(CW: pregnancy loss)
We need to talk about Bev Keane for a minute.
Bev Keane (played by Samantha Sloyan1) is an effective character not just because she’s a classic Stephen King evil church lady, who cherry-picks scripture to suit her own malevolent agenda. Most of us actually know a Bev Keane, either in real life, online, or both. They’re not always church ladies. They aren’t even always ladies. But they are always smug and passive-aggressive, all too eager to criticize and denigrate while believing that they themselves are of unblemished character.
While undoubtedly believing herself to be a godly woman, Bev doesn’t have a kind word or a moment of grace for anyone except her beloved Monsignor Pruitt, and she wields her role as his right-hand woman like a cudgel over everyone else in town, whether it’s strong-arming them into taking a settlement for a devastating oil spill (and then putting it into a church rec center that’s almost never used), or pompously ignoring Sheriff Hassan’s polite request that she not hand out Bibles to her public school students, one of which is Hassan’s teenage son.
Nobody likes Bev, they just put up with her. Even soft-spoken, laid back Wade Scarborough (Michael Trucco) mutters under his breath in her presence. It’s how it is in real life too: we just deal with the bullshit, because nobody wants to be the one to confront people like Bev, to call them out and risk opening that particular Pandora’s box. There’s a chilling single-mindedness and underlying cruelty in people like Bev Keane, made far worse by the fact that they feel entitled to it. They are not to be crossed.
That single-mindedness is revealed when Bev is the first to discover what’s really going on with Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), though I guess we can just call him Monsignor Pruitt now. What’s perhaps most unnerving about it is how utterly unruffled she is by who (and now what) he is. With the same kind of brutal efficiency she exhibited when poisoning Joe Collie’s dog (because we all know it was her, everyone in town does), she sets about both protecting Pruitt and thinking ahead, already talking about the situation with him in terms of “we” instead of “you.”
“We can keep this quiet for a moment,” Bev says. “But we should show them.” There’s a subtle threat to that phrase, “for a moment.” She can keep a secret as long as it’s necessary, as long as Monsignor Pruitt continues to show the appropriate amount of gratitude and appreciation for her service to the church, as long as she gets to bask in his light too.
“She saved me. And now she's gone. And how is that possible? How is that possible?”
We’re at about the halfway point in Midnight Mass, and it’s here that the series lost a lot of people, because it’s among the most monologue-heavy episodes. That’s fascinating, because it’s also the first time the show detours into straight horror and on-screen violence2. It’s also the first episode to make me cry, but it most certainly won’t be the last.
The shine is wearing off Crockett Island’s all too brief run of good fortune. During a check-up with Dr. Sarah (Annabeth Gish), Erin (Kate Siegel) learns that she’s lost her baby. That’s not the right word for it, though. She didn’t lose the baby, through a miscarriage or otherwise. According to test results, the baby never existed at all. Erin was never pregnant, even though both she and Dr. Sarah not only heard the baby’s heartbeat, but saw its image on a monitor.
While Erin is devastated at the news, Dr. Sarah is confounded and alarmed, even moreso when Erin’s blood sample begins to boil3 and then explodes in sunlight. It suddenly puts a sinister pall on Mildred’s (Alex Essoe) mysterious recovery. Mildred is practically spry now, with a sparkle back in her eyes and an eagerness to return to normal. Like someone suddenly becoming unpregnant, with no sign that they were ever pregnant in the first place, it’s unnatural. It’s not supposed to be happening.
Quite possibly the only friend each other has in the world, Erin and Riley (Zach Gilford) grieve together. Remarkably, though she’s shattered by her loss, and questions why it happened (albeit in a more existential sense than how Dr. Sarah is questioning it), Erin finds comfort in her faith, and in the knowledge that someday she’ll be reunited with her unborn child, and her father, and everyone else that she ever loved in her life and left before her. “You are loved. And you are not alone,” she says. “That is God. That is Heaven. And that's why we endure on this big, blue, sad rock.”
Riley’s idea of death is less sentimental, but poetic in its own way. There is no reunion with loved ones, just the natural order of things taking its course. “I'm serving a purpose. I'm feeding life. And I'm broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I'm billions of other places…there one moment, and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.” The best part is that there’s no more pain, no more guilt. He’ll be free.
It’s a beautiful, intimate moment, but it’s crushing at the same time. Erin and Riley pray together, asking God for mercy, to ease this grief they both feel just a little. In a time when they should be happily reconnecting after so many years, instead, they’re drawn together in sorrow, and confusion as to why any of this4 had to happen.
“Give yourself over, whether you understand or not.”
Also consumed with his own sorrow is Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli), as his son, Ali (Rahul Abburi), starts regularly attending services at St. Patrick’s. Part of it is just because Ali, the only non-Christian kid in a tiny town with one (1) church, wants to fit in. But also, Bev Keane’s plan to give out Bibles at school, behind the backs of her students’ parents, is working. There’s a particular insidiousness to her drawing Ali into the fold, as if she cares less about converting him and more about sticking it to Sheriff Hassan. Not wanting to cause any strife in their tiny little family, consisting of just father and son, Hassan lets Ali go, but the weary sadness on his face, combined with his utter lack of surprise (of course they wouldn’t be able to get away with being the only Muslim family on the island), is almost unbearable. Ali’s conversion is another “miracle” with a devastating fallout.
Meanwhile, over at St. Patrick’s, Monsignor Pruitt is also discovering that the miracle takes a toll. The sun chars his skin, but that’s nothing compared to the agonizing hunger he feels. It leaves him writhing on the floor, a noise coming from inside his body that sounds like an animal gnawing its way out of him. For the time being, he’s been dependent on the “angel” providing him with sustenance, but the periods in between those visits grow harder to endure. It’s unwittingly what makes him an ideal leader for the A.A. meetings with Riley and Joe: Pruitt gets what it means to crave something so much you’d destroy yourself and everything around you.
Joe (Robert Longstreet), struggling with his own cravings, has the extraordinary bad luck to drop by Pruitt’s tiny home when Pruitt is at his hungriest. Though technically what happens after that is an accident, and technically Joe probably would have died anyway, Pruitt feasts, satiates himself on his blood, undoubtedly looking at what happened as God’s will, and a justifiable act.
Bev once again steps in to clean up the mess with unnerving efficiency, this time strong-arming Wade and town handyman Sturge (Matt Biedel) into helping her. While Sturge just looks on dumbly, with body language that suggests that Bev has bent him to her will a long time ago, Wade is terrified. Like all the best Christians, Bev bullies him into doing what she says, by berating him with Bible scripture that she’s taken out of context, and reminding Wade of what Joe did to Leeza, even though supposedly Christians are taught first and foremost that forgiveness is the path to Heaven.
Riley is concerned when Joe doesn’t show up for A.A. that night, and his first thought is, of course, that he’s backslid and started drinking again. Pruitt warmly reassures him that Joe is fine, and off visiting his sister on the mainland. Something breaks in Riley at that moment: he knows immediately that this is a lie. Joe himself told Riley just a couple days earlier that his sister was dead, and that he regretted not visiting her one last time. You can see the betrayal in Riley’s eyes in knowing that Pruitt (or to him still, Father Paul), despite encouraging Riley to trust and confide in him, is lying about…something. He doesn’t know what it is yet, but does it matter?
Already leveled by both what happened to Erin, and a painful conversation in which his father, Ed (Henry Thomas), admits he blames himself for Riley’s problems, Riley is so troubled by Pruitt’s dishonesty that he returns to the rec center later in the evening to confront him about it, at the exact time that Pruitt’s “angel” finally reappears to refill the Communion cruet. Now it’s Riley’s turn to receive the blessing, as Monsignor Pruitt closes the rec center door and lets it happen.
Sloyan is so good in this role that ever since watching Midnight Mass the first time my lip immediately curls up in disgust when I see her in anything else. Undoubtedly, as is often the case with the most effective TV and movie villains, she’s a lovely person in real life.
You’d think that a scene where a vampire drinks blood straight out of someone’s open head wound would be enough of a payoff worth sitting through a few scenes of people talking, but what do I know, I don’t have the attention span of a mayfly.
Evidently that’s not supposed to happen.
“This” could mean both their specific situations, and, frankly, the current state of the world.