‘The Changeling’ Episode 4 Recap: No Man Is an Island

When I say LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling, I mean it: LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling. So much of what makes the show work stems directly from his performance, which takes a single note — grief — and turns it into a symphony. 

Going over my notes on this episode, his work, his choices, pop out again and again. The hesitant stop-start way in which he puts his hand on the shoulder of his strange acquaintance William Wheeler as the man sobs for his estranged family. His murmured whisper of “Goodbye, Valentines” when Emma’s sister Kim departs from their meetup, closing the book on a whole bunch of people he once thought he’d love forever. His physical reaction to the mysterious texts he receives claiming that his murderous wife Emma is still alive, as if he’s being struck. 

The ever so slight way in which he emphasizes, as if despite himself, the final phrase in this line to Patrice about William’s clouded motives: “Maybe he’s crazy, maybe he wants to throw me off the boat, I really don’t care.” That “I really don’t care” is an admission that he’s willing to commit suicide by stalker, or at least wouldn’t regret it that much if it happened. His ability to still locate the humor in the piece, as he does when he deadpans “You are a middle-aged IT guy and I am a depressed bookseller” to William when the man gets a bit too gung ho. The way his voice repeatedly cracks as he screams “Where are you???” at the missing Emma, like the sounds can’t fully contain the emotions they’re intended to describe.

Even the way he finally brings himself to say the dreaded phrase “It’s not a baby” to Cal (Jane Kaczmarek), the literal and figurative puppeteer of the band of urban-primitive witches called the Wise Ones living on the abandoned North Brother Island in the East River. In those words you can hear him reliving the trauma of his wife’s last words to him before she murders their child; the grim realization that she might have been right; and the grief for the now-lost version of himself that never would have even entertained such an idea. To lose one’s grip on the sane, rational world after losing so much already…well, if you want to know how that looks and sounds, look and listen to LaKeith Stanfield.

Stanfield’s dance partner for this episode is Samuel T. Herring and his peculiar character William Wheeler. Herring, too, has a difficult task in front of him: He has to be equally convincing as a harmless nebbish, an internet-brained Citizen Detective, a conspiratorial crackpot, a failed husband and parent, a man grieving the end of his family, a victim of an improbably coven of witches, and potentially a murderer, of his family or Apollo or both. Without Herring’s ability to dance deftly between these points, we in the audience wouldn’t share Apollo’s confusion over just what kind of person this guy is, exactly — a confusion that, like his grief, lasts the entire episode, and thus has to work for the episode to work.

Herring pulls it off. Despite his nerdy clothing and thinning hairline and fragile glasses, he has a bullish physique that hints at danger beneath the surface. Despite being only 39 in real life, he’s convincing when, as William, he says he blew a 25-year marriage by becoming a workaholic. You still feel his sorrow over what turns out to be his wife Greta’s murder of their baby daughter, whose name he says he couldn’t even bring himself to say for a year, even though by now it’s been established he’s an expert liar. For that matter, you still can connect and engage with him on an emotional level even though Cal had just delivered him what by rights should have been a fatal beating moments earlier. What’s going on with this guy? That’s for Herring to know and us, maybe, to find out.

The episode ends, for Apollo and William anyway, with both of them locked up in cages by a woman who laughingly brags that, much like the cops, she doesn’t even bother keeping track of how many men she’s killed anymore. But it really ends with a shot of Apollo’s mother Lilian, standing on the same dock off which she threw a red suitcase decades earlier — followed by a shotgun blast of cacophony from composer Dan Deacon. The suitcase and the sounds promise more mystery and menace to come.

As of this moment, The Changeling reminds me of a fine, little-seen HBO miniseries from a couple of years back, also about grieving parents working through their pain while under threat from an isolated island community with links to witchcraft: The Third Day, starring Jude Law in, essentially, the LaKeith Stanfield role. My advice to you is to go seek it out, then return for next week’s episode. In my experience, watching a bunch of good TV in a row creates a positive feedback loop.

(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.