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Jan 19, 2020 · With Ben Mendelsohn, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, Jeremy Bobb. Despite being on mandatory leave, Ralph continues to scrutinize the circumstances surrounding the night of the murder; Jack has a hair-raising experience at a remote barn where key evidence and a mysterious substance have been found.
- (4.2K)
- Crime, Drama, Horror
- Andrew Bernstein
- 2020-01-19
Jan 19, 2020 · A recap of ‘Dark Uncle,’ episode 3 of season 1 of HBO’s The Outsider, based on the novel by Stephen King. It’s going to take someone with unexplainable skills to solve this unexplainable...
- Brian Tallerico
- Contributor
Jan 20, 2020 · The mystery deepens in the third episode of HBO’s Stephen King adaptation of The Outsider. In ‘Dark Uncle’ detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) is still on mandatory leave after the ...
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“Dark Uncle” is a much more contemplative episode than last week’s two-parter. It moves the case a little further along, but more importantly, gives space to the characters to deal with their...
- "If's the Word, Mockingbird."
- HOLLY GIBNEY, THE ONE AND ONLY
- NEW WRINKLES, MORE VICTIMS
- THE MOST STEPHEN KING THING YET
- Verdict
By Matt Fowler
Posted: Jan 20, 2020 3:01 am
Warning: Full spoilers for Episode 3 of The Outsider follow...
The Outsider began to resemble Hulu's Castle Rock, in a certain "mixtape" sense, this week with "Dark Uncle." And by that I mean King-verse character Holly Gibney, played here by Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo, made her debut while Holly Gibney is also currently being played by another actress (Justine Lupe) over on the Audience Network's Mr. Mercedes. Not that The Outsider and Mr. Mercedes are meant to exist in a shared universe like King's books.
With Holly in the mix The Outsider basically becomes a different show. Not tonally, per se, but now it's now more of a full-fledged monster hunt, in very able-bodied X-Files way, featuring an investigator who's going to be totally open minded about whatever she finds. And that's going to hit a brick wall, most likely, with Ralph and the rest of the team. Especially Ralph since he flat out said he has no time or tolerance for the unexplained.
The way the first two episodes premiered together on the same night makes even more sense now given the introduction of Holly here and the shift away from the main town. With Jason Bateman's Terry dead, and the damage already done back home -- including the deaths of young Frankie's family (Ralph eyes their fresh graves at one point) -- the story is going to branch out more fully and dig into the lore of what this doppelgänger-type creature is. But there's still a nice slow burn happening. The information is changing but the pace hasn't quickened and that helps tether us to the Terry episodes.
Erivo gives us a Holly who's both haunted and assured. Both vulnerable and in control. She's a wonderful mix of limitations and savant-like acumen. And she lays it all out on the table for Ralph during their meeting. Her mental gifts got her poked and prodded by teams of cold scientists as a youth and now she's doing her best to cope and contribute. So why is she brought in? Well Ralph's guilt over all that went down has him working, while out on leave, to find out what happened. Not in full to clear Terry's name (though he'd like to), but just to uncover the truth so it doesn't eat away at him. And when Yunis shows him the bizarre evidence (and ooze) the creature left behind in a barn, the two head to Howie Gold for help.
Because of this, the story now has two prongs: Ralph back home tending to the Maitland grief (and young Jessa Maitland's dreams that probably aren't dreams) and Holly out in Dayton retracing the Maitlands steps. Which opens us up to a new wrinkle in the mystery.
"Dark Uncle" contained a mini-mystery that unfolded throughout, centered on an incarcerated man fearing for his life after he spotted a new inmate he was almost certain had arrived to kill him. Answers didn't come to us until they came to Holly, in that her reading about why the cops would have questioned Terry's dad for a completely unrelated issue led her to the case of hospital worker convicted of killing two girls.
We can safely assume, at this point, it's a doppelgänger situation and that this creature/being kills in a chain, going town to town, spreading misery. And that its clone targets aren't necessarily picked on purpose, but more circumstantially. The way the story opened, with the tale of Terry visiting his dad, with none of the family present, made it seem like maybe his father had some root cause in all of this. But the dad was just the reason Terry was in the same hospital as this inmate - who wound up killing himself rather than get shivved.
Nothing says Stephen King more than a bully-slash-creep who gets targeted, and puppeted, by the monster. And here we've got Jack, a drunken violent detective played by Marc Menchaca. To the show's credit -- and it just did the same thing with Holly -- we didn't meet Jack until the show wanted us to. It makes everything feel organic when characters enter focus as needed. Like how messy would everything have felt if we also followed Holly, off in Chicago, during the first two episodes?
Anyhow, Jack got himself stung (darted? quilled?) in the barn as the creature attacked him and...infected him? The back of Jacks neck looks like a burn and the injury is also so debilitating that the entity can cause Jack severe pain from far away, like flipping a switch. In time, the doppelgänger will probably turn Jack into its own person Renfield.
Examining the creature's powers, at this point, we know that it can take someone else's form. It also sheds that shape, in some manner, leaving behind glop and what seemed to be dried skin patches. Now, as of "Dark Uncle," it can spit venom onto someone's neck and cause them pain. We can guess that that pain makes them bend to the beast's will as the thing didn't kill and/or consume Jack. It let him go.
Now as for Jessa's dreams...she was obviously somehow talking to the thing. Four times. But can it go in her dreams or was it actually in the house? And also, why her? Why not tell Ralph himself? It seems like a self-sabotage move (ya dumb monster!) since very few people would take Jessa's story as being real. On the upside, the moment allowed Mare Winningham's Jeannie to step forward as a more active character. At least someone more active than just being Ralph's partner in mourning.
"Dark Uncle" felt nicely different from the first two episodes, but not enough to throw things off track or jostle the tone. Bringing in Erivo's Holly Gibney elevated the show by introducing a character who's apt to understand the "unexplainable" elements of the case more than the doleful cops looking for hard evidence. With her, and her investigat...
Dark Uncle. TV-MA | 58 MIN. WATCH NOW. Confounded by the conflicting evidence, Ralph contacts unorthodox PI Holly Gibney for a fresh perspective. 1. Fish in a Barrel. Series premiere. Georgia detective Ralph Anderson sets out to investigate the murder of an 11-year-old boy. 2. Roanoke.
Jan 22, 2020 · THE OUTSIDER (S1E3) “Dark Uncle”: The Grueling Aftermath. January 22, 2020. Andrew Stover is a film critic/writer from the Chicagoland. His… At the end of last week’s two-part premiere, the body count was astounding. We lost Terry Maitland ( Jason Bateman ), the suspected murderer and rapist of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson, due to a court shooting.
