I have a pet theory about series in which episodes get shorter as the season progresses. Find the shortest among them, and that’s the run time all the episodes should clock in at. The third installment of Delicate gets it done in a crisp 37 minutes and is creepier and less maudlin for it.
Horror depends on a balance of mystery and anticipation, the sense that strange events coalesce into meaning even if the audience can’t know how. But until this episode, Delicate has felt so scattershot that I’d formed no expectations for showrunners to upend. But finally, by the end of “When the Bough Breaks,” we’ve established some basic truths. Anna definitely has a real antagonist — “them” — and at least one ally in whoever it is hacking her phone to warn that evil’s afoot. The hacker is functioning as something of a fact-checker here, a bit like Hutch in Rosemary’s Baby, by confirming what Anna has suspected all along: This freaky, freaky shit is not just in her head.
The episode opens in the meadow from Twilight. Anna twirls her bouncing baby boy in the air as pollen and dandelion fluff are taken by the wind. Never has a woman looked so beatific; never has a child loved his mother more. Up the mountain. Out of the cloud bank. When the gleaming sun breaks through, I half-expected mother and baby to sparkle like Cullens.
But the happy scene disintegrates when Anna tosses the little man into the air. What goes up doesn’t come down. The infant vanishes, though we can still hear his cries. Anna’s sheer white dress turns the color of blood. The falling leaves are actually buzzing gnats. The dream is a nightmare; the only escape is to scream yourself awake.
For Anna, of course, being awake is the worst nightmare. She’s grieving a miscarriage. She suspects the cops won’t believe her story about Ivy and the brutal ultrasound, just like they didn’t believe that a stalker broke into her Brooklyn home. Dex, it seems, is losing faith too. When she tells him she wants to try again for a baby ASAP, he waves her off, indefinitely postponing her motherhood. But Anna insists that this is exactly what “they” want, not sure who “they” could be. Is it Ivy and, perhaps, Ms. Preecher, who appears to her in this episode like a witch perched in a tree in the woods? Does “they” include Dr. Hill with his extraterrestrial-chic medical offices? Does it include Sonia, who turns up in the Hamptons for a clandestine dinner date with Dex? And does “they” include Dex, who vacillates between his own grief and his frustration with Anna?
After the couple’s bust-up over how soon is too soon to conceive again, Anna goes on a walk through the woods, somehow not realizing she’s been gone for hours. Dex, distraught at her disappearance, blames it on the sedatives the hospital gave her, but these gaps in Anna’s time and memory are nothing new. She enlists Dex and Kamal to come back into the forest with her to the spot where she saw Preecher so she can prove once and for all that something’s up. By the time they get there, though, Preecher’s vanished. When Anna gets home, she can no longer find her IG handle or the one belonging to Annihilate Anna, either. It’s become a familiar (and tedious) cycle on Delicate. Give Anna — and viewers — a glimpse of truth, then stay so close to Anna’s hormone-pumped, trauma-addled perspective that we immediately question it.
But some things are verifiable in the real world, like the fact that Hamish — the obnoxious director of The Auteur — sent a congratulatory gift basket to a Hamptons house whose address is supposed to be under wraps. Anna blames Dex, who blames Siobhan, who Anna defends, but it’s immaterial. The point is that someone, even if they’re only pretending to be Hamish, knows where Anna and Dex are hiding out.
Could it be Siobhan’s fault? The patron saint of infertility and Oscar runs shows up on Long Island to coach her client-cum-bestie through the darkness. She finds Anna knee-deep in Harry & David’s chocolates, so she insists Anna needs “real food” and fresh air, which isn’t bad advice. It must be said, however, that (a) Kim K’s cucumber-slicing performance is only slightly more believable than Kendall’s, and that (b) the skintight, ruched dress her character wears on their coastal walk had me thinking about LC’s iconic Justin Bobby put-down — “Homeboy wore combat boots to the beach.” Still, to me, Siobhan is Delicate’s best-written character, the only one who uses speech to convey something of a personality and not just plot-driven word quota.
In Siobhan’s company, Anna does relax a little. She worries aloud that Dex is having an affair and shares how the little pregnancy “pooch” she’s developed makes it harder for her to move on. Siobhan self-servingly suggests this is the perfect moment to shift from personal mode and focus on something less complicated: the professional. The budding starlet has booked the cover of Vogue magazine, thanks to Siobhan’s attention. When God savagely closes a door, he slips your PR’s phone number to Anna Wintour.
Siobhan is right about two things, though. “Nobody’s ready for anything,” she tells her friend — not fame, not fortune, not motherhood, not heartbreak. “We’re all just learning on the job.” The other is that Kamal (Maaz Ali) is distractingly hot, and if Dex really is sleeping with his dead wife’s doppelganger, then perhaps the sudden appearance of Kamal in Anna’s life is a second instance of God throwing open an escape hatch.
The friends share as close to a normal day as we’ve seen Anna have, but as soon as Siobhan leaves, mysterious occurrences resume. Anna finds another Summer Day voodoo doll stuck with pins in the abdomen on the beach, just like the one that appeared in the greenroom at Andy Cohen. And as she walks along the shoreline with Kamal ten feet behind her, she’s being watched by two women — Preecher and Ivy? Nicolette, the conspicuously breast-milk-pumping house manager with a sinister air? — dressed in black masks and black-feather horns, each holding a goat on a leash. Who are these women? They must be real because Anna hasn’t seen them; we can’t be in her imagination. And if they’re really touched with the power of Satan, as the horns imply, would they need to restrain their goats with rope?
Alas, we’ll never know. For as soon as a disturbing occurrence exists beyond the realm of Anna’s fragile mind, the show plunges us back down the rabbit hole. Alone in Thalia’s creepy house, Anna grabs a bottle of wine from Hamish’s basket and heads down to the basement to snoop around a bit — perhaps the most relatable thing she’s done so far. She finds a box of her fake friend’s old baby stuff; so transfixed is Anna by all things baby that she doesn’t seem perturbed when an old mobile spontaneously starts playing a tinny version of “Rockabye Baby” — the same song that eerily drew Anna to Preecher in the woods, the song new mom Nicolette is singing when Anna first meets her.
The lullaby — or maybe it’s the bottle of wine or maybe it’s whatever else could be in the wine? — seduces Anna into sleep on the cold basement floor. When she wakes up, she hears whispering and follows it into a candlelit crawl space, as you do. The whispering turns to laughter, and Anna follows that too, even when it leads her past a hallway of baby body parts preserved in glass jars (not unlike in American Horror Story: Murder House).
At the end of the hallway, she finds an antique medical examination table — the opposite of what you might find in Dr. Hill’s futuristic Manhattan office. There’s gibberish Satan-worshiping Latin scrawled on the dingy walls. Suddenly, the bird-horn women are there, strapping Anna into place and injecting her with an antique syringe that will surely leave her with tetanus and whatever evil potion is inside.
Of course, when Anna wakes up, she’s back on the basement floor surrounded by Thalia’s photo albums and silver rattles, immediately calling into question the veracity of the previous scene and thereby driving me insane. Except, get this freaky, freaky shit: Anna insists she can feel the supposedly miscarried baby move inside her. She tells Dex, who is compassionate but obviously skeptical; he’s been put through the wringer of this miscarriage too. Undeterred, Anna calls Dr. Hill, who tells her it’s a hallucination at best — some sort of postpartum psychosis without the actual, you know, partum. But Anna is past science now. When her gums bleed, another common/gothic pregnancy occurrence, she self-confirms she’s got a bun in the oven. Anna would like to go to town and buy a fetal heart monitor and some blue shit ASAP; while she’s there, a handsy store clerk confirms she can feel the kicking in Anna’s abdomen too.
The horned women have continued to appear in Anna’s mind, but in the final few minutes of the episode, Preecher appears to warn Anna to watch out for Sonia, who has just slipped into a restaurant with Dex. At least this time, Kamal sees Preecher too.
Buoyed by the life growing inside her, Anna uses her iCal to reach out to the person who has demonstrated the most concern for her: the person who hacked her phone accounts, who is maybe the same person who left that lipstick warning in her apartment, who is maybe Preecher herself. “I want to warn you,” the hacker says. “They did something to your baby.”
But all Anna hears is “baby.” There’s a baby inside her, alive and kicking. Despite what happened at the hospital and despite the distance between her and Dex, the nightmare of “When the Bough Breaks” ends in a twisted dream.
