‘Midnight Mass’ Episode 2 Recap: Rise Again

The second episode of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass begins with an uninterrupted, seven-minute-long shot of its cast of characters surrounded by dead cats. They walk, they talk, they investigate, they speculate, they come together and drift away, and all the while seagulls flock to the stretch of beach they inhabit, picking away at the hundreds of slaughtered stray cats that have washed ashore on Crockett Island. As long takes go, it’s not especially noteworthy—it’s not as eventful as, say, that endless shootout from season one of True Detective, and it’s not as still as the out-of-nowhere egg-cooking scene from last week’s episode of Billions. But you have to respect Flanagan for plopping us down amid a mountain of cat corpses and allowing us to linger there, long after most shows would have looked away.

And it’s not the only image of violence against animals this episode (“Book II: Psalms”) serves up; certainly it’s not the hardest to look at. That would be the poisoning of Pike, the faithful dog of the town drunk, Joe Collie. Gathered at the Island’s annual Ash Wednesday potluck party (weird day for a party considering Mardi Gras is literally the day before, but whatever), the townsfolk watch in horror as the dog vomits its bloody guts out, while his devastated owner screams and screams. The culprit is almost certainly the church lady Bev Keene, who freely admits to the sheriff that she set out poison after the cats washed ashore just in case some kind of predator animal were responsible for their deaths; we in the audience saw the dog gobble up a hot dog, seemingly in perfect health, before his horrible demise, so Keane’s story rings false.

The suffering of animals sits side by side in the script with meditations on suffering in general. As a favor to the town’s prodigal son Riley Flynn, who’s forced to make trips to the mainland for his court-ordered AA meetings, the strangely philosophical priest Father Paul sets up a one-on-one AA meeting right there in the church’s surprisingly large rec center. (Riley recounts how the center was built by Bev Keane with money donated to the church by the townsfolk after she persuaded them all to accept a settlement from the oil company that poisoned the bay’s waters, a raw deal for everyone except the oil company and the church. Funny how that works out.)

In the process of talking about alcoholism, Riley gets onto the topic of theodicy, the question of how a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God could allow things like…well, like Riley getting drunk and killing a teenager, whose glass-pierced corpse he sees every time he closes his eyes to sleep at night. Couldn’t God have simply waved His hand and prevented this from happening? Isn’t the Church’s insistence that suffering can be a gift from God “a monstrous idea,” he asks, one that persuades people to accept the world’s horrors? Father Paul, alert and unflappable as always, says he believes God is capable of turning mankind’s “awful works” into something else, something good.

It’s with that in mind that we should process the way the episode ends. At church the following Sunday, Father Paul begins offering the sacrament of the Eucharist—but he insists, bizarrely, that the wheelchair-bound Leeza rise from her chair and approach him to accept the Body of Christ. It’s weird, it seems cruel, it seems like he’s lost his goddamn mind or given in to zealotry…but then she stands and walks. It’s a miracle.

And it takes place the morning after something, some humanoid form with glowing eyes, appears out the window of Erin Greene, Riley’s old flame. A short time later she pays an emergency visit to Dr. Gunning because she sees blood in her underwear, but the doctor assures her it’s just spotting, and the baby is fine. But before the doctor can return to bed, her dementia-suffering mother screams, claiming her father came right up to her window in the night. “That face,” she repeats. “That face, that face.”

Then the local drug dealer is dragged into a condemned house by a monstrous form that mimicked his voice to lure him in. The next morning, the miracle occurs.

What was that you were saying about God turning suffering into something good, Father? Is it possible you know more about this than you’re letting on? Might it have something to do with that big empty box you brought to the island, with the entity flying through the skies above it at night, with the thing that consumed the dealer and killed the cats? Did their suffering lead to Leeza’s gift from God, if that is indeed the entity whose gift it was?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Midnight Mass Episode 2 on Netflix