Content warning for suicide, some graphic imagery and...spooky stuff. And if you're easily startled, I'll have time codes in the description for any jump scares, and spoiler alert for The The Haunting of Bly Manor as well as for The Haunting of Hill House and also some stuff Henry James wrote in the late 1800s. If a 150 year-old novellas can be spoiled at this point. And Finally, this is your regular reminder that these are just my opinions and art is subjective. So, let's get to it. In 2018, The Haunting of Hill House bowled us over with its singular story of the Crain family haunted by traumas and ghosts. People were immediately chomping at the bit for more stories, and the creators made it very clear that if there were going to be more hauntings, it would be about a new family, a new house, and new ghosts. In February of 2019, they announced the follow-up would be titled, The Haunting of Bly Manor, based on Henry James Gothic horror novella, The Turn of the Screw, and in October of 2020, the new season came out and I had the privilege of interviewing show runner, Mike Flanagan, about it. Let's dive in. [Mike Flanagan] "There was a lot of talk
about how could this not be" "some kind of cynical follow-up to a show that we are really believed was over." "Part of that was why I wanted there to be thematic echoes." "I wanted us to rhyme with Hill House at times."
[LK] "Yeah." [Flanagan] "But I wanted it to be a very different show." "I didn't want us to stay just redo what we did." "But there was still stuff like what we have to say 'forever house,'" "and someone has to say 'I can fix it,'" "and it just can't be Henry." The obvious difficulty with the second season of Hill House would always be how to approach it, and the answer was soon reached that this would be an anthology show in a similar vein to American Horror Story. Each season is self-contained, although we see some familiar faces throughout, this is a new story, one that rhymes rather than repeats. I honestly didn't think much about season 1 while I was watching Bly Manor, although I did clock those fun little Easter eggs. [Flora] "The forever house" [Charlotte] "I can fix it." There's a particularly heartbreaking one I'll tell you about later too. But Bly Manor slowly pulled me into its ghostly embrace, much in the way that The Haunting of Hill House did, and with that, let's do the run down. For The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan was the show runner. He wrote and directed the first episode, and he oversaw the plot and direction for the whole season, while other writers and directors worked on the other eight episodes. The other directors on the roster for the season were Ciaran Foy, Liam Gavin, Axelle Carolyn, E.L. Katz, and the directing team, Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling, who co-directed the Australian zombie film,
Cargo, which I highly recommend by the way. For writers room, along with Mike Flanagan and his brother James, they brought in Diane Ademu-John, Laurie Penny, Angela LaManna, Rebecca Leigh Klingel, The Clarkson twins, Leah Fong and Julia Bicknell. Every one of those writers gets a credit on an episode, but it sounds like they all worked pretty close planning out the series before they went off to write their individual episodes. Then we have our cast, with some new and familiar faces. Victoria Pedretti played Nell Crain in season one and in season two she's Dani Clayton, the new au pair for the Wingrave family. There's Henry Thomas who played Hugh Crain last season and this season he's Henry Wingrave, the distant uncle who hires Dani to look after his niece and nephew at Bly Manor. Then there's Oliver Jackson- Cohen formerly playing Luke Crain in season 1, and in season 2, we find him as the devilish and damaged Peter Quint, Henry's former assistant who was up to no good. Then we have Tahirah Sharif as Rebecca Jessel, the former au pair at Bly who died tragically, Flora and Miles Wingrave are the niece and nephew Dani looks after at Bly. They are played by Amelie Bea Smith and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth respectively. And Amelie Bea Smith's biggest role prior to this was Peppa Pig, so have fun with that knowledge. Then we've got T'Nia Miller as Hannah Grose, the housekeeper at Bly, who keeps seeing this crack in the wall, but I'M SURE IT'S FINE.
[Nervous laughter] Rahul Kohli plays Owen Sharma, the cook who is wholesome as fuck and loves a bad pun. [Owen] "You're a battered woman" And Amelia Eve plays the prickly gardener, Jamie, who quickly takes a shine to Dani. [Jamie] "Chin up, Poppins." Then there's Carla Gugino, who played Olivia Crane in season 1. In season 2, she's our narrator, telling this tale to us and an audience the night before a wedding. Kate Siegel, who played Theo in season 1, shows up as Viola Willoughby Lloyd, but we'll get to her later. That about covers the basics. So, what's the story? Well, it begins with some creepy images of this lake, while a woman speaks the lyrics to a song called Oh Willow Waly. [Narrator] "We lay my love and I beneath the weeping willow..." Then we jump to this woman waking up in a chair to look at this half-open door. We're not going to learn much about her for a while, so don't sweat it because it's time for a wedding! Or...a wedding rehearsal, [The Bride] "The rehearsal dinner for God's sakes." We watch this man give a speech about watching your loved ones grow old and die, which is a wild thing to say before a wedding. But as he's giving this speech, we see that same woman from before sit down at the table and make a lot of meaningful eye contact with the man giving the toast. That night, they all sit around a cozy fire trading ghost stories until. [Narrator] "I have a story." [Trixie Mattel] "She said, guess what bitch." [Katya] "She's like... [Laughter]
[Trixie] "Y'all want to play?" Our narrator has a story. She tells her audience it's not a short story and it's not hers. But everybody sits down to listen and we get our story. We go back to London in the year 1987. We even get a fanny pack and a paper map to remind us that, Hey! it's the '80s! But anyways, we're in London following Dani Clayton, an American who's gone to live in London to escape some traumas back home. She interviews for an au pair position for the Wingrave family at Bly Manor. This man, Henry Wingrave, is looking for somebody to keep an eye on his niece and nephew since he's too busy and their parents are dead, and right away we get a sense that Henry's got some issues. [Henry] "What's the catch?" "What makes a woman of your age want to give up her life, to take care of someone else's children?" And also as vulnerable as Dani might seem, she does not fuck around. [Dani] "I saw your ad six months ago and I have seen it every month since." "So I suppose you're right, what is the catch?" I love this scene for just how much we learn
about these two through their interactions. Dani's nervous chatter at the start while Henry's pouring liquor in his tea in the middle of the day, and the way they're tone changes throughout the scene as the gloves come off, makes for a curious and fascinating interplay. Afterwards, she's looking at want ads in a
bar since that interview was such a disaster, and look who's here, and Dani is apparently the sort of person who's willing to have this interaction. [Dani] "That was the most awkward job interview of my entire life." "I think we should toast to it, Mr. Wingrave, or do you prefer it in your tea?" HOLY SHIT DANI! I think my favorite part is that we just hard cut to both of them being like two drinks in and genuinely chatting with each other. Like, that was enough to break the ice, and now they're just talking. Dani asks what the catch was for the au pair job, and Henry tells her the last au pair died and people think the job is cursed or something. Then he asks her what her catch is and, well... [Dani] "I um...couldn't be home any more." There's a lot she doesn't say, but the thing she emphasizes here is. [Dani] "I could make a difference...a real difference, with just two." The next thing we know, she's headed to Bly Manor. We quickly meet Owen Sharma, the cook who doesn't love living in this idyllic countryside. [Owen] "I have actually never liked Bly." "The people, most of them, they're born here, they die here." "It's easy to get stuck." And the housekeeper, Hannah Grose, who is warm and kind, but also a bit distracted and sad, lighting candles for lost loved ones on the daily. We also meet the two Wingrave children, Miles and Flora. [Flora] "Perfectly splendid." [Miles] "So pleased to meet you my lady." Initially, they both seem precocious. [Flora] "And it's perfectly splendid." And polite. [Miles] "I just wanted to say how happy we all are that you are here." Although we get several hints that something is amiss, whether it's Miles ogling Dani while she's getting undressed or Flora sudden turns when she sees Dani wearing this comb in her hair or picking this particularly creepy doll up off the floor. [Flora] "Put her back, she stays there." Also, there's a mysterious man up on the parapet who just stares at Dani. When she asks the others, they say she must have imagined it. Then at the end of the episode, the two children ask Dani to get something out of this closet and lock her in. [Dani] "Guys!"
[Screams] "Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!" Which is very bad. One thing I find maddening
and fascinating is that, much like in season 1, where there was a therapist giving out pretty decent advice except for the fact
that he didn't realize ghosts were real, Dani also doesn't realize
she's in a horror TV show. This leads to many scenes of like. [Flora] "We don't go in there anymore." Ohhh don't go in there. [Flora] "You have to promise me,
don't leave your room at night." No Dani, don't do that! [Flora] "Hide and seek." [Dani] "Hide and seek, sure." In this creepy house? Dani I swear to God! I know this is common trope in horror media, the whole 'girl get out of there' bit. What I find interesting about Dani is that, while she is perpetually just doing things that are a bad idea, she does them kind of bravely. There's that saying about the bravest people are the ones who are afraid and do the thing anyway, and that's Dani to a T. She might be scared shitless when she
sees a weird ghost man out the window, but that won't stop her from grabbing a
poker and getting ready to go fight a ghost. I just really like that about her character. In episode 2, we see more of the weird creepy shit happening in this house like, what's up with those footprints? There's this crack in the wall that only Hannah sees, but I'M SURE IT'S NOTHING, RIGHT? We also learn a bit about how Miles got kicked out of school, first by throwing himself out of a tree and getting in a fight with his friend, and eventually he escalated to murdering a priest's pet bird. After he's been expelled, we learn that Flora had sent him a letter, and this might have been the reason for his intense behavior. In the present day, Dani has the kids doing chores as punishment for the whole locking her in the closet thing. I love this scene with Jamie and Hannah watching them work in the garden. [Jamie] "On a scale of zero to American, how would you rate her?" [Hannah] "American." But she's still struggling to manage these two kids who continue to be wild in their own particular ways. [Miles] "It's such a draining thing dealing with children." Oh, no, no, no. In one scene, Flora is trying to be helpful and unpack Dani's things for her and she finds this pair of glasses. [Flora] "I didn't break them, they were like this already." [Dani] "It's fine." Afterwards, Dani needs to go outside and have a little panic. [Dani hyperventilating]
[Jaime] "You all right?" Jamie finds her there and helps her calm down. [Jamie] "You're doing great." [Dani] "Thank you." [Jamie] "Anytime." I love the scene. Of course then, she lets the kids play a game before bed and they choose hide and seek, which goes as badly and weirdly as you might expect. [Miles] "I'll find you."
[Dani] "Ease up!" Then she goes running after the kids and sees that man again. This time he's at the window looking creepy as shit. And this queen grabs a poker and runs outside to yell at a ghost. [Dani] "I'm going to call the fucking police!" Then Miles appears at the window and says,
"I don't feel so good" and collapses. Dani and Hannah go running to check on him and he wakes up and seems okay-ish. But unbeknownst to both women, that man is there at the window again, smiling at him. Episode 3 opens with this montage that's really playing with our expectations. We watch a flashback of one year ago, Peter Quint's running around buying fancy clothes and alcohol and getting into this expensive car. The whole montage is set to 'Tainted Love,' which might be on the nose, but I like it. Then we watch him go to his employer Henry Wingrave and hand over all this nice stuff he just bought. And suddenly our understanding of the scene is upended. Peter lives adjacent to all this luxury, but none of it is his own. He steps out of the office to bring in a candidate for the au pair position at Bly and Rebecca Jessel is sitting outside waiting to be interviewed. [Peter] "I'm Peter Quint, I work with Henry." [Rebecca] "Mr. Quint." I love this little exchange in their first meeting about a stain on her shirt. [Peter] "He will notice you know." [Rebecca] "Okay." When she goes into the interview, Henry does indeed notice and Rebecca replies. [Rebecca] "The children are what, seven and nine?" "I expect being precious about blouses won't serve me well." In the present, we see Dani and Hannah
dealing with the appearance of Peter Quint, the police and Hannah explain that Peter stole
a lot of money from Henry and then ran off. Oh, and I have to mention here, it's very refreshing to watch a horror property where other characters are constantly disbelieving
and gas lighting the protagonist. After some initial doubt over the
figure Dani saw in episode one, Hannah and everybody back her up and believe her completely. This was an element in the novella as well
with Mrs. Gross believing the Governess' story. In the show, Owen and Jamie help
Hannah and Dani search the grounds. And everybody ends up spending the night and the four adults stay up late
trying to puzzle what's going on. Owen wonders if Peter knows that Rebecca is dead, he guesses that the mysterious
calls they've been getting-- [Phone ringing]
[Owen] "Hello." [Phone ringing]
[Dani] "Hello." [Phone hanging up] --are actually just Peter
trying to get a hold of Rebecca. Also, this happens. [Owen] "Well, Mrs. Grose, it is too late
now. Come, tuck in and relax for a bit." That is so cute, I could just die. Dani and Jamie stay up a little longer
talking about Peter and Rebecca. Jamie says their relationship was toxic. [Jamie] "That kind of love can fuck you up." "I saw how he twisted himself
into her, burrowed in deep." She goes on to say that people
mix up love and possession. "I guess what that means, he didn't
just trap her, he trapped himself." Foreshadowing says what? Anyways, everybody's a bit worried when Owen
stays overnight because his mom is sick. [Hannah] "What about your mum?" [Owen] "Oh it's just one night,
she's already fast asleep." [Owen] "Oh its only one day. I'm
sure she can use a day without me." [Hannah] "Well, thank you
for coming to our rescue." [Owen] "You always come to mine." But still, Owen stays for the day
just to make sure everyone is okay. The flashbacks show us Rebecca Jessel
starting as the au pair for the Wingrave. [Rebecca] "Perfectly splendid." The kids are a handful, but in the normal kid way? [Flora] "Ms. Jessel, he's cheating!" [Miles] "You're lying and that's cheating."
[Flora] "It's not." We also watch as her and Peter grow closer. He's quite charming initially
with brief moments of vulnerability and honesty that
really seemed to win her over. Of course, there are the warning signs too. [Peter] "Please." [Rebecca] "Patience." Not to mention some truly nasty behavior. [Peter] "I'm talking about that man who
you opened wide for not two hours ago." [Rebecca] "He asked me to taste his batter." [Peter] "God, fuck!" In the present, the kids are
acting pretty weird again, but it's all interrupted when they
get a call that Owens mother died. Hannah comforts Owen with springing something in his ear before Owen gets in the car and drives home. And Hannah goes to light a candle for his mother in the little chapel on the grounds. Meanwhile, Dani thanks Jamie
for staying and this happens. [Jamie] "Who the hell knew?" And then after Jamie drives away, Dani turns and sees him again, the ghost she's been seeing more and more, the one whose hand appeared to her
in her bed earlier in this episode. [Muffled sobs] [Loud scary sound & Dani screaming] And that brings us to episode four and Edmund, Dani and her bespectacled childhood friend Edmund grew up together and eventually
were engaged to be married. Dani was raised by a single mother
who seemed a little distant, so Edmund's family was very much her family. We watch in flashbacks throughout the
episode as everybody is preparing for this wedding and Dani is noticeably
lukewarm on the whole thing. Until finally one night she tells
Edmund that she can't marry him. In their car, she tries to
explain how she thought eventually she would feel the way she was supposed
to feel and that she still loves him, but not in that way. And he takes this Extremely Badly. [Dani] "It's just not." [Edmund] "Fuck you, Danielle.
[stammers]Why are you doing this to me?" [Dani] "Eddy." [Edmund] "No, let me go." [Dani "Eddy, I'm sorry."
[Edmund] "Jesus, have you not? You've done enough!" And he gets out of the car and
gets hit by an oncoming truck. The headlights illuminate his glasses
and in this horrifying moment, we realize Dani's been seeing Edmund's
ghost in the seconds before his accident or in the case of the hand in
her bed, in the moments after it, as he lay there bloody on the street. In the present, we see everybody reacting to Owen's loss, Dani tells Jamie she can't really deal with funerals, so she stays home with Flora and Miles. At one point Flora muses on how
strange her own parents funeral was. They died overseas and back
home they buried empty coffins. So Dani tells her. [Dani] "You know your parents loved you so
much that in a way they'll always be here." And Flora replies. [Flora] "They're really not. But we can
pretend if that makes you feel better." She says this to try and comfort the older woman. Oh man, I can't with these weird
kids, they are so precious. After the funeral, Owen
actually comes over for dinner where Flora continues to be alarmingly
wise and poignant for her age as she talks to Owen about how she felt after her parents died. [Flora] "It only felt like dying
because actually I was still alive." "You have to be to feel that way." "But then I learned a secret." "Dead doesn't mean gone." Also Miles is acting out,
wanting to drink wine and shit? Dani ends up sending them both
to bed to curb that behavior, which leads to this little bit that I love. [Hannah] "I do like that young woman." Upstairs, Dani talks to Miles and
it's a game recognizing game moment. She says she gets why he's acting out, trying to act older than he is. She tells him that he's got a
lot of good people in his life. [Dani] "Miles, you've got some great grown-ups," "some great people here to choose for your family." In the flashbacks, we then see Dani and Edmund's family at the hospital as they received the news that Edmund didn't make it. And we see Edmund appear to her for
the first time in the hospital bathroom [Dani gasps and screams] and then as he continues to
haunt her at his own funeral. [Dani] "Excuse me!" [Dani gasping and sobbing] Before she leaves for England, his mother's stops by to share condolences
and to give her Edmund's glasses. [Judy] "I can't stand to look at them," "I couldn't bear to throw them away," so I thought...please?" [Dani] "Okay, of course." In the present, Dani, Owen, Jamie, and
Hannah breakout the wine for a boozy bonfire. They all start to give toasts. Hannah toasts to Rebecca. [Hannah] "But wherever she is, she's still
worth ten of that man I won't say his name." Jamie toasts to the Wingrave's parents. [Jamie] "They were good people and their
kids really miss them. Nothing can fix that." And she toasts, Dani. [Jamie] "She's a bit of a weirdo, but
she's a lot stronger than she thinks." "I'm glad she's here, I think they would be too." And Owen gives a toast to
his mother, Margaret Sharma. He talks about the difficulty of his mother not knowing who he was most
of the time towards the end, he says he hates how the
speech they gave at her burial, smoothed over all the bad bits and made it nice and how they left out all the good stuff too. [Owen] "She had a sweet tooth and a dirty
laugh and she loved me so hard...it hurt." He says he misses her, that she was his anchor, and then his burden. [Owen] "And soon I will let her go too." At some point in the evening, Jamie and Dani wander off, and Jamie asks Dani what's wrong, so, Dani tells her about Edmund, about how he died and the fact
that she still sees him sometimes. Jamie basically goes. [Korg from Thor Ragnarok] "Piss off, ghost!" And then Dani kisses her and... [Scary music sting] [Dani gasps] Seriously, Edmund could you not? Meanwhile, Owen and Hannah
talked about going to Paris. [Owen] "Say it with me. Hannah Grose in Paris." Then Jamie goes to drive Owen home. [Owen] "Alcohol you call you later." [Hannah] "God, even for you." She tells Dani that they're
fine and everything's fine. Later that night, Dani seems to
have reached some conclusion. She grabs the glasses off her bedside
table like she's ready to do something, then Flora and Miles hold her
up in the hall with this story about a bad dream while this
fuckery goes on behind her, I'm guessing she's the one who's been making those muddy footprints we've
been seeing, also yikes. But anyway, once the ghost is
gone and the kids are back in bed, Dani goes with a bottle of
wine back to that bonfire, she throws the glasses in and watches
them begin to melt when Edmund appears. [Dani] "It's just you and me then. Hmm?" So she sits and has a drink with her ghost, which, I just love that a lot. But let's put a pin in that, for now, to talk about Henry James. [LK] "Is there a reading list I
should look into for Henry James?" "I thought it was initially just The Turn of the Screw." "What other stories should I be looking at?" [Flanagan] "You should look at The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," "you should look at The Jolly Corner, The Beast in the Jungle," "there's an interesting one called Sir Edmund Orme," "that we pulled a little from, we named Dani's fiance after him." "But for the most part, you're really well-served by The Turn of the Screw" "and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes in particular." So, the Haunting Of Bly Manor isn't so much an
adaptation of a single work by Henry James, as it is a sort of Henry James mixtape, a Henry James Greatest Hits if you will. Every episode of the season is named after one of Henry James' stories and has something in
common with the short story it's named for. For example, the title of Episode 4 comes
from the short story, The Way It Came, which tells the tale of a man who is jealous of the relationship between his fiance and another woman. The story Flanagan mentioned as Edmund's namesake, Sir Edmund Orme, is about a ghost
who haunts a woman that rejected him. The Jolly Corner features a smiling doppelganger and a
character who is haunted by regrets. The Beast In The Jungle features a character
who is awaiting his eventual demise. This man has a relationship with a
woman who he has told of what's coming, and the two stay in each other's orbit, waiting for the end to come. Then there's The Turn of the Screw, which was published in 1898 and provides a lot of the overarching
framework for the whole season. From the framing device; in the story, the
narrator and several other acquaintances listen to a man named Douglas tell
the story on Christmas Eve. Similarly to the show, the story is not from
Douglas' own experience, in the novella, he's telling the story from a manuscript that was given to him by a former
governess who is now dead. In the show, the job title was updated to
au pair, or in more common terms, a nanny. [Henry] "The nanny.
[Peter] "Au pair." But in the original novella, she was a governess. The novella also references a past
failed romance between the governess, Miss Jessel, and the dastardly
Peter Quint, who are both dead now. There's a Mrs. Grose, who
is the kindly housekeeper, and even a few of the most iconic
images from the story are in the show, such as the ghost smiling at the window, the ghost lady by the lake, and so on. Now, the novella's entire climax happens
one night when Flora has been taken away to stay with her uncle by Mrs. Grose because they believe she has been
possessed by Miss Jessel, so the governess, alone with Miles,
sees Peter Quint's ghost in the window and hugs Miles to try and shield him
from the ghost and she tells him, he's free now, and when she lets him go, he collapses to the ground and
she realizes he died in her arms, which...most of that happens
at the end of Episode 2. I'll also take a moment here to mention the 1961 adaptation of The Turn of
the Screw called, The Innocents. That's where all of these
clips you're seeing are from. This adaptation is pretty beloved and
was an admitted influence for Flanagan, most notably in the use of
the, O Willow Waly tune, which was written by George Auric and
Paul Dehn for the film adaptation. [Mike Flanagan] "The O Willow Waly song from
The Innocents seemed like a great way to go." "Initially, I thought we'd only
use that as the seed of the score." The lyrics of the song are
fairly simple. They say, It's probably obvious, but the lyrics
not only speak of death and lost love, but of nature, of a willow tree. I wonder if a certain gardener
might vibe with these lyrics!! Anyways, just like Season 1 which took a lot
of concepts and ideas from Shirley Jackson's, The Haunting of Hill House to make a new story, Season 2 does the same with
the works of Henry James. Now, Henry James was an interesting
dude, he lived from 1843-1916. He was born in New York City, but
spent most of his adult life in Europe, eventually becoming a British
citizen a year before his death. He was a big proponent of the
literary Realism Movement, he wrote a whole manifesto about it
in 1885 called The Art of Fiction. In it, he spoke to the need for characters
to drive story rather than plot. His works were sometimes criticized
for being too psychological, and he tended to like writing stories about
American transplants in Europe, go figure. And not all of his works were spooky, some were more about people navigating the
society of their time and interpersonal drama, but the man did love him a ghost story. Many of them were considered ambiguous. The Turn of the Screw famously
leaves it up to interpretation whether the governess' visions
of specters are even real. Many of his works feature elements of
gothic literature, doomed romances, and wicked turns of fate and circumstance, which is something we see
quite a lot of in Bly Manor. [Flanagan] "There's this little wicked
turn of ironic fate in particular." "I think that that one more emerged from
the various writers as we went along." "They seemed to get giddy about being able
to pay off those connections in dark ways." Like the dresses coveted by
Perdita which literally kill her or the ghost haunting Dani being a vision
of him seconds before his death. There are many cruel and ironic turns throughout the season that reflect that gothic sensibility. Each one, another turn of the screw. And with that, let's talk about Hannah Grose. [Hannah] "You are Hannah Grose. The year is
1987. You are at Bly. Miles is 10. Flora is 8." "You are...You are Hannah Grose...Hannah Grose." In season 1, The Haunting of Hill House presented us with the idea that time
for the dead is circular. [Nell] "Our moments fall around us like rain, "or snow, or confetti." And in Season 2 we find that time
for the dead is...almost recursive. We see moments repeating over and over again, whether the dead want it or not. [Flanagan] "We talked a lot about memory." "That combined with our discussions about dementia," "in particular in relation to Owen and
his mother collided into this idea that" "we could do a dementia of the spirit." Which brings us to Episode 5, The Altar of the Dead, written by Angela LaManna and directed by Liam Gavin. An episode, that much like The Bent-Neck Lady episode in Season 1, sort of upends all our expectations around the show and sets us barreling in a new
direction we didn't quite expect. The episode begins with Owen and
Hannah sitting by that bonfire. Owen muses on how he can't count on the
past because memory is too unreliable. [Owen] "That's what I learnt taking care of mum," "it's kind of what dementia is, isn't it?" Hannah says he has a past
and a future he can rely on. Owen points out that Hannah spends most
of her time caring for other people. He encourages her to get away
from it all and go to Paris. Maybe both of them could go to Paris. [Owen] "Say it with with
me Hannah Grose in Paris." [Hannah] "What would I do in Paris?" [Owen] "Live, you and me, while we still can." Then Jamie comes and interrupts
this moment to take Owen home. [Owen] "Alcohol you later." [Hannah] "God even for you." And from there the episode progresses
into a series of flashbacks. We see Hannah and Owen's first meeting
when he interviewed to be the cook at Bly. [Owen] "In Paris, I was a sous chef which
means they only let me chop vegetables." We see scenes from before
the Wingrave parents died. Hannah seemed to get along really well
with the mother, Charlotte Wingrave. We also see that Hannah often clashed with
Peter Quint because he was pretty uuuuh... [Peter] "What am I up to?" [Hannah] "You're taking things that aren't yours." "I'll have the necklace, please." [Peter] "Here." [Hannah] "Thank you." That. And we see scenes of Hannah stumbling on to Peter and Rebecca's burgeoning relationship
which she clearly didn't approve of. We also find out Hannah was married at one
point and her husband left her quite suddenly. At Charlotte's suggestion, she lights
a candle for him in the church. [Charlotte] "That's for Sam. He may not be dead," "but nobody's perfect, are they?" [Hannah] "I didn't think you lit
remembrance candles for the living. [Charlotte] "Oh, you don't normally.
But for him, a special case." The other thing we see is several scenes of
Miles being a creepy and vindictive little shit. [Jamie] "Don't ever do that
again, do you hear me?" [Miles] "Look at you all flushed,
you're pretty when you blush." And some of these scenes keep repeating. This interview between Hannah
and Owen keeps coming back, but something is wrong. This scene keeps twisting from the inside. Something keeps pushing it off track. Both characters keep reacting
to the strangeness which isn't normally how memories
or flashbacks work, but-- [Owen] "Something is wrong with Miles." Also, there's this one scene I want to
point out for uuuh...foreshadowing reasons. It's when Rebecca is still alive
and Hannah tells Owen about an old gardener's trick for
dealing with mice using glue traps. One day she found one of those traps
with just a mouse's legs stuck to it. The mouse had chewed its own leg off to
escape and then bled out a few feet away. She says Peter is a glue trap and
Rebecca is the one stuck in it. Then at one point, Hannah stumbles
into a memory that isn't even hers of a night when Peter told Rebecca to get
ready to run away with him to America. [Rebecca] "This is one of my favorites." "He's so much himself in this one." "What are you do you doing here?" "How--how did you slip into my--" [Hannah] "I'm so sorry." Utterly alarmed by the strangeness of it all, Hannah runs out into the hall in time to see Peter telling Flora and Miles to go back to bed and then this happens. This faceless woman grabs Peter by
the neck and drags him down the hall. Then suddenly Peter is back and a little confused about why Miles and Flora are looking at him weird. The reason of course being that he's dead, which he finally realizes when the faceless woman comes back around to drag Peter's body down the stairs. [Peter] "Stop...let me go." Then this happens. [Peter] "Let me go! Let me go!" [Miles] "You bitch, let me go." In this moment, Peter somehow possesses Miles, which is when it's made
abundantly clear that a lot of the creepy adult behavior we've been seeing
from Miles was indeed Peter all along. Meanwhile, this woman drags his body into the lake leaving nothing but a trail of muddy
footprints to illustrate her nightly path. And given the violent tendencies of the spirit, we can now explain some of
Flora and Miles' behavior, locking Dani in the closet and also this scene. [Flora] "And it knew my name. And it
said it wanted to do awful things...and it had bones for hands." Were all just these kids trying to keep
her safe from the lady of the lake? After this, we get another go-around of
that interview between Hannah and Owen. [Owen] "In Paris I was a sous
chef, so I only cut vegetables." "But here I'll be putting
everything together myself." "It would be a...a great learning experience." [Hannah] "Again?" [Owen] "Yes, apparently we're doing this again." [Hannah] "Why?" [Owen] "You tell me." Hannah tries to play it off as normal. [Hannah] "I'm sorry. I'm having
a difficult time. Owen, is it?" And she tries to recall her
dream, the scene she was just in. [Hannah] "I'm having the strangest of dreams." Because for some reason, it seems she's just tripping
from memory to memory, so Owen recites a little Shakespeare. [Owen] "To sleep perchance to dream." "Aye there's the rub." "For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?" "What dreams?" And then she manages to piece together
a little of the memory she just saw, but it's not enough. [Owen] "Not yet, huh? It needs to cook a little longer, I think." And Owen reiterates the facts with her. "You are Hannah Grose, the year is 1987," "you are at Bly, Dominic is dead," "Charlotte is dead, Rebecca is dead." And he tells her that something is wrong with Miles. From there we flip to Miles and Peter Quint standing at the edge of this well, but it's after Peter disappeared, so Hannah comes running and says she'll call the police, and then Peter switches into Miles as they talk, which is super creepy. [Miles] "For fuck sake, woman!" Peter as Miles says he would love
to be dragged away by the police, to be dragged off this property, but he can't. [Hannah] "You can't." [Peter] "Because?" [Hannah] "You're dead." And then he shoves Hannah into the well where she falls to her death. And that crack that she's been seeing on the walls of Bly is a crack in the stone at the bottom of the well. And now we realize that the ghost of Hannah was staring down at her own body as Dani arrived for her first day at Bly Manor. And before all that horror can sink in, we're back to the bonfire, back to Owen and Hannah dreaming of going to Paris. [Owen] "You and me, while we still can." And Hannah says yes. She says yes to going to Paris, to being with Owen, to all of it, but nobody hears her. [Owen] "Alcohol you later." [Hannah] "Wait." The memory continues like
she'd said nothing at all. Please. It's all good. Owen walks away and Hannah calls after him. She runs to try and follow him, but they don't stop walking
and they don't hear her calls. And s Hannah is alone at the edge of a memory, grasping at what few certainties she has. [Hannah] "You're Hannah Grose, the year is 1987," "you're at Bly, Miles is 10, Flora is 8." "You are...You are Hannah Grose." "...Hannah Grose..." Hey kids, you-all want to get
aboard this pain train to sad town? Chu-chu motherfucker. [Flanagan] "I think it was
two days that they ended up running the various versions of that scene," "and they'll both tell you it drove them crazy."
[LK Giggles] "Rahul can...if you just point him and say go," "he can do that whole," "'I came...I was in Paris studying
to be a sous--a sous chef.'" "Uh...he can do the whole thing, and they
just did it over, and over, and over again," "and I'm told it felt very purgatorial." That interview sequence over its various iterations is such a powerhouse performance from both T'Nia Miller, and Rahul Kohli. Hannah's increasing confusion, and Owen's
increasingly strange behavior creates such an engaging and unsettling series of scenes because Hannah doesn't
understand what's happening. And this re-creation of Owen in her
memory knows more than she does, like her subconscious trying to get through to her. And when Flanagan talked about dementia of the spirit, Hannah Grose is one of those spirits. Throughout the season, various characters muse on what it must be like to wear away piece by piece. [Jamie] "Losing yourself like that
you're worn away a little bit everyday." "Just shoot me. Put me out of my misery." "It's not fair on anyone." That is what we see happening
to Hannah in real-time. Her story feels like the eroding
of a mind from the inside. She wanders from memory to memory, quickly forgetting where, and when she once was, and getting fully absorbed in the moment she's in, but then she's pulled away into another memory, and another time losing what little context
she had for the moment she was just in. And there's plenty more to discuss
here with these tucked away memories, and fading ghosts, but I want to put that on
hold and talk about what a showrunner does. [Flanagan] "I learned a lot about
being a showrunner on this show." "While I wasn't in the director's
chair for a lot of these things," "a lot of my work went into working with
the directors ahead of time in prep," "and making sure that we had a set
of rules that we call a style guide," "the things they can and
can't do to make sure that" "the show is consistent and
that it doesn't feel abruptly," "violently transitioning between different
points of view and tones as it goes." As I mentioned before, Mike Flanagan was the showrunner for Bly Manor. On Hill House, he was one of
several executive producers, but he had writing credits on four of the
ten episodes and directed all of them. And he said in several interviews
at the time that being involved with the writing and directing of
ten episodes was wearying, so this season he took more of
an overseer role as showrunner. And what does a showrunner do? I mean, the term is a little nebulous. Since a showrunner on an American show is
usually credited as executive producer, and Flanagan is one of five
credited executive producers, I probably should have asked
him about that, but OH WELL In an article from nofilmschool.com, the job is described as, In basic terms, a showrunner oversees
the direction of a television show, from the writing to the cast and crew, to keeping an eye on the budget. While individual episodes
might have their own directors, the idea is that the whole show will
adhere to a singular cohesive vision. You've probably heard of a few showrunners
like Phoebe Waller Bridge on Killing Eve, Aaron Sorkin on West Wing, and Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall have
all taken turns showrunning on Doctor Who. In our interview, Flanagan was quick to lay plenty of credit at the feet
of his directors and writers. [Flanagan] "The script for episode 5 was
something that we all worked very hard on," "and I worked very closely with Angela
LaManna who penned the teleplay." "We outlined it together with the whole room," "all of us broke it scene-by-scene," "and then by the time she
went off to write the draft," "there was no daylight between any of us." Everybody was on the same page." Flanagan himself wasn't even
on-set for my favorite episode, The Altar of the Dead. [Flanagan] "I was traveling when they shot that," "so I was checking in via text with Adam Fasullo," "who oversees our productions for
Intrepid when we're not on set," "and with Liam and with Rahul just
checking in to see how it was going." But his vision still permeates the show. Director Liam Gavin said on The Evolution of Horror podcast that
he had a brief for what the show was, and he worked to that brief. Overall, Flanagan said he chose
directors who had directed independent horror films that prioritized
character like Liam Gavin's A Dark Song, or Yolanda Ramke, and Ben Howling's
aforementioned film Cargo. [LK] "Oh, want to talk about split diopters?" [Flanagan] "Yeah!"
[LK] "I only spotted them in the first episode," "but was that just like we can't do long
takes this season, split diopter fun?" [Flanagan] "Split diopters!
Yes, I love a split diopter." "I love it, and I think the
last TV show that really consistently leaned into was Six Feet Under," "and they used it so beautifully." A split diopter, as you might guess from its name, splits the focus of a shot. A piece of convex glass covers half the lens, allowing a shot to have two
different depths of field and focus. Usually, the give away would be a slight
blurring at the center of the frame. It's been used in loads of films
and TV shows to various effects. In Bly, it was frequently
used to highlight empty space. In both of these scenes, the children are acting particularly odd due to the presence of ghosts that Dani
can't see, or communicate with. The spot over her shoulder that's in focus, that's where the ghost is. [Flanagan] "The diopter is there to also throw
focus to the person who's invisible who's there," "and who should be there,
but isn't, and they're like," "so what am I focusing on?" "Literally the air over this mark where Miss Jessel would be if Dani could see her," "and we could see her, but we can't see her."
[LK] "Ooooh" "And so it got--it got very complicated...uh building these split diopter shots that were really..." "The one in the bathroom is my favorite when she" "turns and looks over her
shoulder because we went through" "a ton of effort to use this piece of equipment to highlight empty space." Also, there's this split diopter where if the other shot is focused on where a ghost would be, Um this time the ghost is visible and in-focus. ...Man, I'm sad. Another major factor in
this season was the editing, particularly in episode 5. Now, a lot of the editing that you might
really notice is in the interview scenes. There's some editing that feels like it's
deliberately fucking with continuity, and our understanding of a
simple reverse shot to unsettle an audience and submerge us in the
surreal unreality of these scenes, which is so incredibly good. But the technique I spotted a lot in
episode 5 in particular was match cutting. Match cutting basically means connecting
two scenes visually rather than just casually transitioning from one scene into
the next with a wide establishing shot. It can be a hard cut between two shots that have enough visual similarity to
create a kind of symmetry. It can be done with sound, with a piece of overlapping
audio bridging two scenes, [The end of 'Cell Block Tango plays] [The sound of a cell door rolling shut
transitions to the sound of steam hissing] or you can cut on movement. I would say most of the edits in this episode are cuts based on movements, or visual symmetry. Like here's a bit of visual symmetry. By the way, all the Haunting shows love to transition in and out of a flashback with a door, and I like it every time, it's neat. And several flashbacks use a
more movement-based match cut, like Hannah turning her head or even
just closing, and opening her eyes. It's so seamless. And to build an entire episode like this
really adds to the dream-like quality of it. And when it comes to criticism about the show, I might be a little biased. Not only because the creator was
kind enough to talk to me about it, but because I liked season 1 so much, and I like stories that
highlight queer relationships, and I like a narrative that fucks with chronology, and sad stories that have lots of catharsis, so there's a lot here in Bly Manor that's my jam. Overall, my biggest critique is
probably just with the pacing. I don't mind being patient, but episodes 2 and 3 did require
me to sometimes take a breath, and be like, "All right, let's
see where this is going." Or when two episodes in a row
ended on this cliffhanger, I was a little bit like, "I would like to get off of
this cliff now, Michael," but that's really it. The show
required a little patience, and I think rewarded it in the end, so I'm cool with that. A criticism I've heard a lot
is that Bly Manor is boring, or less scary than Hill House, and I'm probably a bad person to talk
to about that because my answer is, "Cool! Awesome! Much appreciated! Thank you very much!" I don't mind a bit of dread or suspense, but there's certain kinds of graphic, or disturbing imagery that
I find really upsetting. This is the reason I'm not watching
Hereditary, like stop asking me. I might watch Midsommar, but that's a Big IF friends. [Flanagan] "I got a lot of flack for saying that
I thought Bly Manor was scarier than Hill House," "and I--and I do, uh... but not because
it has--it has way less scares." [LK] "It's a horrifying
concept. It's very upsetting." [Flanagan] "Yeah, that's what I thought
was that this version of the afterlife and" "this version of the ghosts in this story scared" "me a lot more than the ones who
were just hanging out forever." I mean, this is a bit of personal taste, but I'm down for our horror TV show that presents horrifying concepts
rather than one that shows, I don't know, a girl ripping her face off, or turning inside out, or some shit. I'm cool with engaging on this level
where the horror is quiet and conceptual. I don't know...all I know is this one scene
made me throw my headphones across the room, [Abrupt SCARY SOUNDS] and I had to pause the show, and take a walk after this scene, [Loud scary sound & Dani screaming] so I don't know, I guess it's up to you
to decide if that's scary enough for you. But I do want to address
the criticism that this show utilizes the trope of 'Burying Your Gays,' and quick spoiler alert for these pieces of media, skip ahead to the time code on screen if you must. So I can understand if queer people yearning for some decent representation are a little sensitive to this issue, and if watching one half of a lesbian
couple die is too much for you, I get it. But I really don't think this is
an example of 'Burying Your Gays.' Without going too deep on it, I would say most examples of this trope
treat LGBT characters as expendable, or they die in some way because
of their gayness, like AIDS, and hate crimes, and so on, and Bly Manor does neither of those things. Like, it's okay if you feel too sensitive to watch a happily committed gay couple get
broken up with a character death, but I don't think every gay character who
dies is an example of this harmful trope. If you want more on this in relation to Bly Manor, I've got a link in the description for Rowan Ellis' excellent review which
went further in-depth on the trope. Her whole channel talks a lot
about the history of queer cinema, so go check her out. I did ask Mike Flanagan if Victoria
Pedretti could ever be happy on this show, and this was his answer. [Flanagan] "And we all really believed that
we were creating a happy ending and...uh..." "and then everything that we see on social
it's just like...you know 'devastated!'" [LK] "I mean, listen, I sobbed." [Laughter]
[Flanagan] "'Enraged'...yeah!" "And then I get these e-mails, it's like," "You have to pay my therapy," and
it's like...I thought we were--I thought we were doing--"
[More laughter] "This was the happy--Oh shit, I
don't know what a happy ending is!" And with that, let's talk about
some doppelgangers and dead people. [LK] "Everybody is haunted by something in the
show like Hannah has the crack in the wall," "Dani has her ex-boyfriend." "What was it about Uncle Henry
that made his demon so personal?" [Flanagan] "What I loved about Henry," "was that there are decisions
we're capable of making," "that I think are so damaging," "and the idea of him having an
affair with his sister-in-law." "It's one of those things
you hear about happening," "where you know people who have
been through something like this," "and my question is always, how
do you come back from that?" "How does a family come back from that?" So Episode 6, The Jolly Corner finally clues us in, to what Henry Wingrave has
been doing this whole time. Dani has tried to get in touch with him
a few times about his niece and nephew, and during this episode, she tries a few more times and is
constantly told that he's busy. It turns out what he's busy doing, is locking himself in his office
and drinking himself into oblivion, while he's wracked with guilt and haunted by a doppelganger of himself that won't stop smiling. So he spends all this time alone with
himself and his guilt in human form. It's like a form of
self-flagellation or self-immolation. [Flanagan] "The short story that Henry James
wrote called The Jolly corner, has this really," "really cool hook where a guy comes home and
there's this doppelganger of himself there," "but who's just evil." "Who just has this horrible grin and he's missing fingers," "which we stayed away from because
that was just too confusing." "But that idea of being haunted by yourself,
was something I thought was really fun." "That if the people who could have forgiven" "him or even hated him for what
he did weren't there anymore," "if he didn't have his sister-in-law
to pine over for their lost love," "and he didn't have his brother
to hate him for what he did," "he's left in a profound aloneness." "Where he really only has him." Over the course of this episode, we learn that Henry was having an affair with
his sister-in-law, Charlotte before she died, and that his brother found out about it. The trip they took that ended
in their unfortunate demise, was actually an attempt to get away
from Henry and rekindle their marriage. [Charlotte] "I can fix it." But before they left, his brother Dominic gave
Henry a piece of his mind, and it honestly feels like he's
laying a curse on his brother here, as he delivers the speech about Henry being banished from the family to
be alone with his true self. [Dominic] "And he is a shit
grinning fucking monster." The scene where Henry meets his
other half for the first time, is truly harrowing as he receives the
news that Dominic and Charlotte are dead, and the doppelganger appears to him, smiling demonically, and holding
out his hand to say hello. One other detail we've figured out, is that Flora is actually Henry's
daughter from the affair with Charlotte. [Dominic] "The math didn't work, did it?" "She didn't it tell you? Look at that,
I get to be here when the penny drops." And the crank calls that the house has
been getting are actually Henry calling. He's too scared to say it's him, but he's just calling in hopes that
he might hear his daughter's voice. [Dani] "Hello? Hello? It's
another freaking prank call." And it's profoundly sad to see
how this whole family came apart, partly due to his mistakes, and he knows that all too well, which feels like some of the
reason he is continuing to keep himself in this self-imposed captivity. But at the end of this episode, Henry finally says fuck it. He says [Leia in Empire Strikes Back] "I
have a bad feeling about this." And heads to Bly Manor. And for the first time, his doppelganger stops smiling. But hang on to that thread. It's going to be a while
before we pick it back up. The other half of episode 6, shows
us that Flora isn't doing...great. She keeps getting tucked away. [Flora] "I've been tucked
away again in another memory." [Charlotte] "You have." [Flora] "This is happening
more and more, isn't it?" [Charlotte] "It is." Which means she's kinda getting
possessed by Rebecca Jessel, like, Dani just finds her wandering around
outside or collapsing for no reason. When she gets tucked away by Rebecca, her consciousness ends up in a
memory like Hannah, in episode 5. Mostly sweeter memories from her childhood, when her parents were still around. But there are several flashbacks
devoted to the time she saw a faceless little boy in her room and went to get her mom and found Charlotte
and Uncle Henry together. [Flora] "Uncle Henry?" [Henry] "Hello Flora." [Charlotte] "Uncle Henry slept over." The two go to investigate Flora's ghost, and Henry tells her that he had an
imaginary friend when he was young too. [Henry] "He was a soldier, and I was very
afraid of him until I gave him a story." And at this point, everybody in the audience goes, "Hey Henry, I think you saw a GHOST." Also, in the present, Dani is trying really hard to woo Jamie
with the coffee she's bad at making, to try and smooth over this
whole bit, and it's adorable. [Jamie] "Poppins, you flirt." Eventually, it works enough for Jamie to
relent and spend the evening with Dani. They go out to the garden where Jamie
talks about her difficult life growing up, about her mom who was too
young to be raising three kids, and her dad who worked himself into a
slow death in a dank dark coal mine, while her mother cheated
on him and eventually left. Then social services came and split up her and her siblings and
send them all to foster care, which Jamie describes as; "Just to put a bunch of stale perverted men," "and bitter wives," "Trying to make a few quid by
taking care of local trash." She says she even spent some time in jail, and that's where she got into gardening
because plants are easier than people and plants can often reward a lot of love and
effort with a little beauty and light, even if it's a lot of work for a
flower that will only last a night. It's a gorgeous scene and
then they kiss and we all go. YEAH! Later on, Dani asks Jamie to spend the night
because she's got a bad feeling and Jamie says, there'll be other nights and they have time. So Jamie goes home and Dani checks on Flora to find, Oh shit, that's a GHOST1 [Dani] "Flora, come here." [Flora] "It's okay." "It's only Miss Jessel." And then she starts calling for Miles and uuuh... [Peter] "Well, this is awkward." Flora goes running upstairs
and Dani runs after her. [Dani] "Flora, we got to go. Come on." [Flora] "I'm sorry." And gets knocked out by Miles. So...you know uuuh....that's just uh...fine! Fine! it's fine!! In episode 7, the Two Faces part 2, Dani spends the bulk of the episode
trying to non-verbally reason with two ghosts and the children who are either
being possessed by them or misled by them, depending on the scene. Peter keeps telling the children that everything is fine and this
is all part of the plan. They're going to teach Dani how to be
tucked away and won't that be nice? Of course, one notable bit, is that both ghosts seem to get randomly distracted by sounds the living
people in the room can't hear. Eventually, they just drift back into memories
getting 'tucked away' again as it were. [Peter] "Becks, you're slipping. Stay with me. Becks. Becks!"
[Background voices echoing] For Peter, it's this knocking on the
door that leads to a scene with his mom. [Peter] "No." [Elspeth Quint] "That's what you say to me? All this time?" "That's what you say?" It doesn't seem like these two get along great. She basically showed up at his door
to try and blackmail him for money, which might explain a plan to steal a
bunch of money and run away to America. Then we switch to Rebecca, reacting to Peter's disappearance
with shock and upset. But after some time passes, Peter is able to appear to
her and explain that he died. [Quiet wooshing sound] And he can't leave the grounds, his soul is trapped here. They try to leave Bly together with
Peter possessing Rebecca's body, but... they're both trapped now in one way or another. When Peter finally comes to
her again, he has a plan, a way for them to be together again, and it's a permanent solution. The first step is for him
to possess Rebecca again, they have a phrase now to expedite the process. [Rebecca] "It's you, it's me, it's us." And while Peter is in control of her body, Rebecca gets tucked away in nice
memories of her and Peter together. Meanwhile, Peter walks Rebecca
into the lake and drowns her. The next morning, Flora finds her body floating in the water and her ghost sobbing on the shore. [Rebecca] "No!"
[Sobbing] Rebecca is understandably furious with Peter. [Rebecca] "Fucking son of a bitch! You
fucking lied! You're a fucking liar!" [Peter] "I had to."
[Rebecca] "No!" [Peter](Full of shit) "I'm sorry, but I had to." The situation is so messed
up on so many levels and he was too much of a coward to
even stick around for the fallout. She suffered the pain of her death alone, and before he can begin to
explain his fucked up reasoning, before he can explain what
happens to ghosts at Bly, he's pulled away again. [Peter] "Again? We have to do this." "I was in the middle of something, something important." [Elspeth] "I doubt that." And it's here we learn, this is the only memory that
Peter ever gets tucked away in. Even Rebecca gets to revisit better moments she had with Peter and the kids get to see their parents again, but for Peter, this is all there is. He says it could be worse. He could be trapped in a
memory from his childhood, a memory of his father. [Peter] "But then I started to
realize, why this was worse than that," "Why this was hell." "Because I...I was a kid back then." He says that what his father
did to him as a child, he was too young to understand, but he was an adult when this happened. He's old enough to understand that his mother stood by and did nothing to stop his father, and now she's here to ruin his life more. [Peter] "But here, this time, "Well I know better, don't I? This time,
seeing you in that fucking doorway!" He says that he hopes that she knows... He hopes that she knows that this blackmail is what ended up killing her son and she replies. [Elspeth] "Honey, I don't
even know that you're dead." In the present, Peter and Rebecca are back, convincing the kids that this
is fine, everything's fine. When Rebecca expresses
reservations about the plan, Peter reminds her of what
happens to ghosts at Bly. [Peter] "This is what will happen. Miles and Flora. You don't want that to happen to us do you?"
[Ghost woman gasping] We learn the plan is to possess
the children permanently. Peter sells it to them as a 'forever home'
where they can be with their parents forever. All the while, Dani is just on the floor expressing her terror and objections to all of this. But eventually, the kids agree
and they utter that same phrase. [Dani through the gag] "No!"
[Peter] "It's you, it's me." [Miles] "..."It's us." [Dani screams] And collapse to the ground. When they both get up, Miles'
eyes are two different colors, and he says he'll take care of
Hannah while Rebecca deals with Dani. And by taking care of Hannah, Peter means bringing her back
to the well where her body is, to remind you that she is SUPER DEAD. Apparently, Hannah's continued presence at Bly, her ability to interact with physical space, and even have different outfits has to do with her ghost's denial of the fact that she died, and Peter wants to put a stop to that
so she won't interfere with their plans. And suddenly, we get another flash of that
interview memory from Hannah's perspective. It's only here...with Owen...that the
full weight of it finally sinks in. [Hannah] "Because I'm dead." "Oh god."
[Crying] "Oh god..." But in the present, there's Flora
who's supposed to 'deal with Dani.' As Flora approaches, the
older woman is freaking out but... [Flora] "How did I do?" [Rebecca] "You did very well." It turns out Rebecca, and Flora
only went through the motions. Rebecca isn't possessing Flora for
some harebrained scheme for freedom. And as Flora unties Dani, Flora and Rebecca have this exchange. [Flora] "I thought you needed my help?" [Rebecca] "No Flora, no one
should ever need that much help," "not from anyone else." And she tells Dani that it's too late for Miles, but there's still a chance for Flora,
that Dani just needs to take her and run. But as they're leaving the grounds, Flora realizes they're leaving
Miles behind and she panics, not wanting to leave her brother. Dani desperately tries to reason with her, but then this happens. [Scary music] [Flora screams] Well, shit. One thing Mike Flanagan talked about
was the idea of heaven and hell. [Flanagan] "This idea that hell could be reliving
your worst memories over and over again," "and heaven could be reuniting
with lost loved ones." "It started, I think, with Peter Quint," "with that idea that he would just be
trapped in the same moment again and again." For Peter who lived a life where he
harmed others and never grew as a person, he lives in the hell, that is this one horrifying memory. [Flanagan] "Whereas the characters who had tried to make an effort to make the world a little better around them" "and who had learned how to love people
in a way that he never really did." "That they would have more variety in
the moments that they would revisit," "Then they could go to some that were their favorites or they...they would be trapped in others that really represented a reunion with a lost loved one." The one thing I find particularly fascinating is the handling of Peter Quint in this show. [Flanagan] "Ollie in particular,
he had a lot to say about" "Peter's backstory and a lot of the
things that come out in Episode 7," "the scene with him and his mom," "a lot of the content of that scene are things Ollie pitched," "and in particular his abusive father and some of" "the hints he wanted to make at that a lot came from Ollie directly," "as something he wanted to try to infuse the character with." Flanagan talked about how both Oliver Jackson Cohen and Tahirah Sharif agreed that if Peter was an irredeemable shit head, it would lessen Rebecca's character to be so taken in by him. There needed to be something underneath all that toxic bullshit that was real, and possibly even lovable. But the show never excuses his behavior, we see particularly through Rebecca, the kind of harm he's doing by being this selfish, not to mention the fact that
his Big Awesome Radical Plan for escaping Bly involves using literal children, and it was Peter who murdered Hannah. He just used Miles to do it. So...yes, Peter had a horrific traumatizing
childhood and that may explain his behavior, but it doesn't excuse it. I really love when Rebecca tells Flora
that nobody needs that much help. Because there's a difference
between helping somebody and being manipulated by them. I just loved that the show allows us
to understand this toxic broken man, and then draws this line in the sand
because nobody needs that much help. Now, it's time to talk about Episode 8. [Flanagan] "When you work
on a story about ghosts," "you're always stuck on rules." [LK] "Oh, yeah, ghost physics." [Flanagan] "Yes. Which change radically and
there's no guidebook to carry through with," "and who gets to be a ghost and
who doesn't get to be ghost." "We joke about why does one ghost get to make
a haunted videotape that murders everyone" "but their victims don't get to make their own tapes." "And where's the cutoff, at which point you're no longer qualify to be a ghost in one of these stories." So, a question that plagued the writers was, why are the ghosts happening? They wanted some reasoning behind it, an explanation for what I like to call 'ghost physics.' Apparently back in season one, they had hoped to explore more
of the history of Hill House, but they weren't able to. And that brings us to Episode 8 and Viola Willoughby Lloyd, after a little 'previously on Bly manor,' we jump to the middle of the 17th century
and the two daughters of a widowed gentleman, the narrator names Mr. Willoughby. The younger daughter is named Perdita, and older is named Viola. And their father has just died. Consequently, many an eligible bachelor
shows up to try and charm and marry, one or both of the sisters, thereby acquiring the father's wealth and estate. But the sisters know them to be vulture's. So they devise a plan and invite a distant
cousin, Arthur Lloyd, to the manor. Perdita entertains him, but the
plan is for him to marry Viola, unfortunately, Perdita, is
instantly charmed by this man, but she holds to her promise and
lets her sister work her magic. The two are quickly married and have a child, Isabel, all while Perdita
remains the dutiful sister. During their marriage, Viola is
extravagant with their money, buying herself all kinds of
elegant dresses and finery. Then one day, Viola gets some mystery illness, one that doctors say is incurable and highly contagious. The doctor orders that her husband and young
child be kept away for their own safety, and they do everything they can to cure her. But eventually, her own husband calls
the priest to perform last rites, but Viola refuses to partake remaining silent when the priest tells
her to repeat his words. [Viola] "Tell your God that I. Do. Not. Go." Arthur entreats her to care for her soul now, since her body's too far gone, and of all people, it's Perdita who agrees with her. [Perdita] "You tell them sister." "You tell this priest and that God he fawns upon," "you tell them no." Arthur says that God would want her to be pure, but Perdita says, God should know
better because she is how he made her. [Perdita] "She says she
will not go, she will not." And it almost feels like a spell
the two of them are casting here with this solidarity and defiance
of the God that is known to them. It feels like they're setting something
larger in motion because Viola lives, but she's not better. She's still sickly, they still keep
her apart from her husband and child for fear that she might spread her
sickness and years pass like this. Over time, Viola grows bitter and hateful towards the only person
she gets to see every day, her own sister, Perdita. She imagines an affair between Perdita
and Arthur and punishes her sister for it. Then she spends her nights
walking the halls of Bly singing 'O Willow Waly' and coming to find her
daughter and husband asleep in their bed. The years pass by until one day, she takes all her dresses and
jewels and puts them in this chest. Again, it feels like a spell being
laid as she drops in rose petals and entreats Arthur to keep all of it
for their daughter when she comes of age. She says it will be a gift for
her daughter, a bit of herself, she can be gift to her, and Arthur promises to keep the chest for Isabel. Meanwhile, this living purgatory
is starting to get Perdita. She tries to talk to Viola, basically telling her to give in. [Viola] "But I feel better today." [Perdita] "You say that every day, and
you look worse and worse and worse." But Viola is bitter and angry, still imagining that Perdita
has designs on Arthur, which at this point...she might. The narrator tells us that
a thought had occurred to Perdita over the last years she spent with Viola. The thought is 'mercy.' Although in truth, it might
as simply been...'enough.' When Arthur comes back from his
business ventures, his wife is now dead. After inappropriate mourning period, Perdita and Arthur have a quiet and unceremonious
wedding in the chapel on the grounds. Then over time, we learn that Arthur
is bad at business and Bly Manor is losing all its wealth to the point that
they may not be able to live in it soon. Also, Perdita has been unable
to have a child of her own. So one day she tells Arthur they
should open up that chest and sell all the gowns and jewels so
they can hold onto their home. Arthur says no because he promised Viola, which Perdita takes Very Badly. Eventually, she decides to take matters into her own hands and goes to
open up the chest and well... [Abrupt SCARY SOUNDS] From there, we jump back to Viola. She wakes up in this strange
version of her bedroom with blackened windows that are shut
tight and doors that won't open. But the wardrobe is there with
all her gowns, and that's it. Viola knows that one day she'll be
with her daughter again so she waits, she sleeps, she walks, and she waits. And after an age, the door to the room opens and
Viola is overjoyed expecting to see Isabel, but instead she sees Perdita. And well... you know what comes next. [Scary music rising to a crescendo]
[Perdita gasping for breath until her neck breaks] Even with her sister dead, Viola is still locked away in
the chest, waiting for Isabel. Meanwhile, Arthur has come to believe the chest is cursed and wants it nowhere near his daughter. They leave Bly, moving to a more modest home and they throw the chest to the bottom of the lake. And from Viola's perspective,
this is the final betrayal. She's been abandoned. She's alone without her
husband, without her daughter. Time passes and every night
her ghost walks out of the lake and goes down her nightly path to the
bedroom where her daughter once slept, only to find the bed empty. We see more time pass and Viola begins to fade. She distills down to one emotion, rage, while she never goes looking for more victims,
any adult that falls in her path is murdered, and any child is picked up and carried
into the lake where they drown. But Viola's rage and stubbornness, her loneliness even, is so complete, it creates a gravity well, a glue trap, one could say. All of the ghosts are stuck in her orbit, unable to leave the manor. Over time, Viola fades further and one by one, the other ghosts follow her
down this path to nothing. And now we're back in the present. To
the scene so nice, we played it thrice. [Scary music rising]
[Footsteps] And that's episode 8. [Flanagan] "That idea of ghosts being
these residual images of people that would" "fade over time like a photograph
would or like a memory would," "that was something that gave
us a new rule that most of us" "in a writer's room hadn't really
played with before or run into before." "Because there's only so many
ways you can make someone" "stand there and go 'aah' in the background." "By the 20th episode you're trying to
write, it just gets really boring." "This seemed thematically resonant and it
seemed like something we could play with." So the idea behind this whole concept, the way that ghosts turn into these empty faceless
creatures came from the same ideas about dementia. It came from the same idea of
fading away a piece at a time, which I honestly think is fascinating. And if you're familiar with Henry
James' short story of the same name, you'll know that this is a pretty faithful
adaptation up until Perdita's death, although a few names and details
were moved around and some of the narration we get in this episode
is lifted verbatim from the story. [Narrator] "They were married as was becoming with great privacy." "Almost with secrecy." Also in this episode, Kate Siegel played The Lady of the Lake. But in the rest of the season, she was played by stunt woman Daniela Dib, which makes sense because can you imagine the biceps this woman must have
to drag all these folk around. Although according to Flanagan, they did have some special rigs and harnesses
to keep the actors safe during the scenes. But a portion of it was done by Oliver
Jackson Cohen, and Victoria Pedretti. Oh and did you recognize Perdita? That's Katie Parker. She played Poppy Hill in season one, and you might have spotted her
in a few other Flanagan films. And with all that being said, let's talk about The Beast in the Jungle. Episode 9, 'The Beast In The
Jungle' actually begins with Hannah tucked away in that memory with Owen
as she reiterates her new reality. [Hannah] "I'm dead." [Owen] "Yes." She says she can feel herself slipping
away and she doesn't want to fade. [Owen] "I know, love." She reminisces about what it was
like to meet Owen for the first time, how charming she found him, the future she had sometimes imagined for them. [Hannah] "I loved you, Owen. I should have told you." [Owen] "What a life we could have had." She says she wants to stay here in this memory and Owen reminds her that the real Owen is
out there and he might be in danger. Hannah needs to warn him, even if that means leaving
the safety of this memory. [Owen] "This isn't me. This is just you." And in this very bittersweet moment, her memory of Owen comforts her. [Owen] "You have loved me, so I'll always be here. Hannah says she doesn't know where she'll go if she leaves and Owen tells her to be brave in death. In the present, Dani is getting dragged by Viola. Hannah tries to stop her, but it doesn't work. Viola drags Dani all the way up to her child's former bedroom where
Flora has the idea that saves her. She jumps up on the bed, distracting Viola from Dani, who was barely conscious at this point, she drops the woman and picks up the child, carrying her back downstairs to the lake, just like she did with that little boy many years ago. And at this point, Henry shows up. Remember when he finally
left his office a while back? Well he's here now, it took him three episodes to get here and he's
going to save his daughter--Ah shit! [Viola making scary sounds]
[Flora] "Uncle Henry!" [Flora] "Stop it!" [Flora screams] Is he dead? Oh well there's no time to sweat that, because Owen and Jamie are here too! [Hannah] "Oh Owen, what are you doing here?" [Owen] "This is going to sound insane but we
both had an awful dream and we just drove and..." Hannah sort of gathers her composure and tells them. [Hannah] "They need you at the lake." And then she disappears. And now it's time for Rebecca Jessel to break my goddamn heart Again. Because she's following Flora and Viola into the lake and Flora's scared and screaming and Rebecca tries to soothe her. She says not to worry, and she won't feel a thing. [Rebecca] "I'll feel it for you. I'll just tuck you away one last time." "You go ahead love, you let me handle this part." Because once again, Rebecca has learned from Peter's brutality and she's doing everything she can to protect these kids. And I'm going to cryyyyyy! Flora agrees and says the magic words, and Rebecca sends her to a memory of her mother. Meanwhile, Jamie and Owen find Henry on the ground and Owen tries to resuscitate him while Jamie runs for the lake, but Dani beats her there. It's Dani who runs headlong after them and she can't stop Viola. But the narrator tells us her next words were not something she understood, but something she felt. [Dani] "It's you...it's me...it's us!" She says these words not to Flora...but to Viola and it works. In that moment, the spell on Bly Manor is lifted. The gravity of Viola's spirit that trapped all the ghosts here is finally gone. [Rebecca] "Do you feel that?" Hannah and Henry are off to the side. Watching Owen try to resuscitate Henry's body. And Hannah asks Henry to pass on a message for Owen, t tell him that she's sorry, and that she loved him. [Hannah] "And the rest...well...is just--" [Henry gasps for air] We don't get to hear the rest because Henry wakes up. He's alive again and Hannah's gone. [Flanagan] "And we had a big one there where it was like the last thing Hannah says "should be confetti and it took us until the last draft to say no," "she should not make it." "She should make it right up to the word confetti and then disappear before she gets to say it." And that's gorgeous and I'M SAD . We also get to see Miles waking up as himself and Peter's ghost tells Miles that he's sorry, which like, cool, good! He should say sorry to a lot of people, but this is a good moment for both characters. Meanwhile, at the lake, Dani's got Flora now and she's...pretty freaked out as Jamie gets there. [Dani whimpering] [Dani gasping and stuttering the phrase "It's us" over and over again]
[Jamie] "Okay. It's okay." [Jamie] "It's okay. Shhhh."
[Dani hyperventilating] Also, her eyes are two different colors now. And everybody that's still with us gets a moment to recover. Owen and Jamie hold Dani between them and
Henry gets to hug his daughter and nephew. [Henry] "I'm so sorry, kids." Owen asks where Hannah is and we see Owen finding her body in the well, and the voice over tells us everyone assumes she fell and it was labeled as an unfortunate accident, but Owen stayed with her until she was properly laid to rest and he loved her the whole way. We watch him light a candle for her in
the chapel and I started crying Here, and pretty much didn't stop
for the rest of the episode. So have fun with that knowledge. There's a lovely little
scene of Henry with the kids, there clearly packing to leave blind manner. He teaches Miles how to tie a bow tie, a tricky learned from Dominic, along with how to sew patches into his clothes. Flora and Miles ask if there are more stories, more he can teach them and
tell them about their parents. He says, he'll tell them everything he knows. Then we get this scene with Dani as
Jamie comes to check how she's doing with her own packing up and just like every other
times she can tell that something's wrong. So she asks what it is and Dani tries to explain. When she said those words at the lake, she invited Viola's spirit into herself, a spirit that spent centuries
being distilled down to nothing more than a rage and
that spirit is still within Dani. It's quiet, but it's there, and it's a beast, and one day it will consume her. So Jamie sits down next to her and just asks. [Jamie] "Do you want company? While you wait for your beast in the jungle?" And did I mention I love these two so much. It's a really good bit. They just promise to keep each other
company while Dani waits for her ghost. Dani says goodbye to the Wingraves, to Flora and Miles and Henry who says. [Henry] "I suppose I don't know how I will ever thank you." And gives her a tearful hug. And when these two first met, Dani had told him. "I could make a difference," "a real difference...with just two." And I think he understands in this moment how right she was, maybe even more than she does. And what follows is a life. We get to watch Dani and Jamie together through the years. Ten years according to Flanagan, they get ten years of a life together. We get to watch them choose each other and propose to each other. [Dani] "You're my best friend and the love of my life." "And I don't know how much time we have left." "But however much it is." "I want to spend it with you." It's so sweet and domestic, we even get to see them keeping in touch with Owen. He has this restaurant that he's dedicated to Hannah. Also, another thing we learned in that scene with Owen is that both Flora and Miles have forgotten everything from Bly and everyone seems to agree that it's for the best. But we also see that the ghost inside Dani is still there, still raging and slowly but surely it's coming forward. More and more Dani keep seeing reflections of her. And much like Owens mother succumbing to dementia, we watch as it begins to erode Dani away. One thing I found really heartbreaking throughout the season were these meditations on dementia and loss. Through Owen and we see the kind of loss that happens when a person is still living, when someone you love is sick and everyone is waiting for the inevitable. And on the other end of the spectrum, we see Jamie watching Dani's decline and denying it the whole way. She purposefully ignores the signs, even as Dani keeps getting worse. Jamie was the one who once casually proclaimed she would rather be shot than exist as a worn away version of herself. [Jamie] "Put me out of my misery. It's not fair on anyone." [Hannah] "I don't think fairness comes into it dear." But it's Dani who bites the bullet...as it were. One night, Dani wakes up from a dream of being underwater and her hands are almost around Jamie's throat. And so Dani decides that it's time. She's becoming a risk. The Lady of the Lake is starting to take over and she won't let that happen. So Dani goes back to Bly and drowns herself in the lake. Jamie goes after her, but it's too late. Dani's gone. Taking the spirit of Viola with her, for good this time. And our narrator comes in and tells us that Dani would sleep beneath the lake like Viola had. That she too would eventually wear away, but she would simply walk the grounds of Bly, as harmless as a dove for the rest of her days. [Narrator] "Leaving the only trace of who she once was," "in the memory is the woman who loved her most." The narrator tells us, the gardener would forever look in reflections for her Lady of the Lake and she would leave her door cracked every night hoping her lover would return. And that's the end of the story. Back in the present, sitting
around that fireplace, one woman asks the narrator. [Guest] "So is it true?" [Narrator] "Which part?" [Guest] "If I were to fly to England
and I were to visit Bly Manor," "Might I get a peek of this lady of the lake? The narrator says, "No. I expect if you were to fly to England," "you would find no such place by that name." Then after everybody leaves, the bride lingers to chat a little more. She says her middle name is Flora, and she found that to be an odd coincidence. It's around here that I clocked the fact that the narrator is Jamie. I asked Mike Flanagan about the ambiguity of
the story as it was told to us and he said, [Flanagan] "Our read on it was always
that she's telling the whole story," "that she's not embellishing
anything or lying about anything." "We looked at it as she changed the names slightly and that she changed the name of the location, "she only changed what she had to in order to not kind of traumatize the listener." Basically, Jamie wanted to tell Flora what Dani had sacrificed, but she had to couch it in a story, something that happened to somebody else. So Flora and Jamie have this very sweet
conversation where Flora talks about the anxiety she has over the possibility
of eventually losing the love of her life, her soon to be husband. Jamie tells her that for now, she should enjoy the time she has with her
love and she says that when the time comes, it will be hard, but she'll
still have her memories of him. [Jamie] "And they'll be silly and dumb or
they'll be sad and you'll cry for hours," "but there'll still be a piece of him." She says, it'll be like he's
still there even though he's gone. With that, the pair say night and the
next day at the wedding reception, Jamie watches Flora and her father dance
and we see them all as they once were. Henry, Flora, Miles, Owen, and Jamie herself all appear as the versions of them we saw on
the story and it's really sweet. Then Jamie goes back to her hotel
and we see her getting ready for bed, looking at a sink filled with
water and sitting down to sleep in front of a crack door
and here we come full circle. This was how the first episode began
with her waking up in that chair. But now we linger as she closes her eyes to sleep. The camera pulls back to reveal
Dani's hand on her shoulder. And that's the end of the show. And you know, there's a lot of good media about grief. A lot of media that explores the
various nooks and crannies of it, like the documentary 'Dick Johnson Is Dead,' in which Director Kirsten
Johnson chronicled her experience with her father's dementia and declining health through absurdism. Her father, with remarkably good humor, plays along as they enact various death scenarios and even an entire fake funeral which he gets to go to. [Dick Johnson] "Did you get it mum?" [Kirsten Johnson] "I got it." [Dick Johnson] "Oh, wonderful!" "I've always wanted to be in the movies."
[laughter] It would make a great double
feature with Bly Manor honestly, or there's the film 'A Monster Calls' based
on the novel of same name by Patrick Ness, which will TEAR OUT YOUR HEART AND SPIT ON IT! At the end, you will say THANK YOU! Because it talks about how ugly
grief can be and that's okay. Or the video game 'Gris,' which explores grief and recovering from trauma through simple video game
mechanics and color theory. It's the best fucking thing ever. Both seasons of The Haunting explore
many different aspects of death and grief because of their own ghostly
nature that stuff tends to come built-in. And it's done excellently. We get to experience grief, trauma, and recovery from the perspective
of both the living and the dead. It's fascinating and with Bly Manor, we get such a generational story. In season 1, the crane story was so tight-knit, just by virtue of them being a family, almost all the conflicts sprang from a
single night when everything went wrong. But season 2 was much more sprawling. There's the story of Viola, but there's also Hannah's story and Dani's, and Peter and Rebecca's doomed romance, Miles's downward spiral at school, Flora's fading grasp on the present, and Henry's unfixable mistakes. Another aspect that highlights
the interconnectedness of this larger narrative is the way some
elements repeat throughout the narratives. I don't just mean the memories. Throughout time, we see events
repeating, an unhappy marriage, an affair or the stirrings of one, a father, daughter dance, a woman crying
at the edge of the lake. It almost feels like this story is folding
in on itself, echoing through time. And then there's one of my favorite
aspects of this season of the show. Whereas in the first season, ghosts were largely a source of terror and death, in Bly Manor, we have ghosts that are benevolent, ghosts that love and care. I know Nell was a very nice ghost in season 1 but this season we've got Rebecca and Hannah, and even Dani eventually. And most of the ghosts aside from Viola, are simply passive specters. As creepy as they are, they're harmless. I love when Henry tells Flora about
the imaginary friend he had as a child. [Henry] "He was a soldier, and I was very
afraid of him until I gave him a story." That's exactly what Flora does. [Flora] "Now let's come up
with the story. Just for you." By the time we get to the present day, she so comfortable with these spirits
that she ACTUALLY SHUSHES A GHOST! [Flora humming 'Oh Willow Waly' along with a music box] [A rasping voice tries to join the humming] [Flora] "Shh!"
[The voice goes silent] I just love that bit a lot. Then there's Dani and Edmund. She spends the first half of the
season being petrified by him. But in the end, she just sits, drinking wine straight from
the bottle, and tells him. [Dani] "It's just you and me then. Hmm?" I love this casual attitude
towards ghosts this season. There are so many aspects to death
and the afterlife in the show. But I love this idea of coexistence. This idea of befriending the
ghosts, even loving them. So many characters are haunted by loss. A loss of innocence, a loss of love, or even a loss of life. In the end, every character has to make peace with their traumas and come to terms with their ghosts. José Olivarez once wrote, And then there's this shot. [Flanagan] "That shot was the
whole reason we did the season." "The opening in the hotel and
her waking up in the chair," "and the closing of her sleeping
in a chair with the hand," "that was clear before we had
anything else with the ghosts." "I think before we had character names," "we had those two shots." "That seems for a love story to be kind of" "the visual image of the kind of
love we wanted to talk about." I love this shot so much, but more than that, I love what it highlights. Because Flora told Owen back in episode 4, "Dead doesn't mean gone." It's a sentiment Miles repeated as well. It's something the children have
learned in the hardest way possible, but there's another angle to it, a kinder one. Like Owen told Hannah at the beginning of episode 9, "You have loved me, so I'll always be here." All these years later we can see that Dani
is still with Jamie standing just beside her, even if she does eventually
fade away like Jamie suggested. Her anger isn't rage or
loneliness like it was with Viola. Instead, it's love. And you know, it was E. E. Cummings who once wrote, And the rest, as they say, well, the rest is confetti." This is another long one, oh boy, one day I'll be succinct, I swear." So first off, a huge thank you to Mike
Flynn again for letting me interview him. Can you tell this is the first time
I've ever interviewed somebody? It was cool. I would love to do more
interviews if the opportunity arises again. Also, the full interview is available to watch on Nebula or on my Patreon. It was really cool. There were a lot of interesting facts I learned that I couldn't fit in here
just for the sake of time, so go check that out. Second, a big thank you to my patrons
whose names you saw on the credits. You-all gave me some financial stability
in 2020 and what a gift that was? In terms of what's next, well for everybody who wanted
to hear me scream about my favorite dumpster fire that is Kingdom Hearts, I am going to do a charity stream where I play Kingdom Hearts III for 24 hours
to raise money for trans lifeline. I still need to work out some of the details, but there will be guests, it will be fun. We'll talk about my favorite
sword boy and his cartoon dads. Keep an eye on my Twitter and
the community posts on YouTube. I'll post more details when
I get my shit together. I think that's everything. Thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you on the next one.
Ladyknightthebrave is one of the best video essayists on YouTube and I'd recommend her Hill House and Bly Manor videos to everyone on this sub.
Ladyknightthebrave's Hill House video essay was wonderful, I'm looking forward to watching this one
I’ve been watching in instalments. Heads up for everyone: it’s an hour and a half long!