The axis of the world has moved. That makes sense, in the aftermath of the Rapture. No one could ever be the same again, and that is especially clear to the Garvey family, who barely survived Mapleton, New York’s attempt to cope last season.
This season, we begin in the promised land of Jarden, Texas, where no one has disappeared (or so they say). It’s a hard place to get into, but a new reverend is needed, and wouldn’t you know they call upon Father Jamison, whose Northern church was so grievously misused by those assholes in the Guilty Remnant. And once he’s in, connections are made so his sister (now a part of the Garvey family) has a place to go. He owes her, after all, not least because she’s the only survivor of her immediate family’s rapturing.
I keep trying to talk about things in Jarden, and I keep getting distracted by what happened last year in New York. Because we don’t really see New York at all, except in flashback. We begin in Texas, thousands of years ago, and we stay there to the present day. Yep, we go all cavewoman for awhile, and it’s a very LOST moment when a bunch of random events leads a pregnant woman to salvation and doom, but kindly provides a future for her newborn child.
Cut to millennia later, and some precocious teenage girls are picking mercilessly on a fisherman (or maybe scientist) as they play in the same river he’s testing for … something. The one with the most lines is Evie Murphy, and she introduces us to our new family of fireman John, Nurse Erika and brother Michael, the Murphys. And they are as intense and robust and as fully painted as were the Garveys, mark 1.0 and 2.0.
Who move in soon enough, giving John and Erika a bit of a start, as they weren’t expecting new neighbors. But before that happens, we spend some time with John, who seems to frighten many of the townspeople. Even with just a few steely questions, he sends a waitress scurrying for a solution, finds wariness and circumspection from the departing minister, and can’t seem to be appeased by the town psychic, who tries his hardest to do just that.
Why all the uneasy wary watchful looks? Probably something to do with the way John later leads his fellow firemen to burn down the psychic’s house, an act no one but the exiled victims even sees as wrong.
Jarden’s a weird place, and more bad things happen, but they feel all too familiar. Things are just as screwed up in Texas as they were up north, it seems, just in different and peculiar ways. The slow burn of mounting dread is pretty familiar, and when Kevin finds himself in John’s kitchen, struck by the arrangement of John’s living room couch down the hall, it’s an eerie sense of déjà vu for both men.
Rather than warning Kevin about his volatile host, I feel more inclined to say that John hasn’t seen the half of it yet. But we will, oh yes. I can feel it all coming.