The Exorcist Season Finale Review: Chapter 10: Three Rooms

This The Exorcist review contains spoilers.

The Exorcist Episode 10

So  here we are at the final chapter of our Rance family adventure. The Pope is on his way and the world will never be the same. More importantly, though, there is yet another exorcism going on.

We have been on quite the journey since the pilot. We started off with a mother who thought her depressed daughter was being possessed by a demon, then it turned out to actually be her other daughter. So we had a young girl being possessed, an exorcist who had a falling out with the church, a wunderkind priest saving a church, and that single storyof possession quickly turned into a whole mess of people being possessed everywhere and a bunch of powerful people out to kill the Pope.

“Chapter 10: Three Rooms” was pretty lackluster for me. Yes, there was quite a bit of action but mostly it was watching more of the same. A possessed Angela has her family hostage in their home. The demon’s plan, we learn, is to torture the family until the real Angela, who is hiding out in her childhood bedroom, allows him to fully possess her.

Demonic Angela lets the family know that she does not intend to kill them because it would get in the way of her plans to have the world watch as the Pope bleeds out in front of them. However, she does threaten to pull Henry’s arms off his body, forces Casey to hit Katherine’s knee with a hammer, and then tries to poke out Casey’s eye. So apparently killing them would cause suspicion but mangling and dismembering their bodies is totally fine.

Of course the storyline that is pushed forward, that has been put at the forefront so far in the run, is the Rance family and Angela’s longstanding history with Captain Howdy. With that said, it’s really the least interesting part of the show. As I have been saying this whole time, the real meat of the series is in the Friars of Ascension and their plot to assassinate the Pope against the backdrop of the sociopolitical atmosphere of Chicago.

The tension of the finale should have been the race for Father Marcus to foil the plot against the Pope. The episode tried to do that, but ultimately fell flat. Father Marcus did end up saving the day by coming in clutch with that cross, which was pretty valiant and a cool scene, but it didn’t feel as epic as it should have.  The whole season teased that the Pope is coming and some shit is going down. It all culminated in a few moments that really kind of faded into the canvas of the episode without holding as much weight as it should have.

The episode did do a nice job of taking those inner struggles of our characters and trapping them, forcing each person to come to terms with what drives them. For Angela, her family gave her the strength she needed to fight. Father Tomas finally realized that being flawed is okay but at the end of the day he knows that he is good and strong. Father Marcus has always had his battles with the Church but it’s his pure belief in God that allows him to carry on.

In my very first review I said that if the show can hunker down and focus on the psyche of its characters instead of making it a simple possession story, then it would be okay. The series wavered from that a lot, it got caught up in lots of drama and plot points. The guts and the gore.  

If the show should get another season, it seems like it will focus on Fathers Tomas and Marcus being exorcists. The Rance family is out of the way, for now at least. The Friars of Ascension, on the other hand, are still going strong even though their Pope plan didn’t go very well. But with Maria Walter suddenly at the helm, hopefully we see them play more into the fabric of the story and really have that be the focal point moving forward.