See You Later
Episode 5 of The Midnight Club starts with Ilonka giving Anya CPR. Thankfully she regains consciousness, throwing up on the floor. However, she’s still seeing the shadow up on the wall. All of this seems to be as a result of her overdosing on her meds. We know from across the season she’s been popping more pills and smuggling them out. As for Anya, she’s in the treatment room and shrugs off Ilonka’s questioning about what she saw, claiming it’s nothing. Remember that book we found last time? Well apparently this is the Paragon Diary and it belonged to a girl called Athena. She escaped from the cult called the Paragon. Started in 1931 by Regina Ballad, who went by the name of Aceso. Her kids died so she started up this group as a way of trying to find ways to heal. When Aceso started blood rituals in the name of the Greek Gods, Athena escaped with the kids while the rest of the cult lay dead in the hidden basement room; a blood sacrifice to give her a long life. Not much is known about her after this though. So how does this Julia Jayne slot into this? Ilonka believes Julia found the book of rituals and managed to walk out healed, seemingly enacting the same rituals that Aceso did all those years back. Back in Brightcliffe, Cheri gets Ilonka a lovely present – a wig. Given she’s been reminiscing sadly about wanting long hair while getting Kevin ready for prom, it’s a nice gesture. Anyway, as the night draws on (I’m presuming before 10pm given there’s a strict curfew) the group join to celebrate Amesh’s death day. They even have a bunch of hash brownies… and a PlayStation for him too, courtesy of Cheri. Natsuki makes an appearance too. She speaks to Amesh and admits that she has clinical depression. Her mother always wrote this off as her being hysterical but of course what happened to Anya and Tris have triggered her again in the worst way. Back in their rooms, Ilonka heads in from the basement and finds that strange old woman watching Anya while she sleeps. Ilonka decides to follow her, heading into the hallway which turns back into the old film-footage we saw before. She heads through the rooms and ends up finding herself in the Midnight Club. The footage disappears, and we return to the group. This time though, Spence and Ilonka both talk about their spooky experiences. With that out the way, we’re onto today’s story, which happens to be called See You Later. Amesh is our narrator, and he admits that he has some things within this that he loves. Luke is our protagonist, and he asks out a girl called Becky at the counter. When she rejects him, Billy Butcher happens to approach him, asking about his experience with gaming. It’s not really Butcher from The Boys, it’s basically a budget version of him, called Vincent. He works at V-Com and he’s been working on a near-future strategy game called Decision, based on real life. It’s too real though, and every decision seems to end in disaster. However, if Luke could somehow crack the formula and beat the game, Vincent promises to split the money he’ll make off it with him. Well, Luke seems to crack it, with the world desolate and destroyed but the protagonist of this game surviving, hiding out on the ISS. A strange flash of white light ends the game. So what’s happening here? Well, apparently the white light are the Alumini, an alien race that whisks the surviving humans back to a previous point in history to try and change things. You see, the entire world was destroyed and that scenario Luke has been constructing, ending with the ISS, is exactly what he did to get here. It turns out Kara is actually Becky from the future while Vincent is Luke from the future! Instead of actually trying to change things, the timeline is rewritten when Becky dies after being hit by a car. That, in turn, eliminates Kara from the future. As a result, the timeline is changed and Luke decides not to write the code for the game either. When the Midnight Club ends, with a really solid story I may add, Ilonka heads back to her room where she finds Anya up and trying to take the sheets off. She’s wet the bed and it seems to be as a result of the trauma she’s been experiencing. Here, Anya reveals that she killed her parents. Not literally but it turns out they got involved in a car accident, hitting some black ice on the road. After they died, she started doing heroin and her best friend Rhett tried to get her into rehab. He got her a statue of a ballerina but she threw it at him. That also caused him to leave. Two months latter she was diagnosed. “I don’t want to die,” Anya sobs, as Ilonka comforts her. She looks over her roommate’s shoulder and notices the Paragon Book on the table. Could that somehow save them all?
The Episode Review
Although there’s no horror this episode, that’s not to say there’s not things to like. Namely, the story Amesh concocts up is quite good, with a nice little twist and a Back to the Future vibe to it too. However, Vincent is very much a carbon copy of Billy Butcher from The Boys, which I wrote earlier in the recap, and that’s pretty distracting. Anya is still the stand-out character of the bunch and while I love her story, it’s a little frustrating that we haven’t actually dived into the rest of the kids’ backstories quite so heavily as hers. We’ve seen a little bit for Kevin and Ilonka as well but beyond that, most of these episodes are slotting into a rather formulaic feel. I hope the second half of this series actually allows us to see more of the backstory for characters like Cheri, Natsuki and Spence, because if it doesn’t, it’ll feel like a real missed opportunity.
