NOS4A2 Review: Cripple Creek (Season 2 Episode 7)
NOS4A2 Season 2 Episode 7, “Cripple Creek,” gives us a better overall look of Charlie Manx and not so much why he thinks the way he does, but rather how.
A character as overtly antagonistic and misogynistic as Charlie is one that needs to be done very carefully. The writing needs to find a way for him to be compelling without ever making the audience feel like it’s on his side or sympathizes too strongly with him.
This is not a balance that NOS4A2 has struck all that successfully in the past. The show clearly knows that he’s the villain of the piece but it lacks the counter viewpoint that someone like Vic often hasn’t been able to provide. There’s not really a figure on the show to call out Charlie for woman-hating ways but “Cripple Creek” seems to remedy that problem, at least somewhat.
“Cripple Creek” does what the earlier season two episode, “Good Father,” fails to do, which is present us with a flashback that gives us a better understanding of who Charlie is and the general sense of how his mind works. Where this flashback triumphs that the other doesn’t is in how it’s telling us something that we both didn’t already know but also that we wanted to.
The earlier episode simply wanted to present us with this part of Charlie’s life that we never asked for, whereas “Cripple Creek” is using this as a way of telling us important things about Charlie. While “Good Father” just became a story of how a bad man blames women and kills them for it, this episode is much more introspective than that.
The most crucial part of this episode is the inclusion of Millie and her mother, Cassie, to really put a spotlight on Charlie and his major deficiencies. The episode needs Cassie there to say what is really happening in these other scenes with Manx to be this big counterpoint.
It allows us to not be confused over the fact that Charlie is a manipulative narcissist who is unwilling and unable to take responsibility for anything that happens to him and women are the perfect fall man. The episode doesn’t rest on its laurels, however, and takes it one step further.
It makes the flashback this story of immense pain and trauma and offers this slight explanation of why Charlie takes kids like he does. He was the subject of child rape and took the same method that his abuser used to hurt children in the same way that he was hurt when he was a kid, just like he helped to hurt other kids too.
It takes this trauma that warped Charlie and makes it the very mythos for his actions without ever making him overtly sympathetic.
One final thing, how the episode uses Bing throughout it is a good utilization but there is a very firm line in the sand here: Bing Partridge cannot be redeemed.
Maybe the show is going that direction and maybe it’s not; if it does, the show is even more of a colossal failure than it had lead us to think. It can’t have had Bing do all the things he has done and turn around to have him be redeemed. That’s simply not okay and we will burn this show to the ground if that happens.
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.