The Cutprice Guignol

After last week’s brilliant outing, can Hell Motel stick the landing in its final episodes? Let’s play a game of Cat and Mouse to figure it out.

This week’s Hell Motel episode, Cat and Mouse, whittles us down to four surviving cast members after the mortal maceration Blake faced at the end of last week’s episode – Shirley, Floyd, Paige, and Andy – as paranoia mounts and the focus turns to the killers of yesteryear, Floyd and Shirley, as the try to bring their ritual to a close at last.

Shirley and Floyd have been our sort of de-facto protagonists this season – the only characters who know pretty much everything the audience does, and frequently our way in to various storylines and character arcs throughout Hell Motel as a whole. I’ve made no secret of how much I’ve loved them, especially the performances by Yanna McIntosh and Gray Powell; the chemistry is always on point, their dynamic consistently great to watch, with Shirley as obsessed with Baphomet as Floyd is obsessed with her.

This episode mostly revolves around Shirley and Floyd’s discovery and exposure by Paige (Paula Brancati), who eventually kills both of them; Brancati has always been a favourite recurring Slasher actor for me, so to see her in the midst of their storyline like this, bouncing off these two fabulously fun characters, was a huge treat – she really is a great performer, and if you don’t believe me, watch her breakdown after killing Shirley. With an ensemble this big, Paige hasn’t really been the focus for much of our screentime so far, but I’m confident Brancati can bring her home in next week’s finale, killer or otherwise. The little flashes of darkness in this episode, though justified, along with her storifying herself as an avenger of a victim of the original massacre, is laying some interesting groundwork for what’s to come.

McIntosh and Powell chew the scenery in their last few scenes in the show. It’s never not funny to me to see them playing innocent old-school middle-aged ball-and-chain husband and wife when we know what they’re really capable of, and the show’s all but winking down the lens at us as they coax Brancati into believing that she’s safer with them than with Andy. I particularly (and predictably) love the scenes between Brancati and McIntosh, especially their climactic showdown in the bathroom (in a sly bit of production design, the picture on the wall during this scene is Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, a neat detail given the truths exposed between those very walls). It’s the perfect mix of camp, unsettling, and brutal – I mean, the exfoliator in the shape of an upside-down cross on her forehead? It’s like my last eyebrow threading all over again.

But Powell gets his moment to shine too – from artful arrangements of severed limbs to his desperate attempts to get his end away before Baphomet appears from the ether once and for all, he’s the perfect foil for Shirley, and an unchained dog in the scenes after her death. His commitment to both Shirley and Baphomet extends to his final moments, as he tries to serve as the last sacrifice to their deity, a fitting end for a character as delectably batshit as this one.

This plot takes a couple of contrivances to get where it needs to go – the pills Andy is drugged with giving him not much more than a half-hour nap, Paige discovering images of Shirley and Floyd in an occult bookshop fifteen seconds after her phone comes back on line – but when the payoff is this juicy, I can’t find it in me to care.

And this episode might be the send-off for Floyd and Shirley – but it does start with a fun wrong-footing aiming us in the direction of Andy (Jim Watson) in a flashback where his PhD thesis is roundly trounced by a group of respected academics. It’s an interesting scene to put up top in an episode like this, especially one so close to the finale – Andy makes a case for horror, true crime, and other entertainment based around extreme violence being a cause for the downtown in society’s empathy at large.

And, look, as a woman who could very easily be accused of overthinking horror, I can relate to a man who does the same – but, despite the fact that his thesis is pretty squarely brushed off by the board, it does seem like a nod towards next week’s finale, which takes place at the premiere of the new movie surrounding the events at Cold River Motel. Andy went from criticizing exploitative media to potentially finding himself at the centre of a new production fitting that very mould, and that’s not the kind of thread the show is going to leave un-pulled.

As we head towards the finale last week (named the Grand Guignol, which I can only assume is a reference to your most humble blogging servant), I’m interested to see how Hell Motel pulls together the various storylines that are still in the air. With the actual events at the motel apparently over and done with, we’ve got an intriguing and potentially tricky ending on the horizon, but I’m keen to see if it comes together. What did you think of this episode (and of this season as a whole so far)? Let me know in the comments below!

If you’d like to deep-dive Slasher with me again to compare against Hell Motel, check out my series here! If you’d like to support my blog and get access to exclusive content, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or if you’re interested in my fiction work, check out my short horror story collection!

(header image via Spotern)