The boys have stayed out until dawn, plus Prairie and Alfonso ran out of the restaurant, and the reform school must have told Steve’s parents something. She cries, “Come back, come back!” loud and distressed as she finishes the story.Īs she finishes, her parents, the boys’ families, and the high school principal come up the stairs. She fiddles with Buck’s pocket knife in her hands, then cuts her dress when she tells that part of the story, so that her top half is clothed only in a sports bra. Present day Prairie grows increasingly emotional as the story goes on. The episode itself has been switching between Prairie in the present day, telling the story to her group in the empty house, and showing Prairie living out the story in the past. He’s been holding a knife to her throat during this speech, and at the end, he uses it to tear part of her dress, before he gets up and drives away, with her chasing after him, desperate to get back to Homer and the others. And even if you get back, we’ll be gone in another dimension, all of us. “Did you think you were indispensable to the work, to me? Well, you’re not. Hap stops the car and drags her out, onto the ground at the side of the road. She wakes up some time later in the back of a car, driving down an isolated road in the woods.
He injects Prairie with a drug that knocks her out. Then he yells at Prairie and Homer to stop touching each other, and for Prairie to get out of the room, or he will shoot Homer. Hap stalks into the room and shoots the sheriff and Evelyn with barely a sideways glance, using one bullet to kill them both. But Prairie and Homer think it’s a beginning for them, now that they have everything they need to escape. Evelyn knew it would be her last, since she said that she would show them the movement, then hold her husband for the last time. It’s a beautiful moment, with two sets of soulmates being united in ways that have been denied to them.
Then Prairie and Homer run to the end of the bed to touch each other for the first time after seven years of being separated by glass. Prairie, Homer, and Hap all practice the movement. As she finishes, her husband runs into the room, leaving his gun behind with Hap in his excitement. She tells Prairie and Homer that using it will be a matter of will. It would be very hard and painful, but the vision told Evelyn to stay alive until she could give the fifth movement to them. She had a vision that told her that she would help two captive angels. She tells Prairie about an NDE she had as a child. The power goes out as they heal her, so Hap has to switch to a thermal image camera to monitor. They begin the movements, and watch as Evelyn slowly uncurls and becomes healthy. Prairie replies that if they don’t heal her, then they aren’t who they say they are. Homer tells Prairie that, if they don’t heal Evelyn, the sheriff will arrest Hap and they’ll be free. He leaves Prairie and Homer alone with Evelyn. He and the sheriff will be watching through the monitor. Hap leads them to a bedroom, where he shows them Evelyn lying twisted on the bed, and tells them that he is going to lock them in the bedroom until they heal her.
The captives get excited when the sheriff brings Hap downstairs at gunpoint, but only Homer and Prairie are taken out of their cages, then forced upstairs. The next scene shows him carrying Evelyn to the car. Sheriff Markham says nothing as he drives Hap away in his patrol car without checking on the hostages. Hap quotes his late mentor, Leon, saying that they both know there is no good or evil, only what a man can stand. The sheriff appears unmoved as he cuffs Hap, and protests that he doesn’t make deals. Hap immediately confesses, but offers to use the captives to heal the Sheriff’s wife, Evelyn, who is dying from ALS. This episode picks up exactly where episode six left off, with Sheriff Markham walking in on Hap engrossed in listening to the rings of Saturn, while sitting in front of the captive monitors. It’s left up to the viewer to decide how much to believe is real, and how much is fantasy, delusion or coincidence. We’re left with an ambiguous ending to the episode, after everything Prairie has told us has been questioned, reminding us that her mental health has been in question since Nancy and Abel adopted her.
It’s full of endings, and possibly beginnings. This episode brings us to the end of season 1 and the end of the story of Prairie’s captivity.