The Midnight Club episode 3 review, recap, and analysis: 'The Wicked Heart'

Warning: spoilers for The Midnight Club episode 3 in this review. Turn back if you don't want to be spoiled!

It's Family Day at Brightcliffe, where the kids are allowed to see relatives and visitors. You'd think this would be a happy occasion, but nothing is easy in a place like this. While Ilonka enjoys seeing her foster father Tim, everyone else seems to be having a pretty rotten time. 

Cheri is hiding in her room with only the nurse, Mark, for company. Amesh is visited by his aunt and uncle, but we quickly learn that his parents have been deported. Spence's religious mum simply doesn’t show up, the heavy implication being that she is ashamed of her son having AIDS. Natsuki's mother is there, at least, but on slightly melancholy business - her daughter is looking for the very last photo taken of her soldier father before he was killed in an ambush. 

Kevin, at least, has several visitors – his mother, his brother, and his girlfriend (who Ilonka hilariously assumes is his sister) – but boy, his mum is wired and clearly not dealing with the situation well. Poor old Anya, meanwhile, doesn't get any visitors at all. So, a bad day, but what follows is much worse. Natsuki goes to visit sickly Tristan in her room but finds that she has passed away in her bed. 

It's an important milestone in the series. To this point, we've been told that all of these people are living on borrowed time, but haven't seen dramatic evidence of that. This is both a timely reminder to the audience of the show's dark premise and also sets up a spooky scene later on where Natsuki thinks, just for a second, that perhaps Tris has reached out from beyond the grave to communicate with her. She takes it to the Midnight Club, but everyone agrees that it's just her mind playing tricks. They are all searching for evidence of life after death, but nobody finds it here.

Speaking of the Midnight Club, it's Kevin's turn to "make a ghost". His story, 'The Wicked Heart' is a sordid tale of a young serial killer, Dusty, who is haunted – literally – by the silent ghosts of his victims. As with Anya's story in the last two episodes, there are clear parallels with Kevin's own life, not least an unwell and emotionally detached mother. The story suggests that there's probably a deep pool of repressed anger bubbling away inside Kevin and, honestly, it's understandable. All of these characters have been dealt an absolutely appalling hand in life and it's remarkable that he's able to keep it together as well as he seems to have so far. 

Perhaps it was the tighter length of 'The Wicked Heart' and the way that it kept intercutting between the story and the real events back at Brightcliffe, but this worked far better for me than the Club scenes in previous episodes. It feels more integrated into the episode and less indulgent. I also enjoyed the nod to a very '90s horror trope – the serial killer lurking on a primitive online message board - and the grungy green aesthetic of these scenes. 

Elsewhere, Ilonka's investigation is starting to pay off. Having previously spotted a strange hourglass symbol in the woods outside Brightcliffe, she is now seeing it everywhere - most notably in some of the art left behind by Julia Jayne, and in a dream featuring some sinister, robed cultists – members of the Paragon, presumably. There's also a mysterious string of numbers, 292.13, though we don't yet have an answer for what they might mean. 

In the episode's last act, Ilonka and Kevin discover a hidden button in the elevator, marked with the hourglass symbol. They press it and plunge down into the depths of Brightcliffe, going beneath the morgue and into a secret sub-basement. Ilonka steps out but then the lift leaves without her. She's trapped alone in a room marked with the hourglass symbol on the floor - and a sinister ghostly figure lurking in the shadows. As Kevin says earlier in the episode, "To! Be! Continued!"

This was fun! We got to know most of the characters a little better and the Brightcliffe storyline moved along zippily. The series so far is turning out to be an enjoyably pulpy teen drama and while it's not especially scary, the various plot threads are starting to tie together. That’s a solid cliffhanger, too. 

Brightcliffe notes...

We've not talked about Mark yet, the friendly nurse practitioner played by Zach Gilford. He's popped up in every episode so far, offering kind words to Spence in the previous episode and comforting Cheri here. I don't trust him. No one is that chipper in a home for dying kids. That said, if he turns out to be the secret villain it will be a hilarious cliche. Someone to keep a close eye on.

I laughed hard at Anya's deadpan, "Oh no! Not dreams!” After finding her intolerable in episode one, she's shaping up to be my favorite character on the show.

On the juke box

The music in the show seems to be going for a period-appropriate '90s indie pop vibe. Here are the tunes that pop up throughout the episode. 

• 'Bound For The Floor' – Local H

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.