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‘Midnight Mass’ Episode 3 Recap: The Blood Is the Life

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Midnight Mass

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There’s something extraordinary about the third episode of Midnight Mass—and no, I don’t mean the ending. It’s the performance of Hamish Linklater as “Father Paul Hill,” the…villain of the piece? Or the hero? Or just some poor deluded sap who’s about as wrong as wrong can be about the horror he’s unearthed?

Anyway, long before we see what happened to his “predecessor” Monsignor John Pruitt in a buried desert ruin half a world away, we see a lot of sides of Father Paul. We see a priest asking God for forgiveness for the lies he’s about to tell his congregation. We see a man struggling to deal with a secret illness. We see a preacher delivering the kind of homily that sends you away from Mass thinking “Wow, he was really onto something,” at least until he collapses from exhaustion.

MIDNIGHT MASS 103 PRIEST PASS OUT

We see the leader of an AA meeting, calling bullshit on Riley Flynn’s recalcitrance around the group’s new third member Joe Collie, disarming the atheistic cynic with his warm but unyielding voice.

In short, we see, ironically as it turns out, just about the most realistic portrayal of a priest I’ve ever seen on TV. Linklater absolutely nails it: the soft vocal cadence, the paradoxically ostentatious humility, the ability to weave God in and out of conversation with members of the congregation, the dark secret locked away.

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Well, not anymore, I guess.

The big revelation at the heart of this episode (“Book III: Proverbs”), as you may have guessed from the very first scene in which Father Paul confesses to lying about Msgr. John Pruitt, is that Father Paul is Msgr. John Pruitt. Suffering from dementia, he somehow staggered all the way from Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall into the deep desert, where a sandstorm unearthed an ancient ruin of some sort, like a cave in the dunes. Inside, he is assaulted by a winged, humanoid, vampiric creature—think the things from The Descent, but way less scary tbh—and then offered blood from its veins to drink. The next morning, Pruitt staggers to the entrance of the cave, and discovers he is young again.

According to the story that Paul/Pruitt tells his God, he believes this vampire to be an angel—and the angel followed him from place to place, night after night, until he figured out a way to smuggle it back to the community he came from, where its “miracles” are desperately needed. And indeed, by the end of this episode several more have taken place. Riley’s father is cured of his bad back. Dr. Sarah Gunning’s mother is cured of her dementia. And Father Paul dies in full view of the mayor, his wife, the handyman, and the deeply intolerable Bev Keane, only to rise again.

MIDNIGHT MASS 103 DEAD FATHER

All this plot advancement, it must be said, comes at the cost of a whole lot of plot holes. I know, I know, it feels small and joyless to nitpick genre work for unbelievability, but for the record: No one in this isolated, go-nowhere community remembers what the Monsignor looked like as a young man? No one in the Monsignor’s pilgrimage group thought to give a call to his home parish to let them know he’s been missing for untold weeks? (They’re cut off from the mainland, yes, but they still have landlines—the existence of the internet and smartphones seems to have been handwaved away as inconvenient—but even if they didn’t, you’d figure someone would make the effort of traveling to the island to let them know their priest vanished somewhere in Occupied Palestine or whatever.) No one in Fortress America’s dystopian border-enforcement apparatus stopped the mysterious priest with no ID and a box containing a living man-bat at Customs? Yadda yadda, you get the idea.

Be all that as it may, I want to call attention to another powerful performance, that of Robert Longstreet as the reviled drunk Joe Collie. He takes what easily could have been a one-note bit of local color and, on the strength of the script by Mike and James Flanagan, makes the character sing—bursting into uncontrollable sobs as his miraculously cured shooting victim Leeza (a game Annarah Cymone) confronts and then forgives him, explaining this moment to Riley and Father Paul at the AA meeting, strolling down the street smoking and recounting his estrangement from his beloved sister to Riley after the meeting ends. You want things to work out for this guy; the fact that he’s not an obviously too-young actor working out from under a bunch of age makeup and gray hair dye makes me suspect they most definitely will not.

He’s like the polar opposite of Samantha Sloyan as Bev Keane, a completely insufferable character without an ounce of nuance or relatability. There’s no give to her, no sense of any kind of internal emotional or psychological machinations that have led her to become a poison-spraying (literally and figuratively) scold and bigot (she opens a schism between Sheriff Hassan and his son Ali) and religious evangelist. She’s not a character, lively and rich; she’s a styrofoam packing peanut, existing simply to help transport the plot from Point A to Point B. That she’s in on Father Paul’s ruse, having recognized his youthful self in a newspaper clipping on the wall of the rectory, ought to make her more interesting, but instead she only gets less so as time goes by.

But we’ve still got Linklater’s Father Paul, and a vampire flying around, and a congregation pummeled by life and desperate to believe in miracles, ripe for a fundamentalist religious awakening. As fuel for drama goes, that ought to be fuel enough to make it through.

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Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Midnight Mass Episode 3 on Netflix