The Mist Episode Season Finale Review: The Tenth Meal

This The Mist Review contains spoilers.

The Mist Episode 10

The Mist, episode 10, “The Tenth Meal,” should probably be watched on an empty stomach. It’s not that the gore effects will put you off your food, but people can be so unappetizing. Stores have run out at the mall, and the people stranded there are feeding the surplus to the mist.

The cop sacrifices his son to depths of the hungry fog. His breakdown would almost be heartbreaking if he wasn’t the idiot listening to the crazy old lady. The mall cop is ready to feed anyone into the fog. He’s been spoiling for a fight from the very beginning. We all know he’s going to go off. He starts off by announcing to everyone that the food is all gone, completely usurping mall manager Gus Redman’s (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) authority. A little while later he remembers he’s the one with the gun and enforces an insubordinate mob cop insurrection.

The people in the mall, who’ve been terrorized inside and out, will follow anyone. All they need is a little gossip. Oh, so the chief of police is the evil teenager’s dad? Come on. Isn’t there enough going on with the end of the world without this small town bullshit tagged on in the little group stranded in a mall with an empty food court? Do we need a full accounting of everyone Eve ever sleep with? Although, she and her daughter do like to play into people’s insecurities with ambiguity. First we thought Kevin’s brother could have been the dad. It’s like Eve specifically picks the people who could hurt Kevin most. Maybe the mist is all in his head, fogged up from too much gaslighting.

Evidence that the mist is part of a military test is piling up against the Arrowhead project. It is certainly a mystery wrapped in a puzzle covered in smog. Jonah (Okezie Morro) has enough rank to get himself freed from house arrest. The soldier has known Jonah for eight years, but the amnesiac former medical experiment only remembers the past five, and in those five days he fell in love. You would think it would follow that orders be damned. But no, duty calls, and Jonah tells Mia (Danica Curcic) he’ll find her when he gets to the bottom of things. He sets her off to find the rest of the group. But how does Mia know that Jonah left with another soldier? Neither of them mentioned it. They weren’t wearing uniforms. Arrowhead must truly be infectious.

Kevin (Morgan Spector) confronts Adrian Garff (Russell Posner) in the paint aisle. We don’t get a multicolored exit though, it’s all red. The doting father bashes the kid with a real malevolence. We can’t tell whether it’s paternal protection or the leftover animal urges he’s discovered to cope with the new foggy orders.

Tonight’s episode contains one very cool effect. A rope of fog becomes a minor tornado sweeping Alex (Gus Birney) up as she is running to the car after she, Kevin, and Eve (Alyssa Sutherland) are ejected from the mall. Alex once again proves she’s stronger than Jay (Luke Cosgrove), the jock who saves her. She is in the fog a lot longer than the football hero, but is able to breathe the noxious fumes without collapsing inside herself.

Kevin dooms the mall to an orgy of horrors. Snakes go crawling over security guards, dead ex-husbands push stillborn children onto suckling old mother naturers. Connor Heisel watches sadly as the whole thing comes apart. Darren Pettie, who plays Connor, lets everything play out in his eyes. We see the spell Nathaly Raven (Frances Conroy) cast upon him break. We see how stupid he now feels for falling for it. He is prepared to go out in a whimper rather than a scream and it’s very effective. He has been fluctuating between being a hard man and the father of a broken little boy. It turns out that he is the most rounded and empathetic character on the show.

The episode ends on a note of hope, following Kevin’s destruction. The Copeland family is reunited. The whole family. Eve has her husband back, and the father of her daughter. Alex is now taking a dark edition of My Two Dads on the road, though with probably one or two less laughs. Bringing Kevin and Connor Heisel (Darren Pettie) together in one car will definitely be the source of some major comedy and drama. Now they can fight and maneuver each other for the only woman in the car, who has a history with both of them. This is a different kind of horror than the book.

Much of the tension of the book comes from the idea that the main character, forced to flee the town with his young son, is separated from his wife. Kevin’s frantic search ends in a reunion, the book ends with him coming to grips that he and his son are alone a new world.

“The Tenth Meal” was written by Christian Torpe, and directed by Guy Ferland.