NOS4A2 Review: Welcome to Christmasland (Season 2 Episode 9)
Vic and Maggie go to blow up Charlie’s inscape and rescue Wayne on NOS4A2 Season 2 Episode 9, “Welcome to Christmasland.”
The biggest thing to keep in mind with this episode is that it is essentially the first of a two-part finale that we won’t get the second half of for another week. Overall, that leaves it feeling a bit incomplete as an hour of television but the bits that we do end up getting here are satisfying enough to make up for that.
“Welcome to Christmasland” is, in many ways, the inevitable climax to Charlie and Vic’s conflict. Christmasland itself is a giant Chekov’s Gun where some of the action of this series was always bound to occur at. Charlie’s inscape, the very manifestation of his messed up mind, is something we’ve only ever seen glimpses of and this is the horrific reveal of that.
Christmasland has always been this very specific and demented idea but it’s also something that’s been shown broadly enough that just about anything could reside there as long as it stays true to a kind of motif of an amusement park draped in yuletide.
What we end up getting isn’t anything terribly new and ends up lacking some of the more distinctive flourishes that a place like this needs to truly be a successful rendering, but instead puts anything really interesting on the demon children that reside there. They are what makes this work for the most part and where the episode really finds its horror.
Granted, “Welcome to Christmasland” doesn’t end up telling us an awful lot more about their transformation or what happens to them if Charlie dies, but they are very effective gremlins. This is basically a horror movie where your characters are being chased by something sinister and that’s really enough for this episode.
It doesn’t need to be more than that and — for the most part — it doesn’t try to be. It just drops Vic and Maggie into a crowd of these kids and lets them run away from these little maniacs who can’t be killed anymore.
One of the more interesting things that it does offer us, however, is what they’re turned into now. We’ve seen bits of it in the past but it’s really on display here now that they’re basically id if it only cares about having fun and has been made the most evil version of itself.
Right or wrong is an irrelevant concept to them. They’re simply playing games now and it’s as if they have no grasp on death or life at this point. It’s a compelling idea — or it would be if the show felt like exploring that at all, which is severely unlikely.
This connects to Millie in fascinating ways, who was the original one of these children, and now seems to be more or less normal. Despite the fact that she has to have an anchor to exist outside of Christmasland and still has razor teeth, she appears to be more like a regular kid than the ones that Charlie transformed.
This implies that there’s still conceivably a way for the kids to return more to their true selves but what’s infinitely more likely is that we’ll just have a bunch of dead children by the end of this season.
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.