The Cutprice Guignol

I love Channel Zero.

Which you already know. But what you might not know is exactly why Butcher’s Block is my favourite season of the anthology horror show from Nick Antosca. The third season is an outstanding piece of horror no matter which way you slice it (pun fully intended), but there’s one plot in particular storyline that has stuck with me ever since I’ve seen it, and I would like to chat a little about that now. Spoilers for the season ahead.

The reason that Butcher’s Block has always stood out to me as my favourite season is because of the way it handles mental illness, especially mental illness within families. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show approach the topic in the way Channel Zero does; the other seasons deal with mental illness to varying degrees, but it’s the instigating factor for Butcher’s Block, one of the driving forces behind the main characters, and what it pushes her to is fascinating to me.

Butcher’s Block starts out following Alice Woods (Olivia Luccardi), a social worker who is juggling a demanding job with taking care of her older sister, Zoe (Holland Roden). Zoe has recently returned home after a serious mental health episode, a psychotic break that mirrored the illness that has rendered their mother borderline catatonic and under full-time care in a psychiatric ward – and, for Alice, she represents the epitome of what she can’t let happen to her.

Zoe, in the first couple of episodes, is a spectre of what Alice’s future seems destined for: succumbing to a life-dominating mental illness, relying on the people around them for support. Both Zoe and their mother began showing symptoms at an age Alice is rapidly approaching. The horror in this season, it seems, is what is coming for Alice, the inevitable downward spiral that lurks in her future and will force her to sacrifice her self-sufficiency and the career she has worked so hard for. In her line of work, Alice encounters a bizarre and possibly dangerous family who seem to have supernatural powers and the ability to manipulate their fates and those of the people around them, connected to a series of murders in the area.

But then, the story takes a twist: Alice strikes a bargain with the family, to avoid what seems her inevitable fate. It’s a genuinely shocking twist, but it makes perfect sense in the line of the plot thus far. Though Alice doesn’t know for sure that she’s going to suffer from the same illness as her sister and mother have, the spectre of it alone is enough for her to strike a deal with the proverbial devil and join forces with the villainous family at the centre of this story. She’s literally haunted by a physical representation of this – real or imagined – ticking time bomb within her brain, a chilling lobotomy scene displaying this thing that lives within her, or at least that she believes does.

And, so, the story shifts leads – to Zoe. Even though she’s still coming to terms with the impact her illness will have on the rest of her life, she is able to accept it’s existence, and it’s this that allows her to take on the family and her sister’s allegiance with them in a more clear-headed way. For Zoe, the worst has already happened, the illness has already taken hold – she knows it’s depths, how far down it goes. Unlike Alice, she’s dealing with a known quantity, and, despite the family’s attempts to tempt her into the same fate as her sister, she’s able to resist it.

I truly do love this storyline, because I think it captures a certain, often taboo aspect of hereditary illness – the fear of your fate, set in stone, because of what you’ve seen your family go through. Whether or not you’re actually destined to suffer the same way members of your family had, the fear of it, the spectre of it, haunts you – to the point where, sometimes, it’s what you do to avoid it that draws you closer to it. Alice ends the series in the same psychiatric ward as her mother, stuck in the same near-catatonic state, while Zoe visits them both, and it’s a deeply cruel but totally fitting end to her story. She was so convinced she could not or would not survive the illness that she functionally took herself out before it could.

Butcher’s Block is a tremendous season of television, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I can only implore you to do it – there’s so much more going on in these six episodes that this plot (and I could probably write an article on every character arc, they’re just so juicy), but this is always the story that hit home with me the most.

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(header image via TV Fanatic)