But the more he describes the brain shutting down and body decomposing, the more reverent he becomes until it almost sounds like he's worshipping an organism's natural life cycle. Throughout it, there's a brilliantly subtle role reversal between what you'd expect to hear from the secular Riley and the religious Erin.Īt first, Riley speaks clinically about the facts of death - as it's currently understood by science. Rather, it's a conversation that respects personal interpretation as the only valid answer to the existential crisis of death. This is not a conversation where two dogmas speak on behalf of all the masses who ascribe to it. But what sets the scene in Midnight Mass apart is the true reconciliation that the characters find between seemingly irreconcilable belief systems. Sure, the atheist-versus-believer setup isn't anything new. In the span of a single conversation (and a callback to it in the final episode), Midnight Mass turns the uncertain fear of death that divides us into a comforting certainty on the one universally shared experience we are all promised. Maybe it's just my religious trauma talking here, but it's a scene powerful enough to cleanse you of all the guilt, doubt, and self-righteousness that too often plagues these opposing ideologies. Midnight Mass turns the uncertain fear of death that divides us into a comforting certainty on the one universally shared experience.
Instead of divisive tension or placating pleasantries about agreeing to disagree, what the two find is far more surprising: commonality. While atheist Riley does his best to support the religious Erin by praying alongside her, the conversation inevitably turns to their polarizing beliefs on the afterlife. The two have spent the whole day grieving the unnatural, inexplicable loss of Erin's unborn child. In what reads like the overarching thesis of the mini-series, a crucial scene in episode 4 centers on protagonists Riley (Zach Gilford) and Erin (Kate Siegel) sharing each of their answers to that final question of existence. Yet despite the innumerable centuries of countless people creating entire religions, philosophies, and even cults in search of that answer-somehow, Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass episode, "Book IV: Lamentations," finds new comfort in walking through the valley of the shadow of death. It's hard to find much of anything interesting or new to say about the existential question that's haunted human consciousness since its beginning: What happens to us when we die?
Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we're obsessed with this week.
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