"Servant" 2.01: "Doll" is a bit heavy on plot
"Servant" 2.01: "Doll" is a bit heavy on plot
The aftermath of S1 is solid but does not quite play to the show's strengths.
Original Airdate: January 15, 2021
Written By: Tony Basgallop
Directed by: Julia Ducournau
Plot Summary: Dorothy attempts to track down Leanne, believing her to have kidnapped Jericho. Sean and Julian attempt to cover their tracks.
Review:
After a longer-than-expected break brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic, Servant has returned for its second season. The Apple TV+ original series — produced by M. Night Shyamalan and predominantly written by creator Tony Basgallop — has not exactly become a major hit for Apple during its debut season, but it has gained a cult following and some critical buzz.
Why should this be a good time to start watching it?
Well, the simple answer is that Servant feels like nothing else on TV. To some extent, it resembles a play, as the action is predominantly confined to a small collection of sets tied to a single location — a brownstone mansion in Philadelphia (that may very well belong to Shyamalan himself). And yet, there is no denying that the series looks what one could only describe as “cinematic.” Thanks to director of photography Michael Gioulakis, nearly every episode contains some unorthodox-for-TV shots and visual compositions, especially when it comes to the depiction of food.
And then there is the atmosphere. Servant is the rare show that can consistently conjure a palpable sense of unnerving dread and terror through its combination of sound and image, to the extent that one could compare it to a European art-horror film. It is a series that likes to generally take its time, to move slowly through story and so let audiences really soak in the details.
All this is perhaps why, to be honest, I don’t believe that “Doll” is among the show’s strongest installments. It is a good and confident entry, for sure, but it is also a more story-heavy and fast-paced Servant than usual.
The first season ended with a masterfully edited and scored audiovisual sequence that had Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell) trying to burn his hand to see if he could feel, Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) discovering a reborn doll inside of baby Jericho’s crib, and Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) — the titular Servant — seemingly vanishing into thin air along with her extended family, presumably all members of a cult called “The Church of the Lesser Saints.”
The S2 premiere picks up pretty much right where the finale left off, focusing on the immediate aftermath of Leanne’s departure, as Dorothy tries frantically to track down any leads to her son. The final shot of last season seemed to be the point where Dorothy finally realized what happened to Jericho. “Doll” though quickly reveals that Dorothy is still ignorant and instead thinks that Leanne absconded with the real baby.
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This leads to all sorts of narrative complications. Sean’s first instinct after hearing that his wife had called the police is to try to get rid of any evidence that there had been a party celebrating the child’s baptism. And Julian and Natalie basically show up to ensure Dorothy doesn’t say anything too incriminating to the cops.
The show here has to play a very careful game — it must successfully sell audiences on the idea that the main characters (sans Dorothy) can keep up the public deception that they hadn’t had a real child in their midst at all, while leaving Dorothy unaware of their subterfuge. This places an undue emphasis on traditional plotting and narrative plausibility. “Doll” gets by, but not without stretching credulity somewhat. (The S1 finale, after all, had Jericho unveiled to the public, a fact that even leads Sean to acknowledge that keeping up the deception is unsustainable.)
The premiere overall moves briskly, covering 48 or so hours of story time in just 26 minutes of screen time. The short duration results in an episode of Servant that is more exciting and action-packed than usual, but one that simultaneously feels closer to a more conventional thriller or police procedural. To an extent though, this is a natural consequence of the fact that a key ingredient that made the show so unique in its brilliant first season is now absent.
Leanne Grayson, after all, was not just a wild card, whose actions you could never really predict, but also a constant source of weird and inexplicable phenomena that disrupted the lives of the Turners. Virtually every scene with Leanne in the first season was open to interpretation, endowing the series with a surreal, off-kilter energy. Without her, everything seems less interesting and fantastic, more mundane than it was before.
Now, of course, if you know anything about how television storytelling works, then you realize that it’s only a matter of time before Leanne returns to the fold. Nell Tiger Free, after all, is a series regular and the show is called Servantfor a reason. Fortunately, despite the faster pace, it looks like Season 2 will take its time to get Leanne back to the house and avoid the unfortunate tendency of serialized dramas to quickly restore the status quo, undermining their narrative potential in the process. What it will need to do in the meantime, however, is figure out a new way to incorporate surreal elements into the plot.
Of course, just because Leanne is gone, it doesn’t mean that her presence isn’t felt. Sean and Dorothy can’t just get back to normal after everything that’s happened, a point underscored by the protracted scene of Sean cutting into his blistered, pus-filled hand. It’s a visually standout moment that returns to the more measured and atmospheric storytelling of Season 1, while also pushing the show into body horror territory. One cannot help but wish there were more haunting images like this.
Servant works best when it operates not on conventional narrative logic but on dream logic, linking together irrational narrative events via emotional realism. We do get this towards the end, when Sean comes close to confronting Dorothy with the truth about Jericho but backs down when he realizes Dorothy would kill herself if she knew what she had done. This is a beautifully acted scene that goes a long way towards explaining why Sean would keep Dorothy in the dark, as implausible as that may seem.
It also illustrates how the series is expanding its tonal range. The first season was, at times, certainly funny, but one can sense that the writers are now explicitly leaning into the show’s comedic sensibilities. When Dorothy repeatedly talks about Sean not having ‘reassuring eyes’ or specifies that she would kill herself using her “Hermès belt,” you can tell that the series wants you to laugh. It reminds me of how Hannibal similarly chose to lighten things up somewhat with black comedy in its sophomore season, making the dark elements easier to digest.
All in all, “Doll” makes for a good season premiere, though one that doesn’t quite reach the heights that this series is capable of. In hindsight, it would’ve worked better as the first part of a two-part premiere, but that’s a story for the next review.
Grade: B
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Notes and Annotations:
The opening teaser directly draws attention to the fact that Leanne is gone: we hear but never actually see her on-screen as the camera pans into her room, focusing on the strange mural on the wall. Is this a recording? Is Dorothy imagining Leanne reading aloud the words on her cover letter? This is never really clarified or elaborated on, though we again see the image of the tortured woman in the mural before the shot transitions to Dorothy in the episode’s mid-section. Is there any significance to this, other than the fact that Dorothy similarly seems tortured? What is that mural doing there anyway?
The fact that Sean still has blisters as well as a lack of taste and touch (apparently due to being afflicted with leprosy, as the biblical passage indicates) evinces that Leanne’s leaving did not stop Sean’s maladies.Thus, we can expect more bodily issues to spring up as the season continues. This also suggests Leanne could have possibly left Jericho (and/or his soul) with the Turners but chose not to.
I love the closing shots of Sean carefully washing Doll Jericho. They show how far he has come as a character from the early episodes, where he was so cynical that he couldn’t be bothered to handle the doll with care. The irony is that he and Dorothy have now effectively switched places in terms of who’s treating the Doll as a real child.
My take is that on some level Sean recognizes, following his epiphany in “Balloon,” that the doll is the real Jericho, or at least a part of him. Note also how he repeatedly confused the dead Jericho and the new, living Jericho when talking to Julian and/or Natalie.
Interestingly, Dorothy never engages with the Jericho doll at all, which is a bit of a missed opportunity, I think. What does she think the doll is doing here anyway?
The video of May Markham getting dumped with a milkshake does suggest Detective Dorothy’s investigation will allow the series to maintain a certain level of dread.
Dorothy at one point locates the camera that Sean installed in Leanne’s room. I don’t recall if the camera ever actually came into play in the story back in Season 1. It’s possible the writers ultimately chose to more or less drop this thread after not being able to develop it. But perhaps it could also become a way for Leanne to appear in S2 on prerecorded videos.
I find it a little hard to buy that it never occurs to Dorothy to check the camera footage from the baptism, given everything else she’s able to find. Had she shown the cops that May and George appeared at the baptism, everything would’ve unravelled, and we probably wouldn’t have a plot.
I’ve mentioned in my long interpretation article on the series that it’s possible the members of the “lesser saints” cult were indeed actual saints, perhaps even before the Wilmington Siege of 2012. Here, we hear an interviewee mention that one of them had “revived” his daughter, giving credence to this idea.
Love the new intro sequence. I wonder if it’s hinting at any plot developments.
I admire how “Doll” avoids exposition. We clearly see Julian take the little baby shoe from Jericho’s room, so it’s evident that he’s one who wrote the ransom note, even though it’s not explicitly shown on screen.
What are those things around Julian’s eyes anyway?