‘The Changeling’ Episode 3 Recap: All of Them Witches

There’s no buildup, no fanfare, no transition at all when The Changeling changes from one thing to another. Last episode, it was a slow burn, a building of steam, a gradual descent into madness. Everything was going to explode at one point or another, sure, but there was no reason to think we wouldn’t watch the fuse get lit and burn down first. 

But that’s not what we got. Instead, writer Kelly Marcel and director Jonathan van Tulleken present us with a fait accompli. Apollo Kogwa has been beaten to a bloody pulp, chained to a chair, and bolted to a pipe by the neck with a bike lock. His wife, Emma Valentine, is moving with the herky-jerky mechanical patterns of someone deep into a psychotic break. His baby, Brian, is crying in the next room. And when Emma grabs a boiling kettle of water from the stove by hoisting it from the bottom with her bare hands, growling “It’s not a baby” before exiting, both we in the audience and Apollo himself know that baby is as good as dead.

The rest of the episode, easily — and presumably by design — the strongest of this initial batch of three, practically rockets along, propelled by the fuel of Apollo’s grief and LaKeith Stanfield’s talent at portraying it. Because of our association of great actors crying with Oscar reels, it’s easy to overlook how demanding a part like this. But this isn’t one scene of Stanfield crying on cue. This is fifty minutes of a man at absolute rock bottom. Beaten nearly to death by his insane wife, chained up helpless as she murders his baby before disappearing. Showing up at her old library with a shotgun, so consumed with grief and rage that he’s willing to terrorize her coworkers as if they know where she is, relenting only when he hears one librarian crying for, you guessed it, her mother. 

Hijacking grief counseling groups already made uncomfortable with his notoriety. Getting kicked out of the dad park for the same reason. Giving up the precious signed first-edition To Kill a Mockingbird to his partner Patrice, from whom he’d sleazily kept it a secret, but only because he plans to kill himself that night. Relenting in the face of Patrice’s shrewd tough love. Talking to his building super about the discovery of the crime scene. (It was the smell that tipped off the neighbors, the smell of a rotting infant.) 

And learning, in part via a parallel storyline told in flashback, that his nightmares about his father’s return are a repressed memory, from a time when his mother was forced by her vindictive boss to leave four-year-old Apollo home alone during work. Learning furthermore that his father didn’t abandon them, he was booted from the family by his mother, who couldn’t carry the weight of an adult fuckup in addition to a baby boy. Blaming his mother for depriving him of a male role model who could have made him a better husband and father, a husband and father whose wife wouldn’t…well, you know.

This is all ugly, nasty, deeply sad stuff, effectively forcing Stanfield to act with his eyes full of tears and his voice on the verge of breaking for an hour. To see him do so, not just expertly but seemingly effortlessly, as if he really is that sad, is like this one time I watched some kid pop a wheelie on his bicycle, then cruise diagonally across a twelve-lane intersection wheel in the air, without a care in the world. Doing it at all is impressive; maintaining it is jawdropping.

But the shockingly sudden way in which the show deploys the terrible event at its center isn’t all there is to this episode. When a woman at one of the grief groups recounts the paranormal phenomena and the sense that her baby isn’t a baby that Emma did prior to her break, Apollo freaks out, warning the group that this woman plans to kill her child. He’s pursued by a strange, sweaty nerd of a guy named William Wheeler (Samuel T. Herring, of Future Islands fame), who filmed the outburst. While wondering about the identity of the mysterious “Cal” the woman turned to for advice (a name dropped earlier with Emma), William does a little searching around to discover that the “wise ones” the woman alluded to during her rant are probably witches. You remember, like the one whose curse Apollo all but invited when he cut that string off Emma’s wrist years earlier. “Witches?” Apollo says, his voice hovering between “you’ve got to be kidding me” and “my god, now it makes sense.”

Oddly, this is the second week in a row that a dark fantasy show from a major tech-platform streaming service debuted with three episodes because they were clearly saving the best for last; the same thing happened with Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time just a few days ago. Lord only knows why streamers do what they do (beyond screwing writers and actors to save a buck, I mean), but it’s hard to question the wisdom of packaging The Changeling this way. From “promising but a bit treacly” to “okay, now we’re going somewhere” to “Jesus Christ make it stop” in three episodes is the kind of trajectory that shows a horror series is being made with thought, skill, and a willingness to go there. I’m both dreading and excited for where it goes next.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

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.