Spoilers

“Screaming Meemies”

I am not sure I was ready for that.

This episode, entitled “Screaming Meemies,” which was a slang term meaning a “heightened sense of panic or anxiety,” showed us the events of the night when Hugh took the kids and left the Hill House in the middle of the night. It was all from the perspective of Olivia, whose entire life had seemingly become a dream that she could not awake from.

I had not expected for the house to have driven her as mad as it did that she would try to awaken the twins (and Luke’s not-so-imaginary friend, Abigail) by having a middle of the night, surprise tea party, with tea laced with rat poison.

Poor little Abigail saved the day, in a sense, by sipping on her poisoned tea before the twins could, and she promptly died.

Much of this had been influenced by the ghost known as Poppy Hill, who showed up at the end of episode 7 to grab adult Luke when he tried to burn the house down. This Poppy was a nasty ghost who was planting the seeds of evil in the mind of the mentally ill Olivia, leading to this act of horror.

With this bit, in the penultimate episode no less, the last thing we need to discover from the past flashbacks, would be what happened when Hugh went back to the Hill House after he dropped his kids off at the motel. I am sure that will be included in the 70+ minute finale in episode 10.

We got to see the truth behind several of the odd things we had seen previously from Olivia, like the screwdriver she held at Hugh’s neck or breaking the mirror on the vanity that Steven had fixed up for her. Everything fit in nicely as we see the descent of Olivia into this house induced madness. We also see her “suicide”, aided by the push of Poppy Hill.

I expect that next week’s big finale will deliver big time, as this show has been truly firing on all cylinders the last four-five episodes.