Jade’s Avatars and Tabitha’s Dolls
FROM – Episode 405 – What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been – speculative recap ⁓
Young Jade
Tripping on mushrooms, Jade (David Alpay) meets his ten-year-old self (Viggo Hanvelt), who shows him four people. Christopher (Thom Payne), a soldier from the American Civil War (Dylan Bailey), a dead man who was crushed by a rock (André Pettigrew), and the man with the spike in his left eye (played by Sean Skerry and described in the credits as “Colonial Man”). Christopher is without his ventriloquist’s dummy Jasper. All four have violins.
Jade with one of his previous selves.
Jade realises they are all other versions of himself, and that they were all murdered by the townspeople. Young Jade explains why. “Once they learn who you are, that it is you the children are calling for first they blame you, then they hate you eventually they kill you.” He also says a phrase in French, which adult Jade translates as “Minnows in a shark net”, a reference to innocents inadvertently trapped in the pursuit of bigger fish.
Young Jade next leads his older self into a storage room attached to Colony House, which may or may not be the same storage room Boyd has assigned Acosta to catalogue.
Jade’s younger self guides him through the mystery.
A hidden door leads to a tunnel that connects to the chamber with seven children lying on slabs that Jade saw in “Once Upon A Time” (episode 210). There he encounters several night creatures, among them Swingcoat (Beth Rogers), Milkman (Derek Verdonck), Tough Guy (Lee Myrick), and The Professor (Andrew Marcello De Ros) who bury him beneath one of the slabs.
Covered by the slab, Jade screams when he sees one of the ghastly children (Emmett Atwood) sitting in front of him. All of this happens in Jades head, since he never left Boyd’s office. After the effects of the mushrooms fade, Jade tells Boyd: “I know where they are. I know what we have to do to go home. I know how we can save the children.”
Words of the Prophet
Kristi and Mari react when Sophia dubs Mari a ‘prophet’.
Mari (Kaelen Ohm) and Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) set Sophia’s broken arm, and Mari goes to the ambulance to get a brace. The vehicle’s radio comes on by itself, and she hallucinates being shackled. (Kristi comes looking for her and brings her back to reality.) Mari tells Kristi and Sophia (Julia Doyle) that what just happened was similar to what she experienced at the end of Season Two when she, Julie, and Randall were affected by the Music Box Monster, and collectively imagined themselves in a chamber, chained to the wall.
Marielle has her hallucination of being shackled return in the clinic after Sophia touches her arm.
“I heard them screaming,” Mari explains. “Everyone. Every single person who’s ever died here. That’s what it was like for me when we were in the chamber. All I could hear, all I could feel was the suffering of every single person who has ever died here. I kept telling myself it wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be. But when the radio came on, it was like all that pain and horror just shot through me again.”
Sophia tells Mari she’s a prophet and suggests God has chosen her to hear their suffering. Mari gets up and walks away. Kristi follows, and tries to tell her she’s seen this sort of thing before, but Mari isn’t having any. “There is something old here. Something ancient.” Mari says. “And it is feeding off our suffering and it doesn’t stop. Even after we die we are still trapped here.”
Family Reunion
Patty, Ellis, and Roger ponder the dolls they fished out of the lake.
At The Settlement, the food-gathering expedition runs into something unexpected. Roger (Eugene Sampang) unearths a tow rope attached to something in the lake, which turns out to be three life-sized cloth dolls stuffed with cotton batting and covered in weeds. Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) suggests they might be scarecrows designed to keep something in the lake from coming out. They fill the dolls with stones to make them sink and put them back in the water.
The dolls from the lake.
Later, a woman’s voice is heard singing an eerie but not unpleasant tune from somewhere outside, and it makes Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) remember about the dolls.
“They were smaller. They were mine; I was playing with them,” she explains. “A man, he was angry. He came and took them from me. He said they gave him nightmares, so he threw them in the lake. But one day the man died, and his nightmares came out of the lake.” Tabitha warns that the Talismans won’t protect them from this thing, and as if on cue, one of the dolls smashes through the wall and attacks Roger. Another grabs Patty (Trina Corkum) and shoves her face into a campfire.
An angry man takes young Tabitha’s dolls from her.
Ellis (Corteon Moore) manages to rescue Patty from further harm, and Tabitha remembers how to hurt the doll creatures. She stabs the one trying to strangle Donna in the back with one of the totems, after which the dolls retreat. Everyone but Roger survives.
Back at Colony House, Henry (Robert Joy), still freaked out by what happened to his wife (see previous episode), gets drunk and talkative. We learn, among other things, that Miranda had a lovely singing voice, so she could have been the source of the mysterious singing that was heard at the settlement.