'Outcast' Recap: 'A Wrath Unseen'

​Written by John Edward Betancourt

​THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM...YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...

When we are frightened by a horror movie or a horror story that revolves around possession or things that go bump in the night, it's not uncommon for us to quietly remind ourselves, while we sit in the dark waiting for the shadows to move, that demons simply aren't real over and over again until our nerves finally give way to the gentle wonder of sleep.

But despite the fact that we sometimes find ourselves scared of stories like this and we reassure ourselves that the world is safe and free from monsters such as that, we are in many ways wrong. There are demons out there, just not in the traditional storytelling sense of beings that look to possess humans. Instead the demons we know are already inside of us, and they come from trauma and memories from our past and well...they drive us to do things out of anger and fear and we do our best to fight them, sometimes on a daily basis. These are the kind of monsters that were explored in depth on Outcast this week and well...the fact that 'A Wrath Unseen' made that the focus story wise made the show uncomfortable on a whole new level and in its own special way explained how evil is finding its way through the world.

It's ironic because this was in fact a filler episode, one that didn't advance the plot in the slightest, but it did certainly answer quite a few questions that were posed last week and well, let's start with the good before getting into the bad because it was extremely pleasing to know that the Chief isn't in on any conspiracy after all, he just wants proof that weird stuff is going down. It turns out that one of his closer friends is potentially the man behind the scenes when it comes to that camper and now that the Chief has seen the camper burn down at his friend's hands...he's ready to dig in and find out what the hell happened there. But sadly, as Mark pointed out...it's going to take a month to get the results of the forensics test and let's be honest, there's a good chance something extremely wild is going to happen before those results make it home. 

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But all that good news aside, this was an episode about battling one's internal demons and that's exactly what came about when we learned what happened between Donnie and Megan all those years ago. Donnie was in foster care and lived with Kyle and Megan back in the day and well...the long and short of it is that he abused Megan and she's had to live with those horrible memories. But despite her best efforts to keep the truth from her husband, he eventually discovers who Donnie really is when he pulls the truth out of Kyle and well...that's when the show's darkest moment arrived when Mark decides to take the law into his own hands and teach Donnie a lesson with his fists in a brutal moment brought to us through the eyes of the dash cam mounted in Mark's cruiser. 

Yet despite these fascinating and uncomfortable moments from the characters as they battled their past and the horrors that come with it, the show did a wonderful job of combining the fight against inner demons...with the ones that populate the story since we also learned that Reverend Anderson didn't drive out the evil in one particular woman and man...were the interactions with her straight up bone chilling. But while we didn't see another exorcism this week, the fact that the evil remained within this woman haunted the good Reverend who was clearly rattled in his failure to remove the evil from her. It makes one wonder just how much more of this the Reverend can take since this defeat continues to eat at him and it led to some greater implications for the show. This revelation clearly demonstrated that the darkness has spread to many places...and the monsters that walk among us, do a wonderful job of hiding.

It does pose the question as to how many people are currently possessed and well, now this world no longer feels safe in the slightest. It seems that the darkness is hovering around every single corner and one has to wonder if the battle within, regarding the past and the personal demons people carry is what allows the darkness to find its victims. It makes one wonder if Mark or Megan are going to be okay in the long run and we'll find out next week if Kyle's wife is still filled with the darkness as well. Either way, this show continues to impress and this was an absolutely engaging episode that ramped up the tension minute by minute and as an added bonus, we now know the mystery man is named Sydney and that he's going to be around for a while and considering the way this episode went...it's safe to say that none of what he has planned while he's in Rome is going to be good. Until next time.

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