Warning: spoilers for The Midnight Club episode 4 in this review. Turn back if you don't want to be spoiled!
Aaaaand the lift just came straight back down... 'Gimme A Kiss' starts with a fairly limp conclusion to last episode's terrific cliffhanger. After being stranded in the secret room under Brightcliffe with a ghost lurking in the shadows, Ilonka is saved - if she was ever in any danger at all - by Kevin simply returning to get her. I mean, it makes sense, but you can't help but wish that this so far fairly tame horror series had extended the scares just a little bit more here.
Still, it does mean that the rest of the Midnight Club are soon in on the action. The whole gang explore the hidden chamber and find evidence that someone has been living down here. There's a bed, candles, murals on the walls and ceiling and, on the floor, the hourglass symbol in the center of a labyrinth.
Perhaps the most significant discovery is a book documenting the original lineup of the Midnight Club, founded, we discover, on January 5, 1969 by our old pal Julia Jayne. The book includes a roster of members and their stories (see the Brightcliffe Notes section below). The relevance of this will become more clear as the season progresses, no doubt.
So far each episode of the show has tended to focus on a single character, and now it's Sandra's turn. She's deeply unhappy about all of this. Not only does she hate breaking the rules, but the occult overtones of the room also offend her staunchly Christian sensibilities. In the group therapy session the next morning she clumsily tries to use Tristan's death as a recruitment opportunity for her church and winds up angering Spence (William Chris Sumpter) who – understandably, given how his mother has treated him – has a lot of grievances with the church.
It's a terrific scene for both Annarah Cymone and Sumpter. You feel Spence's righteous anger ("Your faith cost me my community!") but at the same time, it's clear that there's more to Sandra than simply fanaticism. She's a scared young woman whose faith is helping her through an impossibly difficult situation. She's been bullied in the past by both Spence and Anya and she's not wrong when she points out that taking a bunch of immunocompromised teenagers into a room that's likely teeming with bacteria isn't a wildly smart idea.
Despite having annoyed basically everyone, Sandra takes the lead at the Midnight Club that evening, telling a noirish detective tale in the style of her favorite films. The episode switches to black and white and the extended cast (including Heather Langenkamp and Zack Gilford) get to camp it up in different roles. She even clumsily writes in Spence and Kevin as lovers, much to the former's deep irritation. It's all entertaining enough, but, as with Anya's story a couple of episodes back, drags on for far too long.
Still, in its closing moments, the 'Gimme A Kiss' section finds a purpose. As Sandra wraps up her shaggy dog story it becomes clear that all of this is her way of offering an extended apology to Spence for what she'd said earlier in the day. She makes it explicit with a heartfelt speech that ends with her apologizing on behalf of everyone in the church who has mistreated him for being gay stating simply, but affectingly, "You can't love God and hate love". Spence, for his part, is sat stony-faced throughout before getting up and planting a gentle kiss on her forehead.
The deep sincerity and tender performances in this moment go a long way to making up for the slow momentum of the preceding story. Still, the episode as a whole felt like a bit of a step backward after the previous installment moved things along nicely. We're heading to the halfway point and the show feels pulled between its competing impulses. It's a serial drama that keeps getting distracted by its funny, goofy, story-of-the-week plots.
Brightcliffe notes...
I loved Sandra being incapable of not giving into her worst instincts and accidentally turning 'Gimme A Kiss' into, as she puts it, "angel porn" at the end.
Ilonka takes a bit of a back seat this time, though she shares a tender moment with Kevin before he goes to Katherine's prom. She also has another interesting encounter in the woods with Shasta, who we discover is some sort of wellness guru. That, more than anything else, makes me suspect that she will turn out to be a villain. Ilonka also finds, carved into a tree, a moon and the initials "GB". My initial thought was that this would line up with one of the members of the Midnight Club found in the book, but it doesn't seem to match anyone.
Speaking of which, the names of the former members are: Nancy Anderson, Aziza Wilmot, Ashley Deutschemann, Dean Blair, James Gibbons, Thomas Hartley and Gale Ritchie. Some of the Club's stories are listed too, including Among Us, Under The Moonlight, A Chilling Scream, Close Enough, Happy Killaversary, and Spellbound.
The Midnight Club is available on Netflix – keep with us for episodic reviews of Mike Flanagan's new show. For more viewing options, check out our list of the best Netflix shows available to watch right now.
