After taking a diversion from the main story thread, Episode 7 of The Changeling, Season 1 is another episode that plays with the idea of this fairytale to a self-indulgent extreme. Focusing on Appollo’s mother, Lillian, who had always felt like an important key in the puzzle, the latest swing in the tale features author Victor LaValle quite heavily, and in a way, blurs the fact, the fiction, the subjective, and the objective into a moody piece of history and present. Since almost all of it takes place in a dilapidated hotel room, it’s hard to really say everything that goes down to be related to Emma or Apollo’s story, but I will try to dissect whatever I can fathom.
As always, the article will be full of spoilers, so please proceed with precaution.
The Changeling (Season 1), Episode 7 “Stormy Weather” Recap:
There’s a simple way to dissect episode 7 of The Changeling. We can’t really point out what takes place in the episode to be completely true. Since the mood piece swings between past and present – sometimes simultaneously, we can assume that it is timed right after Lilian’s son Appolo is nowhere to be found.
We see a worried mother (this time Lilian and not Emma) walking past some shanty streets of LA to get to The Elk Hotel. The constant voiceovers from author Victor LaValle, which suggests that America is all about erasing history to write a new one, take us to this shady hotel. As soon as Lilian enters the premises, we see her face change, and there are bruises on her face. This is, of course, representing the relentless abuse that she might have faced back when she first tried to find refuge in the hotel. Till this point, we have only seen hints of the trauma that Lilian has been carrying inside her – we do not know what exactly happened between her and Brian (Apollo’s father) that led him to abandon his son.
Anyway, The Elk Hotel feels like a proper getaway for the lost, but mostly, it feels like a hub for prostitutes. The hotel is run by a guy named Lester, who carries the burden of keeping the sacred history of the hotel in his ledger and occasionally trying to keep things right in his workplace.
Now, there’s an interesting spin to the episode. Some of the actors who play these characters – for example, Lester is played by Albert Jones, who also plays Lilian’s boss at the firm, the sick man who we see covered by black scars (a possible case of the AIDS epidemic) played by the same actor who plays Brian, and we also see an abusive man beating a woman played by the same actor who plays William. The trick used here is to make the connection between these seemingly familiar and unfamiliar threads to tell Lilian’s story.
Now, the episode finds Lilian in room number 205 as she records her life’s story for her son Apollo. This is not a confession, but one of the characters finally succumbing to the author’s constant wish to ‘tell your story’ and the author telling the characters where it will lead them. Anyway, Lilian starts drinking and telling her tale, which firstly takes us back to her escape from Uganda and how she has constantly battled the urge and guilt of her existence here in America after leaving everyone else she knew behind.
The scars start appearing everywhere on Lilian’s body as she starts telling us about how she managed to make Apollo’s future secure by giving it her very best. She makes sure that Apollo is raised like a proper American (feeding him American food and so forth) so that he is rid of the survivor’s guilt that she carries with her. However, all of this also comes with a realization that her efforts were all in vain because, without even knowing, she somehow passed on all her trauma and grief to her child.
The monumental shift in the narrative puts the entire hotel room on a stage that keeps shifting to inhabit all memories that Lilian carries within her. We are taken back to the time when she first met Brian and how she could not believe her stars for seeing a man who loved her and her to-be-son so much. However, she started noticing the cracks when she had to rely on Brian to live a life. She was always in the shadows – mostly because she was a woman, but also because she immigrated to America, making her identity not as important as his.
Next, we see someone delivering a red suitcase (the same one we saw in one of the earlier episodes at the bottom of the sea) to her door, and she takes a beautiful golden dress out of it. We learn that when she came to America, she was full of dreams. She thought that since she was a good singer, she could work in one of those bars and make a living out of it. But that never happened – although we briefly see her performing on stage for the dying man and a metaphorical audience that she could have sung to if she did not put all her ambitions down for settling onto an idyllic family life.
The sick person we saw earlier narrates his life story of loving a married man and how he always wanted to reach out to his mother about getting sick but didn’t. This part of the story mostly deals with the show’s overreaching of parental anxiety and how children who are not brought up in the right way often stray far away from them.
As mentioned above, Lilian sings ‘Story Weather’ for the dying man as it is one of his last wishes. Since it was one of the things Lilian always wanted to do, setting up the narrative this way allows closure to both Lilian’s wish and the dying man (who in some way represents Brian) having a final send-off.
The Changeling (Season 1), Episode 7 “Stormy Weather” Ending Explained:
Did Lillian kill Brian?
Talking about final send-offs, the point of the story was to show Brian’s abusive nature towards Lilian. How his casual appreciation towards her turned sour once she started going back to work. He doubted her and made sure her postpartum depression took both of them along a descent into the worst kind of life possible. We briefly hear Lilian also saying that a new mother should not be sent out to work after having a baby (pointing out one of the reasons for Emma’s situation). Lilian also shows us the cycle of abuse that Brian instilled in her.
Now, we lead to the episode’s most important moment. We go back to the day that has been shown to us again and again. The day when Lilian comes back home and realizes that Brian had gotten in when her son was all alone at home as she was at work. We see Brian trying to drown their son in a bathtub and a furious Lilian taking a baseball bat and hitting his head with it. Did Lilian Kill Brian? Even though it’s never made clear, I’m sure she did. Any mother in her place would do the same.
The ending of Episode 7 of The Changeling, Season 1 shows us that a younger Lilian is saved by an older version of her. My best guess is that after killing Brian, Lilian would have spent a night at the Elk Hotel contemplating killing herself. However, when she would have looked within, understanding the real reason behind ‘being where she was supposed to be,’ she would have understood that none of this was her fault and it was just her crisis of faith that led her to believe that she was some kind of culprit.
The final moments of the episode show us the current state of the hotel and the haunting memories it holds within – including giving Lilian a life in some way. We do see a monster prowling below the ocean. Seeing the modern fairytale nature of the show, we can assume that Brian’s remains would have been in the red suitcase that we saw below the ocean. Since we can never rid ourselves of the guilt we feel towards certain life-altering things, he must have manifested into a monster who is still haunting Lilian and her family years later.
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