*Episode premise spoilers, which spoils the end of “Axis Mundi.”*
All right – we’ve taken our detours and done our doubling-back, and now we’ve caught up with the main action again, back to where we were at the end of the season premiere. Plenty of mystery and creepiness to go around.
At the end of the season premiere, the town of Miracle was touched by something dark. An earthquake hit in the middle of the night, and as the Murphys woke and checked on each other, they realized that Evie wasn’t in her bedroom. Not only have she and a couple of her close friends disappeared, but so has all the water in the lake where they used to sneak off and swim. Kevin doesn’t know what happened to the girls, but he does know that he woke up in the empty lake bed on the same night that they vanished.
Obviously, this crisis throws Miracle for a serious curve. Any time young people disappear without warning, you’re going to find people rallying together to try and find them, but there’s an additional edge to the search parties combing the park. Miracle is the place where no one departed: the girls can’t have just disappeared, that’s the undercurrent thrumming beneath everyone’s efforts. Dead or alive, they have to be somewhere. This is an especially-eerie reaction for Nora, who’s already lost so much, to witness. While she’s terrified at the prospect of secondary departures, she passes by prayer circles of Miracle residents clinging tight to the idea that they’re the town that was spared.
We get some more on the Murphys, although it’s filtered largely through a Garvey lens. Jill connects with Michael a bit, not exactly being a shoulder to cry on but just being there as a presence for him. Meanwhile, Kevin, who’s dealing with his own sleepwalking/potential-prophet issues about not knowing what he was doing at the presumed scene of the disappearances, finds himself rather unwillingly tied to John. Obviously, he feels for his new neighbor and wants to be there for him, given that the guy’s daughter is missing, but 1) Kevin is freaked about any possible involvement he may have unknowingly had and doesn’t want to be found out and 2) John is spiraling hard. The ungenerous part of me thinks back to some of Kevin’s most off-kilter moments last season and hopes he thinks long and hard about how his past actions have hurt/frightened others. I wouldn’t call the two of them peas in a pod yet, but they’re definitely cut from the same cloth. Erika unfortunately gets the short shrift again – almost halfway through the season, and we’ve not seen nearly enough of Regina King. We do know, unfortunately, that Erika uses hearing aids, making King another ablebodied actor on the show to be playing a disabled character.
Christopher Eccleston is used sparingly but well. After being absent in episode 3 (which took the action back to Mapleton,) we see a little more on how Matt’s been settling into the town. He’s definitely integrated himself into the church – he’s part of the search-party prayer circle, and we later see him setting out hymnals and stuff in the sanctuary in preparation for the following day’s service. (If I remember correctly from the season premiere, he might have joined on as an associate pastor?) However, he’s frustrated too. He’s convinced that he’s glimpsed some of Miracle’s wonders but the townsfolk are refusing to acknowledge it, and he’s agitating to make more noise about it. In the energy he brings to this plot, I’m reminded of the crusader Matt was in the early episodes. Are we heading towards another Matt campaign, and if so, how will the residents of Miracle react if he’s preaching about secrets they want to keep hidden? Could prove to be an interesting storyline.
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