NOS4A2 Review: The House of Sleep (Season 1 Episode 4)
NOS4A2 Season 1 Episode 4, “The House of Sleep,” is ramping up the tension and stakes, but is it actually going anywhere?
Four episodes in, NOS4A2 still has a major problem: We don’t have a good sense of what the story is or should be. Is it one girl’s tale of escaping her nowhere town? Is it about a creepy vampire that takes and corrupts kids, turning them into something monstrous as he drains their life energy? Perhaps it’s a tale of good and evil where select people have special powers.
This show is all of that and simultaneously none of it, because this is a story that feels as if it has no idea what it truly wants to be. It is just along for the ride. It’s a series that is so woefully mundane most of the time — unless it switches over to a scene involving Charlie Manx.
Love it or hate it, Zachary Quinto is doing something in this series that, at the very least, borders on being distinctive in a show that has largely lacked any distinction up to this point. He’s a bit of a grandiose trickster, playing on this Father Christmas persona. And when it’s not giving you tonal whiplash, it kind of works.
NOS4A2 is, by and large, a show that lacks anything that might be defined as something purely its own, which is what makes it even more distressing when it does try something.
“The House of Sleep” focuses a great deal on Bing Partridge, centering on him via a series of flashbacks to Bing’s childhood and teenage years. This would be all well and good if it wasn’t so disturbing on the face of it. The episode elaborates on his character but almost makes him less interesting as a result.
It’s a good impulse to flesh out Bing’s character and zero in on some of the things that make him what he is. But in this case, it’s either telling us things we already know or making Bing even more monstrous than he needs to be. All viewers really needed is to know that Bing was abused as a child and is mentally deficient in a way that will probably never be explicitly stated.
The problem is that the show takes it another step further by showing us that not only did Bing eventually kill his abusive father with a nailgun to the head, but he also killed his mother. And it’s heavily implied that he raped her beforehand.
Not only is this a disgusting turn for Bing as a character, but it also colors what we see of him earlier in the episode. We see him at one point gassing Haley’s mother and forcing her to behave like his own mother, which means that not only did he kill her too, but almost certainly raped her in the same way he did his own mother.
More and more, there have been these little instances of cruelty that seem grossly unnecessary. On the previous episode, NOS4A2 Season 1 Episode 3, “The Gas Mask Man,” the kidnapping of Haley is bookended by Charlie Manx killing her cat. It continues to do things like this because we’re ostensibly in a horror story without realizing that these things aren’t scary or edgy.
What did you think of this episode of NOS4A2? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.