Bring Back My Bonnie To Me
FROM – Season 2 Episode 1 – SPOILERS
The bus had already arrived at the end of Season One, and the jukebox in the diner was playing a Neil Young song. This story begins before that because inside the diner, Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” is playing and, at the outskirts of town, a passenger named Elgin (Nathan D Simmons) is listening to that same Dylan song. Elgin looks out the bus window and becomes convinced that bad things are about to happen. He asks the driver to stop the bus. She refuses, and he has to puke on someone’s shirt to make that happen.
The twenty-odd bus passengers disembark just before sunset. One of them does an impromptu dance in the rain, and her dance seems to make the rain stop. The last to leave the vehicle is Elgin, helped along by another passenger (Kaelen Ohm) who is a pediatric nurse. A few minutes later, Elgin has a seizure, which could indicate that he has a connection to whatever is powering the town, because electromagnetic activity has been shown to affect such seizures. (See Electromagnetic Activity: a Possible Player in Epilepsy by Yi Guo, Yaowen Liu & Xuefeng Wang.)
At Colony House, Jade (David Alpay) starts seeing things even before he finishes rolling a joint with his only remaining rolling paper. Alone in the room, he sees a symbol (possibly drawn in blood) on the wall in front of him. It is a symbol he first saw in the journal he found in storage behind the diner immediately after drinking tea served by Kenny’s mother Tian Chen Liu (Elizabeth Moy). Then something that looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy appears in a chair to his left. The dummy vanishes quickly, and Jade, disturbed by the visions, locates Victor’s room and searches it for clues. (Most of Victor’s drawings have been removed from the walls.) Ethan disapproves of Jade’s rummaging through Victor’s stuff. “This is a quest,” Ethan says, “and everyone has a part to play.” Ethan suggests that, while symbols like the one Jade has been seeing are important in a quest, some of them make you do bad things.
Meanwhile, Victor (Scott McCord) is trying to guide Tabitha (Catalina Sandina Moreno) safely out of the catacombs beneath the town, which, he tells her, is where the monsters sleep during the day. In their quest for a way back to town, they encounter (first) two rats eating a dead bird; (second) a suitcase covered with travel stickers containing only a white nightgown ; and (third) a small cairn. The cairn is promptly knocked down by a ball that emerges from a hole in the wall, probably by the “Ghastly Child” (Sugar-Daisy Torrens) whom we see only through an opening covered by wooden bars.
(The suitcase might be Tabitha’s. One of its stickers is from Arizona, and another is from Las Vegas. The Matthews family disappeared while traveling from Glendale, AZ to Yellowstone.)
Victor becomes frightened when they spot a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting atop a trunk (amazingly similar to the one hallucinated earlier by Jade). After passing two zombie cheerleaders without incident, they exit the catacombs into the woods.
Some of what happens in the town might be wish fullfillment. At the end of last season, Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) told Kenny: “Part of me really wants to go back to Michigan one day and find out that the woman I fell in love with waited for me…and that we can pick up where we left off and get married.” The pediatric nurse who helped Elgin through his seizure is (it turns out) the fiancée Kristi left behind in Grand Rapids. (One wonders who would perform the ceremony if they decide to get married, now that Father Khatri is dead.)
Tabitha’s husband Jim (Eion Bailey) thinks that his wife is buried under the debris clogging the hole she dug in their basement, but it is Jim that ends up being trapped when the house is pulled down by a force of unknown origin, and collapses on top of him. Sunset is approaching, so he is left pinned until morning.
Sheriff Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau) finally climbs out of the rock chimney where he was trapped. After promising reciprocal help to a would-be rescuer, he is tossed a rope. Upon reaching the chimney-top, Boyd finds a bearded man chained to a wall, and the man asks Boyd to kill him. No one else is in sight, and the chained man could not possibly have thrown Boyd the rope.
Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) gets tired of trying to convince the bus driver of the danger after dark and shoots out one of the tires. At the urging of Acting Sheriff Kenny (Ricky He), many of the new arrivals head into the diner for tea.
Seasons One through Three can be streamed on MGM+.