Into the Dark Review: Tentacles (Season 2 Episode 11)

There’s a general rule of thumb with psychosexual horrors, which is that you’ll be either be into it or you just won’t. It usually hits at something so visceral and almost cathartic that it’s virtually impossible to not fall on one of those lines.

That’s how we know that Into the Dark Season 2 Episode 11, “Tentacles,” fails to land because the only real reaction we have after the fact comes down to more or less of a shrug. 

It’s not necessarily poorly made in any way and it does flow fairly nicely together, along with being decently paced, but it ultimately feels like it doesn’t have any teeth to it. What it features is unsettling and disturbing enough that it could certainly fit well into the genre but it seems tame, for whatever reason. 

That’s a bit unfair to “Tentacles,” though, because it does a lot more good than it does bad. First, and foremost, it does a good job at subverting the kind of story that you think you’re watching. It follows Tara (played by Dana Drori), a woman living in vacant houses and off of some kind of illicit gains. 

She meets Sam (played by Casey Deidrick, who some might recognize from In the Dark — he just really likes the dark) and they quickly fall into this passionate romance where they soon move in together. The thing this does really well is that it lulls us into thinking that it’s a certain type of story before it pulls the rug from us. 

We’ve been trained through this trope to believe that the fragile woman gets drawn into the man and only later discovers the ways in which he is untrustworthy or unstable as it goes along. “Tentacles” flips that on its head by slowly showing us that Sam is the one in danger here, not Tara. 

It’s showcasing a different type of toxic love, one where the sex is so good that things inevitably get clouded and you don’t notice the kind of person your partner is until it’s too late. It isn’t as successful at making that turn as it would like to be, mainly because it’s difficult to reconcile the person Tara is during the first two-thirds, as opposed to the last act. 

Another part of this is that the ultimate twist with the tentacles muddies a bit the romantic metaphor that it’s attempting to make. It’s showing a kind of abusive relationship that we haven’t seen too often before but that kind of relationship also doesn’t end with one of the people literally becoming the other by the end. 

The characterization for Tara isn’t all there, mainly because it has to save a lot of her backstory for the big reveal, but you find yourself almost feeling sorry for her and having a degree of sympathy. It strikes as believable when she says that she’d rather not do what she will and perhaps that’s a credit to the gaslighting that “Tentacles” is operating in. 

Maybe the poor taste in our mouth comes from the final moments of the episode when another tentacle being asks Sam, previously Tara, what is better than being in the water and he responds with: “fu**ing.” That’s the note it leaves us on and it’s this bizarre edgelord comment that can do nothing but make everything seem sour in retrospect. 

What did you think of Into the Dark: Tentacles? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Into the Dark: Tentacles is now streaming on Hulu.

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