Ben Watches Television : The Outsider - "Foxhead"
* This review contains spoilers for the first eight episodes *
In this week’s episode of The Outsider, Claude Bolton (Paddy Considine) freaks out and decides to visit his brother Seale (Max Beesley) in Tennessee because “something bad is going to happen” if he doesn’t leave Cherokee City. Lead by Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), the investigation team travels in order to insulate Claude from the threat. If they can vouch for him, there’s not going to be another Terry Maitland. But El Cuco followed them all the way from Georgia, riding backseat to Jack Hoskins (Marc Mencacha), who fucks around in the woods some more.
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Maybe The Outsider is just not that good after all.
It’s neither complex or original. It isn’t much of an emotional experience either. It’s a character-driven horror drama where a band of miscast law enforcers (cop, lawyers, private investigators) put aside their differences in order to fight off a greater evil. Structurally speaking, it isn’t much different than Avengers: Endgame. Except it’s three times longer and doesn’t have space battles, time travel, witty humor or Thanos to compensate for its straightforwardness. It’s a lot of room to fill with shots of a bereaved Ben Mendelsohn gloomily staring into space.
The most interesting element of The Outsider is that characters don’t put their “differences” aside to work together, but their entire understanding of reality. The one requirement to join the club is literally admitting that the boogeyman exist, which is something you stop doing once you’re an adult. That makes The Outsider one of the first deliberately post-truth television shows where the everyone’s character arc requires that they suspend their disbelief. I mean, it happened in movies before BUT mainstream fiction was never ABOUT that. That is original, at least.
At least three times in Foxhead and once last week, Ralph (Ben Mendelsohn) was being told by other characters - but mainly Holly - to get over himself and start believing because he’d otherwise endanger everyone else. He’s still struggling with it, but one can imagine he’s eventually going to confront the inevitable and reconcile himself with the idea that his dead son might be in a better place now. The Outsider is about the duality between faith and evidence. It questions the nature of reality. It just doesn’t do it in a very convincing way.
There were a lot of cool moments in Foxhead, but it was a fucking head scratcher that these moments weren’t put earlier in the series. For example, Ralph tells Holly a story about hearing a song only twice in his life: once requested by his dead mother and once while talking to his dead mother 15 years later. Why couldn’t it have been a flashback scene in like….episode 4? It would’ve highlighted Ralph’s desire to believe and would’ve sold him as not completely closed to the idea that El Cuco exists. Instead, it’s just thrown away in a borderline meaningless scene.
Ralph also tells Holly an interesting bit of Jack’s background. He explains that he wanted to become a sniper in the army, but didn’t pass the final psychological evaluation. This is an amazing wrinkle to Jack’s personality, but why wasn’t this developed earlier? It would’ve made me feel even worse for Jack, who’s a lot more sympathetic and nuanced in the show than he is in the novel. The Outsider has spent all this time in the “now” when it could’ve explored its characters backgrounds in a much bolder way. As long as the plot remains the same, the rest is up to the writing team.
I can’t say Foxhead was good, but I can’t say it was bad either. Just a little frustrating, like everything else on the show. But all that suspense and buildup is eventually going to pay, right? Right? Only two episodes left now, the good part can’t be far away.
