Each week, Joe and Terry discuss Apple TV+’s new series The Changeling, based on the novel by Victor LaValle.

Missed a Review? Episodes 1-3 / 4 / 5 / 6

Spoilers follow for Episode 7

JOE

It’s taken me a few attempts to start this week’s review, Terry, but I find it deeply ironic that The Changeling seemingly anticipated my plan to watch Episode 7 without fretting about the plot.

Needless to say, I wound up spending nearly 57 minutes eating crow.

This is…a fine episode. I’ve come to accept that The Changeling isn’t a show for me and, specific to this episode, this isn’t the direction I would have gone in, were I at the creator’s helm. And I certainly wouldn’t have programmed what basically amounts to a stage play, featuring a secondary character acting solo for nearly the entire runtime, as the series’ penultimate episode.

But here we are.

So yes, for nearly an hour, we watch as Lillian (Adina Porter) battles her demons at the Elk Hotel, a seedy “by the hour” establishment. How do we know it’s a dodgy establishment? Well, narrator Victor LaValle helpfully informs us a trans sex worker was once killed here and her remains were hidden under a bed and went undiscovered for two weeks.

Cool, cool, cool.

Lillian is here on the eve of a storm to ponder the state of motherhood, and what she sacrificed to raise Apollo. There are numerous soliloquies, recorded messages on a child’s toy recorder, and conversations with her dead husband Brian (Jared Abrahamson), who is also the proxy for a man dying of AIDS that she comforts in the guise of singer Lena Horne (The Wiz). Because that’s the kind of surreal, fever dream logic the show is adopting now.

There are certainly revelations hidden within this scant narrative. Most significantly, there’s confirmation that Lillian did, in fact, sleep with her boss Charles Blackwood (Albert Jones), that Brian subsequently found the hotel room receipt and questioned Apollo’s paternity, and that she was ultimately forced to kill Brian when she later found him drowning their son in the bathtub.

I’ll confess I’m unsure about the nature of these reveals, in only because they’re known only to Lillian and the audience. We’ll see next week if Apollo learns any of this, or if it is simply meant to inform the show’s overall thematic interest in how little we know about those we love. It’s interesting, but I’m uncertain what else it amounts to.

While I sound very down on the episode, there are at least two stunning visual sequences we should acknowledge. The first occurs when Lillian witnesses an interaction between front desk attendant Lester, sex worker Angelica and her john through a glass ceiling.

Kudos to director Michael Francis Williams for the inspired staging of that sequence, as well as the Lena Horne concert moments, wherein Lillian sings to “Brian” in a bed/bath that’s sunk into the stage as it rains. It’s glamorous and bizarre and surreal in equal measure, even if I didn’t always understand what was going on or why.

To be honest, that sentiment mostly sums up my thoughts on this episode, Terry. It was wild to witness, but I’m also perplexed by its placement as the second last episode of this limited series.

It’s an amazing showcase for Porter, who spends the majority of the time acting off herself without difficulty, but at the cost of excluding nearly every other actor.

As an experiment, it’s bold and audacious. But it grinds The Changeling to a narrative halt.

I just can’t shake the feeling that this is too much screen time to dedicate to a character who has been present, but only sporadically and in a supporting role, throughout the show. And at such a pivotal time! Right in the lead-up to the final episode!

Terry, I wonder if you had more of an appreciation for this episode? While I can concede it contributes to The Changeling’s continuing interrogation of the sacrifices of motherhood, is there something else I missed? And what did you make of the sudden appearance of so much queer content in a series that has featured virtually none?

TERRY

If you’re going to hire Adina Porter for your show, you owe it to the audience to showcase her talent. She’s a mercurial actress; someone who feels ageless. Old sometimes. Young another. Frail. But also powerful. She’s a stunning actress who, I feel, doesn’t get the nearly the attention she rightfully deserves. Here, she commands the screen and The Changeling knows she can hold her own and hold our attention for, as you already stated, amounts to a mostly one woman play.

The way her version of Lillian stalks the scene, quietly moving past a pair of men lounging in the hallway, before turning back to admonish them that they should move for a woman, to the more quiet moments of introspection, is basically begging for her to get another Emmy nomination.

In this episode alone, she plays a mutable character, ranging from a mother who wants to care for Apollo (“where are you Apollo?”) to a frightened woman reimagining the horrors she experienced in Uganda to singing “Stormy Weather” as Lena Horne.

Coupling her strong performance, The Changeling gives us a bunch of surreal imagery, like the man in a bathtub that glows like gold or the way in which bullets from the past echo across the walls of the dingy hotel room number 205 or the stunning glass ceiling view you mentioned. I loved the shot of the wall sliding open to show young Lillian and Brian on a picnic date.

It’s shot brilliantly. It’s performed humanely and it provides yet another example of the themes that The Changeling seems to be about, namely the love and devotion of a mother to her son.

It might be the strongest, thematically important episode that The Changeling has given us…and yet I was annoyed.

Let’s tackle the queer aspects of this episode. I was honestly taken aback by it, Joe, because for six episodes the show has pretty much sidestepped any queer content. It’s been a very straight series. So for queer characters to show up now feels incredibly reductive. I understand their use here. Lillian talks about being invisible – a theme that has stretched, sometimes quietly, throughout the show that provides a feeble spine to the narrative.

She talks about how much she longed for America; to be American. She fed her son American food over her homeland’s food. But she also discovered that, in order to survive in America, she was forced to be invisible, telling us how America “Made me feel like I had to get smaller. Watch my words and my smiles, can’t get too big. Can’t get angry. Can’t be visible.” This is echoed through the assaulted sex worker who cries that the abusive John will find her and that she doesn’t exist.

This idea of being invisible or being forced to be unseen is clumsily explored through the throwaway line of the trans sex worker who was murdered and stuffed, ignored, under a bed for two weeks. Then there’s the Brian stand-in who was hiding his sexuality from his mom and died in the hotel, suffering from AIDS. These queer characters, much like the abused sex worker, are both people often ignored or invisible to the rest of the world.

They inform the way in which Lillian – Black and an immigrant – was forced to become equally invisible. Sure, it feeds into the themes of motherhood and the bonds of a mom and her son. It’s telling that Lillian comforts the dying man as if she was his mother, and his final words are regret for missing his mother. Yet, the injection of queer storytelling falls back onto tropes of “bury your gays”, in which queer pain helps inform an otherwise straight story.

While this episode is mostly well done, I’m left sitting here asking “...and?” I’ve mentioned my disdain for the way in which the last few episodes felt like they were spinning their wheels. That doesn’t stop here, unfortunately. On the plus side, it does continue to dabble in the history of NYC. Just like the first episode began, this episode brings back the Garbage Strike and The Elk Hotel was a real place (that closed in 2012). These are the kinds of histories that Victor LaValle mentions in his narration; the kind that America wants to rewrite or ignore.

So, I don’t know, Joe. What started as such an intriguing, albeit slightly clumsy show has devolved into a mostly muddled mess. As much as I appreciated Adina Porter’s powerful performance here, I’m past ready for The Changeling to be over.

We’re heading back to Queer.Horror.Movies for a final time next week to see how everything ties together in the finale.