Finally Finishing Midnight Mass

 Whoo boy!

Well, it took me, like, months, but I finally watched the final episode of Midnight Mass.

I've now, in overlapping fashion (though I think I watched Bly Manor all in one go) seen the first three of five of Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries. I think I'm with the general consensus that Midnight Mass is the best of the three, with Hill House in second (a close second, actually - the two shows are doing very different things) and Bly Manor, while it has its charms, comes in a more distant third.

Midnight Mass is a story about community, religion, conformity, and the desire to take control of one's fate. Our focal character, returning us to Crockett Island, a tiny community off the coast of Massachusetts (I think? It's definitely New England, but it could be another state. I might just be biased as a native Bay-Stater myself), is Riley, who is haunted (not literally - this show isn't about ghosts, unlike the previous two) by the young woman he killed in a drunk-driving accident. Having spent time in prison, he's released back to his family on the remote island, and must contend with the horror of his crime and how it has come to make his community feel about him, but also how difficult it is to come back to a dying, insular community.

Flanagan, I believe, drew on a lot of his own life experiences, including having been raised Catholic but finding he didn't believe as he got older.

Crockett Island is one where community is built around the local Catholic church, St. Patrick's.

I've already largely summarized this plot here, so we'll skip ahead to the end past a spoiler cut (it's a few years old, but I think still within the statute of limitations on spoilers).

The really big crisis on Crockett Isle is the appearance of the "new" priest, Father Paul, who arrives with a massive chest that, as we eventually discover, holds within it what he believes to be an angel. And yet, anyone who has ever been aware of any kind of vampire fiction will understand that the being within is clearly a vampire - the kind of elder vampire with actual wings (hence the mistaken angelic identification) and with no hair. The "Angel" as it is called is a brutal hunter, feeding first upon the stray cats on the nearby "Uppers," an unsettled island reachable by canoe where teenagers go to drink and smoke pot, but then showing little hesitance to feed upon stray people on the island.

Paul comes to St. Patricks to take over for Father John, whom he claims is ill, and perhaps we're left to wonder if he's actually murdered John to take his place. The truth is far worse: he is John, and has had his youthful (well, middle-aged - Hamish Linklater, the actor, was around 45 when this came out) appearance returned to him after being forced to drink the "angel's" blood.

John is so overwhelmed by this seeming miracle that he overlooks the angel's monstrous appearance, brushing it aside by noting that angels in the Bible always seem to say "Be Not Afraid." There's a lot of confirmation bias that he and others succumb to as they ignore the massive red flags, but ultimately, John/Paul winds up spiking the communion wine at the church to spread this restorative power to his parishioners without their knowledge.

As we discover clearly in the finale, the motivation for this ultimately wasn't just youthful vigor or even a sense that it was the right thing to do - we find that John actually fathered a child in his youth, and that the local doctor, Sarah (Annabeth Gish) is his daughter. Sarah, who was not observant (potentially because of the church's rejection of homosexuality, as she's a lesbian) ultimately doesn't drink the blood, and as she and the few remaining townsfolk who have not given themselves over to vampiric bloodlust do their best to sabotage the vampires' attempts to escape the island, she is shot. While John and her mother, Mildred (restored to her youthful state and free from her dementia due to her communion, played by Alex Essoe) hold her as she lays dying, and John tries to offer her his vampiric blood to save her, but she spits it out, rejecting this intervention. It is, I think, the final moment that John realizes just how wrong he has been, and instead goes with Mildred to take their daughter to a place she loved in her childhood and wait for the sun to take them.

The bodycount of this show is enormous: of the entire population of the isle, only two kids, Riley's little brother Warren (Igby Rigney) and vampirically-healed paraplegic Leeza (Annarah Cymone) remain, in a canoe with the sun shining overhead. The fate of the "Angel" is left ambiguous, but the final line, from Leeza: "I can't feel my legs," is ironically hopeful - that perhaps if the elder vampire has burned up in the morning sun, the lingering effect of its blood might have burned out of Leeza's system and spared her from eventually rising as a vampire herself.

But despite how brutally dark it is - especially in those last two episodes - ultimately, as the people begin to realize that they are doomed to burn in the sun, almost all of them come to accept it, embracing one another in community and forgiving one another for past trespasses.

Here, we see the two-sided coin that is religion. It's easy for those of us who are not religious to condemn the entire enterprise as superstition and forced conformity, and that is for sure an element to its portrayal in this series. But some people - and I don't mean everyone (we'll cover this in a moment) - can find a kind of grace within it, a sympathy for one another and a hope that goes beyond one's own physical well-being.

Still, the religious fervor does not let you off the hook:

One of the key lines, as identified by my best friend when we were discussing it, is when Riley's father, Ed (Henry Thomas, one of Flanagan's most consistent collaborators) talks about his experience dying and awakening as a vampire. He finds his wife, Annie (Kristin Lehman,) who slashed her own throat to hold the attention of some of her vampiric neighbors and let others escape (and then she awakens as a vampire herself minutes later), and they talk about their new status and the doom that the sun holds for them. Ed had been turned in the previous episode, caught in the church as they escape. But while the people who drank the rat poison, only to rise and begin immediately feeding on others, act as if they are under some irresistible compulsion, Ed realizes that no, it's not irresistible. He feels the hunger, feels like he's starving, even, but he refuses to attack anyone, refuses to drink anyone's blood. Like his son, who had Erin row him out into the ocean so that he couldn't hurt anyone else, Ed has the willpower to resist this evil.

And, if I may read into this a bit - I think this is fairly allegorical for the MAGA movement. While this show came out at a blessed time when we thought that said political movement might actually be over (while today we're confronted with the fact that it's brought about a Secret Police that kills innocent onlookers as well as threatening to send our country to war against our own allies. Here's hoping I don't get arrested for merely mentioning this some day down the line!), one might recall that during the days of Trump's shocking first election, there was a lot of questioning as to whether small towns in rural America had been forced into backing such an evil, vain, and cruel man, and the evil, vain, cruel political movement he represents. Ed here, shows us, though, that even when everyone is giving into their most rapacious, hateful, violent urges, you can show restraint. You can resist evil. Indeed, it's one of the core tenets of Christianity, that you should stand up to evil even if it should cost you your life.

Riley sacrifices himself to warn Erin and convince her that this supernatural terror is real. And then, Erin (Kate Siegel), Hassan (Rahul Kohli), Sarah, and Annie sacrifice themselves to ensure that the evil doesn't spread to the rest of the world.

There is something redeemable about most of the folks on Crockett Isle. Even as they succumb to the vampirism, they show remorse, and ultimately they come together as a community, with every last building and source of shadow burned away, to greet the sun and accept their fates. The exception to this is Bev (Samantha Sloyan).

Bev has always seen her religious devotion as a justification for her own power. Early on, she poisons a dog, and it's even implied that she is the one that kills Father John, fully effecting his transformation into a vampire (not that she'd have know that is what would happen). She openly detests Sheriff Hassan for being a Muslim, beginning only with passive aggressive moves against the secular institutions of the community, but in the end openly calling him out with slurs.

Ironically, it is her bloodlust, her insistence that they burn down the town to drive potential victims out of their homes (using some scripture from Revelations to justify it) that winds up dooming the vampiric outbreak. When even the Church and Rec Center that had been intended as the "arks" to protect them during the day are burned as well, she struggles to accept that she too, will burn in the sun.

And while the rest of Crockett Isle gathers together to mourn and grieve and repent and be with one another, she is last seen futilely trying to dig into the sand of the beach as she bursts into flame.

Whatever occurs, the happiness of this ending is that the evil does not spread to the rest of the world. That the curse this "angel" spreads is confined and snuffed out.

But the fear that this community would ultimately disappear becomes very literal - every building burns down, and its people are gone, all but two teenagers who are going to have a very long day of paddling a canoe ahead of themselves.

I have not heard very much about the Midnight Club, Flanagan's subsequent project, except that it begins with the bleak premise of a bunch of teenagers with terminal illnesses in hospice care telling each other ghost stories. So, you know, fun subject matter.