I thought this was a pretty good episode, nice return to form after last week.
I will say that I haven’t really felt the climaxes of any of these, because the CGI just looks too bad for me to get into and I wish they wouldn’t rely on it so much. Any sense of dread the show may have been building to dies when they actually have to show the monsters, because they’re too goofy-looking. I have to imagine the possession of ‘Tic would have been several times more effective if instead they just relied on the actor to sell it rather than that weird, fast-forward motion with his head. Spielberg learned it with
Jaws, sometimes less is more, y’know.
But the show is really good at selling the horror of more mundane examples of racism and contrasting that against the more fantastical examples. The cross burning, Leti getting interrogated by the police, the white guys breaking in, etc. I also love that the racists always get their comeuppance at the end of these things, too. Most of all, I love that it was just a simple haunted house story. Obviously, with Christina showing up at the end, there’s a macro plot weaving throughout all of this but that wasn’t the point like it was last week. That gets kept to the background while we deal with the plot of the episode.