The Changeling masterfully takes relatable feelings about parenthood and exacerbates them, showcasing how horror is a great genre to explore human emotions. Cal consistently emphasizes that Estrogen Island is a safe haven for women where they can be heard and believed, which is rare in the real world. This sentiment reflects how women, particularly moms, can feel gaslit when expressing certain emotions. For mothers, the kaleidoscope of emotions and hormones experienced while creating and raising little humans can feel like living on the edge of madness, yet the world too often expects women to move on, business as usual.
Sure, we’ve made strides in normalizing discussions about post-partum depression and mental health, but does the world really believe women? If so, why do so many jobs offer extremely limited maternity leave, essentially separating mothers from their babies before they even develop from newborn to infant? Though there has been some progress regarding federal laws requiring employers to offer time off (the leave doesn’t have to be paid, and most women don’t qualify), the United States still ranks as one of the worst countries for paid and unpaid maternity leave. In the series, Emma had to return to work after a mere eight weeks because if she didn’t, she risked losing her employer-based insurance coverage.
Leaving Brian with Apollo was excruciating; still, in a raw emotional state, Emma apprehensively turned her baby over despite her gut telling her not to. As author Katie Gutierrez wrote in an enlightening personal essay for Time, “That’s where I was at four weeks postpartum: sleepless, bleeding, raw, so desperately in love and hormonally out of whack that all I could think about was my baby dying.” For Emma, these feelings are intensified because her baby was switched out with a changeling, and now she’s being told killing the monster isn’t enough to get Brian back. Once she finally makes it to the island, Cal informs her that Brian is long gone, and no matter how hard she searches, she won’t be reunited with her child.
The episode provides a lot more of Emma’s perspective, and Clark Backo’s performance as a woman straddling the line of desperation and undeniable willpower adds more dimension to Emma’s character than in the book. But the suspenseful horror aspect is dulled due to slow pacing and because the series consistently shoots itself in the foot by getting ahead of itself. Part of what made last week’s episode difficult to sit through is that the show presented us with information we already knew instead of prioritizing moving the plot. This week’s episode does the same thing — it’s been established that Emma frequented the island before Apollo’s arrival, setting up a library while going back and forth to mainland NYC, and we already know that now she’s on her own odyssey to find baby Brian. Had this episode aired before we watched Apollo uncover information about Emma, the suspense would have been exponentially more captivating. Almost like an actual children’s fairytale, any scene where it appears Emma could have lost her life is pacified by our knowledge that she’s still out there.
The show takes us back to the moments directly following Emma killing the changeling; she flees the crime scene, moving almost supernaturally as she escapes to the ferry. Here, her sister Kim meets her, and it turns out that Kim is somehow in contact with the women on the island and prepares them for Emma’s arrival. She encourages Emma to go as this is the only opportunity she has “to figure out if any of it is real” or, conversely, if Emma is just like their mother. Emma pleads for Kim to join her, but Kim is adamant that Emma must do this alone. Kim throws her sister overboard, and after a gruesome trip, Emma arrives on the island, where she is sedated and told that she won’t get Brian back.
Emma can’t accept that the second chance Cal promised her was not a second chance at mothering Brian but a second chance at life. When she finally wakes up from her forced rest, she sets out to find Brian on her own despite knowing that none of the other women ever reunited with their babies, including Cal. But Emma is determined, like any mother desperate to protect her child. Lines from To the Waters and the Wild haunt her, and she carves them into the wood of the cage where Cal kept her, the same cage Apollo will be trapped in shortly: “They bathe it at dusk, they hide it with guile. At home in the forest, forever lost in the wild.”
Along with these words that infer that Brian is somewhere in the forest, Emma has one clue that may further reveal his location. After killing the changeling, Emma finds a twig left in the crib that she keeps with her all the way to Cal’s island. The purpose of her initial trips to the mainland is not only to get books for the whole community but to find a book that will help her identify the kind of tree the twig came from. Ignoring Cal’s instructions to stay on the island, she takes one of the rowboats herself and returns to the city. When she returns with the books, she speaks to another woman on the island, asking if anything was left in the crib after she killed her changeling. The woman says that she found a leaf in the crib, and though she didn’t keep it, she sketches an image for Emma. With the book, the twig, and the picture of a leaf in her arsenal, Emma finally finds the correct tree, which is a Norway maple (of course, as we know that William/Kinder Gaten is Norwegian).
LaValle’s narration informs us that the Norway maple is incredibly invasive, with aggressive roots that kill the parent tree, making it a fitting metaphor for what Emma is going through. With this new knowledge, Emma goes to the city again, but with assistance from Cal, who realizes there’s nothing she can do to stop her, so she might as well help. She allows Emma to use a tunnel that connects to an underground society of people who live beneath the city. It’s a bustling community that rejects the rules of the world above, choosing to live in harmony below the surface. The fantasy aspect is apparent here — it’s a truly New York fairytale where mole people are real, and trolls exist behind phone screens.
A man named Wheels, who is another character who speaks in riddles and rhymes, shows Emma around the secret community before escorting her back to the train station above ground. She makes her way to the library where she once worked to get access to the internet and print out a map of all the Norway maples in the city. Her old coworker Yurina arrives earlier than expected, so Emma is forced to hide out in a bathroom stall. Then she hears Apollo’s voice accompanied by Yurina’s screams, revealing that Emma was in the library at the exact moment Apollo showed up with a rifle. For a moment, Apollo looks over his shoulder, coming close to seeing Emma in the flesh, but she moves fast enough to escape without being visible to her husband.
Unfortunately, the police see her sprinting away from the library and chase her all the way to the subway, but she escapes underground with Wheels ready to take her to safety. He takes her back to his home, which is an abandoned train, and Emma shares her story. Wheels doesn’t have any more information for her but advises that she should search for a neighborhood in Queens that was once considered Little Norway, a neighborhood that has its own forest. Emma returns to the island to drop off more books and to say goodbye to the woman who drew the picture of the leaf before embarking on her odyssey to find Brian. She tells her new friend that if she does find Brian, she’ll send a message to the women, but either way, they will never see her again.
Emma takes the rowboat out once more, prepared to embark on her odyssey to find Brian. Before heading off, she gives Cal a copy of To the Waters and the Wild, explaining how much Apollo loved the story. Emma instructs Cal to give the book to Brian if she doesn’t make it, and somehow, one day, Brian sets out looking for her. She asks Cal to tell Brian that Apollo was greatly looking forward to reading the book to his son, the same way that Apollo’s father shared it with him. Backo’s acting is less frenzied and erratic here, showing how Emma has some peace now that the puzzle pieces are starting to fall together. Plus, even if she never finds Brian, it’s apparent that Emma feels tranquility because she knows that she at least tried. And there’s a sense of finality to where she’s found herself; like she told Cal, it will be the end of her life if she doesn’t find Brian. There’s no changing Emma’s mind that Brian is in the forest, and we end the episode with her rowing her way toward the city.
Apollo’s Breadcrumbs
• I imagine that the woman from the viral airplane video would fit right in on Estrogen Island because she, too, declared: “that motherfucker is not real.” My mind hilariously repeated this phrase as I empathized with Emma and the other women on the island’s insanity-inducing predicament.
• I say it almost every week, but the show is truly gorgeous. The hazy, dream-like cinematography beautifully complements the feeling of watching a twisted fairy-tale nightmare. My favorite scene of the episode was Emma journeying through the tunnels back to NYC as the camera swirls, turning us as upside down as Emma feels.
• Another visually great scene is when Emma swims to catch up with the boat on her first trip to the city. She can’t keep up with the tide for a moment and starts to drown. When she finally makes it back onto the boat, the camera switches to an aerial shot of Emma lying on her back, the water a black abyss surrounding her. The shot makes it look like she’s in a coffin, trapped in the terrifying position she’s found herself in.
