Movies News Talk
In Them: Covenant episode 5, "Covenant I.", a flashback from the first episode 1 is finally expanded upon, revealing why the Emorys are in California. Told mostly through flashbacks, Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) is at her home in North Carolina with her family, and her new baby boy, Chester. This is enough to give viewers a start, considering Chester has not been in the show up to this point. With Henry (Ashley Thomas) and the girls at a movie, Lucky and Chester are alone when an odd, white woman (Dale Dickey) walks up, behaving off-kilter.
Her request to take Chester home with her is denied, and so she shows back up, now with two large white men in tow. The scene rapidly descends into dread-inducing chaos as one of the men rapes Lucky, and the woman coos over Chester. However, she soon gets another idea, "cat in a bag", as she chants over and over. The unnamed woman wraps Chester in a white bag and swings him violently over her head repeating "cat in a bag", passing the baby around to the other man as Lucky is held down, screaming and weeping. Mercifully, the scene comes to an end, but not before the woman throws the unmoving white bag on the floor as blood begins to leak out of it. It's an immensely disturbing scene and after four episodes of more traditional horror with ghosts, this sequence is an important reminder that the Emory family has faced tragedy and monsters even before their encounters with the supernatural, a fact of life for many black people in the '50s, and in the present.
In a special panel of "TheWrap’s Screening Series", Ayorinde, Thomas, and series creator Little Marvin discussed the scene, via The Wrap. Marvin said about making the scene, "[The scene] came full bore from a nightmare... Over the course of the next 48 hours, it kept haunting me. It was making me feel some kind of way inside, thoroughly and emotionally and physically. As an artist, I feel like it’s our responsibility, our duty to explore the things that terrify us."
For Marvin, it was a scene he felt he had to film, even if part of him didn't want to. On filming the scene, Ayorinde said, "My biggest objective was to make sure that it was true that anyone who had actually gone through that would be like, yep, I believe her. And maybe someone would actually believe them. To be honest, I already knew that people would feel something, but that is where I feel like I’ve done my job, if you watch it and you feel something — no matter what you feel." Ayorinde's screams go a long way to making the terror and realness of the scene palpable. Some may consider Them: Covenant gratuitous, but the creators and actors didn't add scenes like "Cat in a Bag" lightly.
The scene, however, also highlights one of the criticisms of Them. This is not the only time the show gets gratuitous in the service of showcasing race-related terror. It's scenes like this one that straddles the line between appropriately presenting grisly real-world horrors and sensationalizing violence and trauma for shock value. Viewers may recognize Dale Dickey from a similarly off-kilter and shocking role, Spooge's "Skank" Lady in two episodes of Breaking Bad, who pushes an ATM onto her husband's head.
This scene, while shocking and hard to watch, is crucial to understanding the complex history of racism and violence that the Emory family has faced. By showing the reality of this violence, Them: Covenant forces viewers to confront the uncomfortable truth of American history and how it continues to affect people today. However, the show's creators acknowledged that this scene is not for everyone and that some viewers may find it too graphic.