Season: 4
Episode: 4
Original Airdate: October 18, 2014
Director: James Head
Writer(s): Melody Fox
So
earlier this week, I started my online college classes. It's a bit too
early to determine how well I'll do with them but since both classes
have something to do with technology, I can't imagine that they'll be
extremely difficult.
Nate
is a young artist whose sister bullies him and whose mother takes her
side. That all changes when his drawing of an old woman named Mrs.
Worthington, who dishes out punishments to bad kids, came to life and
becomes their own babysitter for the evening.
One
of the things that works about this episode is Mrs. Worthington
herself. In this episode, Mrs. Worthington tortures Molly in ways that I
found disturbing such as serving her eyeball soup, tying her up like a
mummy and literally zippering her mouth shut with a voodoo doll of her,
imitating her mother's voice when she tries to call her for help, and
even putting a scorpion on her head. What makes this even more
disturbing is that at the beginning of her visit, we see her taking
stuff out of her bag such as a bear trap and a giant pair of pliers that
old timey dentists would use to extract teeth. Although she never uses
these tools in the episode, it indicates that she has the tools to dish
out even worse punishments if she absolutely wanted to and that the
punishments she gives Molly seem rather tame for her. But Molly isn't
the only person she wants to torture. At one point, Mrs Worthington
tries to make a voodoo doll of Nate's mother and expresses her desire to
punish her for not doing anything about her daughter's abusive behavior. However, she asks Nate to get a picture of her, which her
fails to do, and eventually drops the plan. She also decides to torture
Nate by pulling on the tongue of his voodoo doll and threatening to cut
its tongue off after Nate called her out on her sadistic nature.
The
other thing that works about this episode is its portrayal of sibling
abuse. Throughout the episode, Nate's sister does nothing but treat him
like garbage. For example, she verbally abuses him multiple times,
blames him for things he didn't do, destroys his stuff for her own gain,
and even kicks him at one point. If that wasn't bad enough, his mother
doesn't even make an attempt to stop or even address the abuse that's
going on. As somebody who has been through a similar situation in the
past, I can say that, for the most part, this is a pretty accurate
portrayal of what it's like and I really had a lot of sympathy for Nate.
Not only that but depicting the situation like this makes the scenes
where Molly is getting tortured all the more cathartic.
Overall,
Mrs. Worthington is one of the darkest episodes of the season thus far
without being bloody or gritty. It's kind of like what would happen if
Mary Poppins was told as a horror story and if that's sounds like
something you'd enjoy, go ahead and check it out.
Overall Grade: A
I really wanted to like this episode, but it just didn’t click with me. The scares are really tame for this series’s standards, the morals are all over the place, and I don’t like that Mrs. Worthington was forced into the villain role. I liked her more as a friend of Nate’s that didn’t know when enough was enough. I personally give this one a 3/10, but I guess I can see why others like it.
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