I have been broken by The Mist. Much like poor, innocent Jay Heisel, the mist has worked its way inside my head and turned my eyes a foggy white—something the mist does now, apparently—leaving nothing but a smoking dead-eyed husk to write a review of this season finale. “The Tenth Meal” is an hour of television so jarringly nonsensical—so filled with logical leaps and narrative holes—that I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t enjoyable in its way, the same way we are lying when we say we don’t slow down to gawk at car wrecks. By the end, three-quarters of the characters are dead and the survivors have had their relationships altered completely, rendering much of what we experienced in this first season a waste of time, and any viewer who made the choice to invest in it is a worse off human being for having done so.
So, where to begin? I suppose nothing is more indicative of what we’re dealing with here more than the reveal that Jay Heisel and Alex Copeland—mostly seen this season crushing, canoodling, and even kissing—are in fact half-siblings. And, by extension, Connor Heisel—former stock asshole character turned fanatic cult member then just as quickly turned former cult member—is Alex’s real father.
The most insane part of this twist, which is saying a lot considering it is insane on a fundamental level of filmmaking and storytelling, is that it falls directly in line with the most perfect version of The Mist. It’s different from “the gay outcast is secretly a psychotic rapist and murder” twist; that was bad television, sure, but it was also actively harmful, utilizing an all-too-real toxic narrative as plot progression. This, however, is a bad twist that rounds back on itself to become a flawless example of pure, nonsensical abandon. It’s Maury Povich inside a haunted house. It’s a daytime telenovela told around a campfire. If The Mist wants a future—and this episode ended on a cliffhanger, so you know their fingers are crossed—the writers need to stop pretending they were ever telling a structured story or that any of these people are emotionally relatable, and lean in hard to utter preposterousness.
Nothing helped set that tone in this episode more than the lower-level survivors in the mall, who I refuse to believe were ever given names other than Rage-Filled Security Guard, or Increasingly Concerned Housewife. Here, as tensions escalated in the lobby, those background characters acted as a Greek chorus of gibberish opinions. It’s a storytelling tactic this show has never used before—similar to how one episode utilized flashbacks and then never again—but I highly recommend going back and seeing if you can pick out the exclamations in the background, clearly added in during post, each more overblown than the last. The highlight, for me, came after Eve revealed Alex’s true father, but Kevin still fights to protect his family. “You disgust me! You’re freaks!” cries one voice. “The whole family is sick,” whispers another. Apparently, in the town of Bridgeville, there is nothing more appalling than a man raising a child from his wife’s previous relationship.