By Dee Holloway 
This serial column revisits The Exorcist television series. Conceived by Jeremy Slater for FOX and starring Ben Daniels, Alfonso Herrera, Geena Davis, Alan Ruck, and John Cho, the show ran 2016-17 and was generally well-received by critics and audiences. DIS/MEMBER returns to the show in the context of new Exorcist franchise films, seeking insight on what made the show work and why it’s lesser-known than its film counterparts. All screencaps sourced from Kiss Them Goodbye.
WARNING: Episode seven of The Exorcist season two contains maximum Sweater Boy John Cho. We’re talking soft knits, loose collars, tousled hair. Proceed with caution.
Especially because Andy’s trauma in “Help Me” stands in direct proportion to his cuddliness.
A flashback episode is typically a well-beloved entry into any season of television: “Out of Gas” is a Firefly fan fave, as are “FUBU” from Atlanta, Brooklyn 99’s “Hitchcock & Scully,” Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s “Zuko Alone,” and “Paradigms of Human Memory” from Community. Yet like “Paradigms,” a so-called flashback episode that did viewers one better by filming entirely new clips for said flashbacks, “Help Me” turns the flashback concept on its head slightly. Andy’s memories, at this juncture, don’t bring him strength. The joy he derives from reliving happier days with Nicole and the kids is corrupted by the Nikki-thing, the devil in the projection booth. And at some point, the line between Andy’s memory and what the Nikki-thing wants him to believe becomes hopelessly murky. Andy can’t trust any of the visions plunging him into the past, and so neither can we.
“Help Me” takes place almost solely within the universe of Andy’s mind. When he, the camera, and the story return to his agonized present, it’s experienced by Andy and the audience as an intrusion. The real world is harsh, filled with sobbing children and chanting priests and pain and far too much knowledge–of what Andy has done in killing Harper’s mother, and what Nicole might have done in killing herself. The longer we stay in the soft-lit realms of reminiscence, the easier it is to imagine we could always stay there… and that the violence of the past can be fixed in the present. In Andy’s mind, there’s a Mom mug filled with fresh coffee from a French press; in the real world, there’s a mouthful of bile.
In addition to the obvious temptations of Andy’s demon, “Help Me” skillfully fleshes out the family relationships prior to Nicole’s death. In doing so, the audience is provided a terrifying map, one that makes connections between Andy, Nicole, the children, and the ages-old entity preying on local families. If Verity was the first foster child, can the Kims’ marital troubles be attributed to her? The Nikki-thing wants Andy to think so. If Nicole and Andy occasionally failed to connect with the kids, should we conclude that they were never meant to be parents? The Nikki-thing says yes. If Andy’s energy was bound up in making space for new fosters in his home, does that mean those children took Andy from Nicole?
They’re the reason I died, says the Nikki-thing.
In many ways, “Help Me” is composed of a parent’s worst nightmares. Hours awake not knowing where a wayward teen has gone; fights with a spouse over the correct way to parent a fragile psyche; never feeling that there’s enough time in the world for all the people one loves; children flinging accusations a parent has to believe they don’t truly mean; falling prey to Cool Dad and Mean Mom roles. It’s this last that arrives as a particular slap in the face. Andy wants to believe he’s been a good father, but also a loving husband. He’s a trained psychologist, and surely above the cruel gender essentialism that so often slots fathers into indulgers and mothers into enforcers.
Worse yet, there seems to be no end to Andy’s memories, no limit to the emotional pain the Nikki-thing can inflict. She restarts the rosy, loving beginning of their shared nightmare over and over again, forcing Andy to go looking for his wife, only to find her walking into the lake. The scene twists slightly each time, deepening the wound in Andy’s psyche by showing his children turning against him, and finally, a row of graves marking their deaths. And worst of all: the audience, by our nature, are bystanders. We can only derive meaning from what we’re shown. We don’t know how much of this vision occurred. We have no way of knowing, for instance, if Andy truly did find Nicole in the water too late, or if this is the most agonizing figment of his imagination, pondered over since her death.
Taken out in dark moments to peek at like pressing a bruise. Coveted and cosseted. Shaped, perhaps, into a tangible form.
In one of the few moments in Andy’s real world, where he’s being exorcised by Tomas and Marcus, Tomas asks him to find the demon’s origin. It seems clear that this entity is unlike others the priests have dealt with. It’s a hermit, for one thing, while the demons in Chicago and elsewhere around the world seemed happy to possess any body they could find. They were chatterboxes and gossips and part of a massive, coordinated demonic effort to assimilate all of humanity. Andy’s demon, the Nikki-thing, feels older. We’ve learned some of its lineage of pain inflicted on parents and children, but not where it comes from, how it truly began. Even Andy’s experience of possession looks unlike others we’ve seen. His face remains handsome; his eyes go black, but it’s his vision of the priests who receive the classic demonic-torment makeover, Marcus’s eyes flaming pits and Tomas’s head spinning around.
The demon will try to hide its origin from you, Father Tomas says, but you must find it.
Grace, the demon’s most obvious form, is a red herring. Grace’s childish appearance is the spoonful of sugar to get Andy to swallow his poison. The entity was there long before Grace, before Andy and Nicole and the kids, waiting for a family in which to hook its claws. Our only solid clue is the chunk of rock from Nicole’s atelier. It acts as a lodestone, a focus, perhaps a channel through which demonic energy glows… and we witness Andy finding it with Nicole’s drowned body. The rock-weighted dress is a dark classic of the female suicide genre, but this stone doesn’t seem heavy enough to weight Nicole down–which makes it an apt metaphor. When Andy brings it back to the house, we’re left to wonder: what would have happened if it had stayed submerged in the lake?
Did Andy unintentionally carry the demon home again?
It’s these tendrils, expanding the second season’s concerns rather than answering questions already posed, that make “Help Me” such a fraught and effective episode. By the hour’s end, Andy is closer to his own destruction than he began. As experienced Exorcist observers, we know that he has a long road ahead of him. As media-literate viewers, we know with which intentions that road is paved. Andy and Nicole’s good intentions brought children into their home, opening their marriage to stress and pain–but no relationship is free of these things. Verity’s good intentions in the aftermath of Nicole’s death, we see, place the mother’s household role on her shoulders–which in turn might open her to the predatory, family-destroying demon. Shelby’s good intentions stemming from his faith are at odds with the abuse Verity has faced at the hands of believers. And Rose’s good intentions caused her to look aside from incidents in Andy’s home, an attempt to deflect harm that might yield even greater harm.
The Nikki-thing deals in absolutes. She can save Andy–from the risk she’s inflicting on him. She and Andy can have a happy life together–but only if the children are gone from it. Demons see the world in black and white, but “Help Me” shows instead a family portrait–flawed, painful, complicated, necessitating faith–in shades of gray.
