In its fourth episode, The Mist stops being horrifying and starts getting hilarious
The very worst thing horror can be is lazy. Even the schlockiest, lowest-budget B-movies—the stuff usually found in bargain bins or used as fodder for the Mystery Science Theater crew—have a certain heart and energy that allows you to ignore the obvious seams running up the monster’s back. But man, The Mist’s fourth installment, “Pequod,” was a lazy hour of television. Director T.J. Scott and writer Andrew Wilder knew exactly which beats they wanted to hit, set-pieces they wanted to display, and themes they wanted to get across. But the roads they took to get there were, at best, illogical. At worst, it was genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.
Take, for example, the scene inside The Book End. Without context, it’s terrifying; two children trapped in a confined space with a hulking shadow-monster. But it’s impossible to ignore that the only reason the room is filled with the mist is because it chased Vic through an open backdoor and directly to… behind the counter of a book store? I could maybe even forgive the odd layout—we all know someone who has worked in a mall, they’re basically labyrinths—but the convenience of Vic fleeing through the single populated store is too cheap a setup for the eventual payoff: the death of little Lila DeWitt.
Obviously, this show wants to disturb by breaking all the rules, man. It butchered an adorable dog within its first five minutes, and now sucked the soul out of a small child. Next week someone is probably going to say “I’ll be right back” and survive. But here, the potential shock factor is essentially erased when you notice nobody would open the door for poor Lila—“You can’t! You’ll let it in!” someone screams—and then a moment later Alex casually opens the door and closes it behind her. In that moment, the scene changes from horrifying to hilarious. A gargantuan mist-creature siphoning the life from an 8-year-old should not, in most cases, be hilarious.
And it’s not just the actions that are illogical, but the reactions as well. The Mist deserves credit for pointing out the prevalence of panic attacks within the mall, a small but very realistic note that adds credibility to the claustrophobic atmosphere. But the leap from panic to outright murder is astounding. Because that’s what it is, murder, sending Vic out into a mist that all involved know is lethal. “Anyone who endangers the group is thrown out” makes sense in the case of someone doing something truly dangerous—like, say, a woman who shoots someone and then lies about having a gun—but The Mist essentially had a group of ordinary people near-unanimously sentence a man to death for being dumb.
