‘The Changeling’ Episode 2 Recap: A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother

“I know no one’s gonna believe me,” says Emma. “I know that now. So I’ll go.” After months of sleep deprivation, trouble with breastfeeding, and — this is key — illusory text messages showing surveillance-style photos of her family that somehow disappear the moment she tries to show anyone else, Emma has been asked by her husband Apollo to go see a doctor. The statement above is the sound of her trying to reconcile herself to it, make peace with it. But all I can hear is a woman giving up. Something bad is happening, and no one’s gonna believe her.

The second episode of writer/creator Kelly Marcel’s slow-burn horror series The Changeling puts Clark Backo’s Emma front and center. Once again bouncing around through time, albeit less dramatically, it shows us how she got to the point where she’s dragging her sister, Kim (Amirah Vann), along with her to strange apartments to pick up bags full of chains from weird practitioners of folk medicine, or something. Six months of no sleep, no real physical or emotional connection with your child, the slow estrangement of yourself from your once-doting husband, and, oh yeah, sinister forces of unknown origin tormenting you Lost Highway style by sending you images of your own family will do that to you.

But some of the problems facing Emma are external as well. Her measly eight weeks of maternity leave, for one thing, a universally despised price we all pay for the freedom of living in these United States. Her mother-in-law Lillian (Adina Porter, always a welcome presence) is another factor, with her out-of-date ideas about what Emma is and isn’t doing wrong. 

Everyone’s a critic when you’re a parent, as this episode takes great pains to point out. It does so most cathartically when Apollo and his book-hunting buddy Patrice (Malcolm Barrett) tell some lady who offers unsolicited constructive criticism of how Apollo is carrying his baby around to “have a nice hot cup of shut the fuck up.”

Humor aside, the project this episode brings to mind more than any other — and not just because they share a composer, Baltimore musician Dan Deacon — is Unedited Footage of a Bear, the terrifying 2014 Adult Swim Infomercial whose drum I never stop banging. (I’ve probably talked more about this short film than the filmmakers, Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien, have themselves.) The slow descent from happy parenthood to isolated misery; the emphasis on how mothers in psychological distress often go un- or under-treated; the portrayal of severe mental illness as something so close to the supernatural stuff of horror that it’s a distinction without a difference; the use of both the family and the phone as vectors for fear — it’s all there. I don’t mean to imply this is a rip-off, because it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination. I do mean to imply, however, that this episode is eerie enough to merit comparison to one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen on television.

As was the case with Unedited Footage, the lead performance is the load-bearing structure here. Like twin actors Kerry and Jacqueline Donelli in that earlier project, Clark Backo transitions so seamlessly from perky, fun mama to glassy-eyed, sallow-faced living zombie. Her paranoia and dread, which either bring on or are brought on by her sleeplessness, have turned her into something less than herself — a being one macabre half-step out of sync with the world around her, like a mirrored reflection that somehow begins moving a brief but unmistakable moment after you do. By episode’s end, you too want to keep this poor person and her poor baby away from each other, for both their sakes.

LaKeith Stanfield’s assignment in this episode is a comparatively easy one: Be normal, be a good dad, be a pretty shitty friend, and be ready willing and able to distance yourself from your obviously sick wife after months of this shit have you at your wits’ end. But in a horror series, playing the character who doesn’t realize something is capital-W Wrong actually is hard work: You have to keep the audience caring what happens to you even as your ignorance or unwillingness to see what’s happening drives us away. Stanfield’s not doing the gangbusters work Backo is in this ep, but what he is doing is impressive in its own right.

So too with The Changeling overall. It’s probably premature to be making sweeping pronouncements about the direction of this thing, but this second hour put paid to a lot of my concerns regarding the first. The romantic stuff, fun as it was, is pretty much gone. The true love/power of family stuff gets shot in the kneecaps by Emma’s madness, possibly inherited from her would-be family-annihilator mother. All in all, it’s a much tougher, edgier, creepier, scarier show all of a sudden. But its strengths — Backo and Stanfield first and foremost, but also the racist micro-aggressions to which Apollo is repeatedly subjected — remain intact as well. Go figure: It took everything turning to shit to turn me into an optimist about this show.

And there are abundant signs that things will get worse. If the title hadn’t tipped you off already, Emma becomes convinced that her son is…not her son. A stranger on the street screams “It’s not a baby! It’s not a baby!” repeatedly upon seeing Emma and Brian together, though Emma’s in the middle of a breakdown, so I’m not sure it even registers. There’s a very prominently placed knife rack in the kitchen, and the knives it holds dwindle in number throughout the episode, which strikes me as no bueno. The surveillance pics of Apollo and Emma are prefigured by a sourceless long-distance view of the action, a way for director Jonathan van Tulleken to convey the idea that someone, or something, is watching without having to reveal who or what it is.

What’s more, we learn that Emma has blocked out her mother’s attempt to kill her whole family by burning their house down around them — not just the details of that day, but the very fact that her mom set the fire, that even at her young age she had to demand her mom let her go in order to survive, that she spent years in foster care afterwards. Even Apollo has his problems: When he discovers a miraculously preserved first-edition copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, with an autograph made out to no less than Truman Capote, he keeps his partner Patrice in the dark about it despite their agreement to split the profits on anything they find on their excursions together. This is the good guy, remember.

It’s a recipe for disaster, all told. When it comes to horror, disaster is exactly what I’m in the market for.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.