his determination to become the supporting pillar of this ailing community are the stuff legendary heroes are fuelled by. He almost instantly comes to closely know almost every member of the island.
His sermons, more fiery with every communion, are personalized for this specific community at this specific time. On his first or second Sunday event in town, he addresses Crockett Island's near-dead fishery, and points to the miracle of the fish and loaves. Multiplying fish drawn from the water was one of the first miracles Jesus ever performed, so have faith; it is one that he will perform again, here on this island and very soon. He says it, and he means it. He believes every word he speaks, not in the sense that religious folk usually "believe" in their theology, but in the sense that a person believes that the sun will rise tomorrow and that a dropped object will fall toward the ground. At the same time, Father Hill makes himself eminently approachable, and presents a very humble, very human face to his flock when he isn't giving scarily intense sermons. His self-deprecating humor, unrelenting kindness, and proactive efforts to help every member of the community in any way he can, material or spiritual, make him impossible for the townsfolk not to like. Even the Muslim outsiders, Sheriff Hassan and his son, warm up quickly to Hill even though his status as the priest makes him a figurehead for the thing that keeps them eternal outsiders to the other islanders.
...
The night that he arrives on the island, Father Hill is shown moving his belongings into the old Father Pruitt's house by the church. Among them a suspiciously large, rectangular wooden box.
Hey, he's making an easy 10,000 GBP just by not opening it, I can respect the hustle.
After closing the door behind him, he taps on the lid. Whatever is inside the box taps back.
...
Riley Flynn is reluctant to attend church with his parents, now that he's no longer a believer, but he's strongarmed into it. When Father Hill learns that Riley needs to take a boat to the mainland once a week for alcoholism counselling to meet his parole conditions, he offers to use his status as priest to start a local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter on the island just for him. Well, not just for him. As aforementioned, drink has been yet another scourge on this community in the wake of the oil spill. But, when Father Hill tells Riley - in his characteristic sly, self-deprecating, but still sincere way - that he's hoping having the group active will bring other closeted drinkers out of the woodwork, and that helping him set this up will let Riley have a positive impact on the community in addition to saving himself a weekly boat trip, Riley agrees. His parents, naturally, approve of this arrangement, disagreeing with Riley's scepticism that the religiously rooted 12-step program can work as well as the more psychologically based programme he's been attending until now.
Of course, there's also the fact that Riley hasn't actually had any alcohol in years. He couldn't get any in jail, and he hasn't had a sip of it since getting out. It's hard to say if either program has helped him, or even if he needs any outside help at all at this point. But, it's really for the parole board, not for him. Just another ritual that the priest oversees.
During their first AA meeting, Father Hill - respectfully and kindly, as he always behaves - asks Riley why he lost his faith. Riley responds with a more eloquent, research-backed (he's been doing some reading in prison) version of what the police officer in the teaser said to him. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God have allowed that girl to die just because Riley chose to get drunk and get in his vehicle?
Father Hill gives him the traditional apologetics for the problem of evil that every priest is presumably taught, but when Riley pushes back he just sort of...politely backs off. Ostensibly because they're not here to have a religious debate and they shouldn't go off on a tangent from Riley's issues or make their relationship needlessly adversarial, and these are indeed good reasons to drop the subject. However, it does seem a little convenient that this happens right at the point when the normally unflappable Father Hill seems to start having trouble coming up with answers.
...
A few nights after Riley's arrival, a massive storm hits the island. Yeah, big storm hits a tiny island community right after a soft-spoken, charismatic mysterious outsider shows up, that's another checkmark on the Stephen King Bingo board. When the storm finally clears, Riley and his family find at least one hundred dead cats washed up along the shore near their house.
There's no mystery as to their origin. Whenever there's a big rainstorm, things in the desolate upper side of the island get washed into the sea, and the riptide usually deposits them along this stretch. What is mysterious is that none of these cat bodies appear to have been dead for more than a couple of days.
...
Riley's little brother Warren was up on that abandoned shore smoking weed with his friends the night before the storm. He was sure that he'd seen *something* much larger than a cat moving in the darkness. Something with glimmering eyes, uncanny sharp movements, and a tall, flexible silhouette. Elsewhere on the island, other locals claim to have caught a bare glimpse of some kind of incredibly large bird flapping overhead in the night. During the storm itself, Riley was sure that he saw a figure resembling the old absent Father Huitt himself through the window, striding along the beach in the middle of the blinding rainstorm, oblivious to the cold and wet.
...
While the bodies of the cats have all the damage you'd expect from the seagulls picking at them before the humans discover them, it seems incredibly unlikely that the gulls would have specifically torn out the throats of each and every single last carcass. That's not something that scavenging birds do. That must have happened when the cats were still alive.
Brought to the island and then abandoned. Left with a growing population in too little space with too little food. And then, one night, something came for them, and nobody was paying attention.
...
Who gave the devil authority over the nations of the earth, that he would then be in a position to offer them to anyone else?
Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omnibenevolent. Pick two.
