Have Faith, which is Lea’s episode, tells the story of where Lea was and what she was doing when the plague rain came, while also showing the survivors finding a mysterious mansion full of thriving people. The title refers to faith because Lea is a devout Christian, despite the tragedies she’s faced. In fact, it’s almost like God has directly answered her prayers at times, though not in the ways she expected.
This episode examines each survivor’s ability to let go and believe in a fantasy world, based on a little reality, some storytelling, and a lot of trust, faith and hope. But this is still the harsh, post apocalyptic world. Nothing is too good to be true.
As the episode begins, night is falling, the rain is coming, and Simone can’t find the next bunker. The electronic map isn’t working and they’re out in the woods with no landmarks for her to use to orient herself. Tempers flare and everyone yells at everyone else. Patrick becomes aggressive toward Simone, then toward Rasmus.
Lea drags Patrick away from the group before things can escalate further. She tells him that she misses Jean too. He says that Jean was a pain. She agrees, but she still misses him. Patrick admits that he does too. They hug and cry together. Lea tells Patrick that Jean is still in their hearts.
Then they notice lights in the distance and follow them. It’s a large old mansion that looks as though the plague never happened. Patrick wants to avoid it, but Lea says going there would be better than dying when it starts raining. They get the rest of the group, who are equally divided.
When they reach the front door, still bickering, a man and two women meet the survivors on the steps and ask if they want to come in. They speak in the disturbingly calm tone of voice used by TV cults everywhere. They are dressed identically in flowing blue cotton tunics and loose pants, practically a stereotypical cult uniform. And they insist that Martin hands over his gun before they let the group inside.
Martin doesn’t trust this situation at all, but the rain is seconds away, so he gives in, for the moment, and they are led inside. They ask what this place is, and the man in charge tells them that, “All you need to know is, once you enter, you are part of us. Nothing outside can touch you. Whatever you used to be, all your problems and worries, are gone. There is no past here. There is only you, right now.”
Sounds like someone with something to hide.
Rasmus doubles over in pain. The cultists ask if he’s infected. Simone explains that he had an accident. They are taken to a room to sleep in, and locked inside until morning.
The next morning, one of the women unlocks the door to see if they are still alive and uninfected. When she sees that they are, she offers them breakfast and a tour. The new group has lush gardens filled with a bountiful harvest of fresh vegetables, despite the toxic rain.
She takes them into a bathhouse and instructs them to shower to get the dirt of the world off, then to change into the cult’s clothing. The cult will wash their clothes. The survivors are skeptical. The woman, Karen, explains that they get their water from a well that they dug, so the water is uncontaminated. She proves it by going under the shower herself.
The survivors watch her, stunned. Martin wants to leave, immediately. Lea believes they should trust the people in this place. The others agree. Martin leaves, and the rest take a group shower in their underwear. Some take their underwear off. They have a foam fight. Rasmus has to sit it out because his wound starts bleeding again.
Afterwards, Simone asks Rasmus if he got a good look at Beatrice without her bra. He says sure, but she’s with Martin. Didn’t Simone know? Simone doesn’t understand why he thinks she’d care. Then she notices that his wound is infected.
Martin pokes around the nooks and crannies of the house, trying to figure out the group’s story. He finds kids’ shoes, but hasn’t seen any kids. When Martin brings it up, the leader points to the kids who are playing outside. It looks like he just sent the display kids out to dispel Martin’s doubts.
Martin is upset that the rest of his group are eating breakfast. To be fair, it looks like the best meal they’ve had in years. On the other hand, half the cult is watching them eat, like it’s a major event. Fattening them up for the kill?
The cult leader talks around Martin’s questions, but doesn’t answer them. He wants Martin to change out of his own clothes and into uniform. Martin wants to know who they are, what they are, how they have all this food, why they wear hippie uniforms, and if they are a cult. The other survivors don’t care, as long as their bellies are full of fresh, tasty food.
Cult leader: I understand your doubts, your questions and your distrust towards others. I get it. I’ve felt it too. I’ve had that thought in the back of my mind that won’t go away. Who can I trust? Is there anyone out there that I can really trust? But we have done away with those doubts here. [He creepily puts his hand on Lea’s shoulder.]
Martin: So doubts just disappeared? How did you do that?
Cult leader: By melting into one. It all boils down to: What do I fear if I’m not here? We are one and we are now. That’s all that matters…We have no past, no name, and no gender. It’s the end of the world, but we’re right here, right now, and that’s all that matters.
Martin: You’re so full of it, man. That’s so stupid.
Lea: Calm down. Martin. They’re just trying to help us.
Lea and Karen talk outside. Lea apologizes for Martin’s skepticism. Karen says that some people are afraid of the love they share in the cult. (Yeah, they should be.) Leah says her friends aren’t used to it. (She doesn’t know how right she is.) Karen invites Lea to stay with them forever, but Lea plans to move on with the group very soon. Karen insists that Lea at least stay for their monthly celebration, where they cook a nice dinner and the whole cult eats together in silence and gratitude. Then she brings it home by saying that Lea reminds her of her daughter. Lea eats that sentiment right up.
Flashback to high schooler Lea arguing with her mother about going to a party. Lea’s all dressed up and made up and ready to go. Her mother asks if she’s going to drink and smoke and hang out with boys. Lea says she won’t drink or do drugs or have sex, even if those things are happening around her. Her mother still doesn’t want her to go. Lea asks her mother to support her when she acts like a normal teenager, but her mother just can’t. Lea goes to the party anyway.
Another man at the mansion examines Rasmus’ wound. He doesn’t want to know how Rasmus got it, or how it’s been treated in the past. All that matters is the present. They’re out of antibiotics, so he wants to sedate Rasmus while he cleanses the wound. He also says that it’s really important for Rasmus to rest for a week. He pulls out a giant syringe and an Apollon medication tube, just like the Apollon doctor tried to use to kill Rasmus. Simone decides that sedation is a bad idea.
She tells the other man that she has pain pills in her backpack and he says he’ll have it brought to her. She’s been trying to get Rasmus to cut back on the pills. While the other man isn’t looking, Simone pockets the sedative tube. Later, she give Rasmus one pill and tells him it’s the last one, then compares the tube the doctor had and the sedative tube. They’re identical, except for one symbol. While she’s engrossed with that, Rasmus steals another morphine pill.
Simone brings the tubes to the cult leaders, who are meditating together, and questions them about their connection to Apollon and the medications. They refuse to talk about them and try to take them away. The other man does say that the doctor’s tube could kill everyone. The leader takes the tubes from Simone, and tells her to let go of the past. She says that she just wants to know what’s in them. He says, “Believe me, you don’t want to.” He tells her to let go of the past.
Lea is outside talking and meditating with Karen, who’s also trying to convince her to let go of the past. Lea doesn’t want to. She says that she once did a terrible thing, and she doesn’t want to let it go. The woman continues to press her to let it go.
Lea remembers the party, where she was roofied, then filmed as her “friends” encouraged her to do all of the things she promised her mother she’d never do. She drinks and climbs all over boys on the dance floor, while the girls who drugged her laugh at her. Then she’s taken upstairs and gang raped, which is also filmed. Because she’s drugged and drunk, on the video it looks like she consented.
When she wakes up in the morning, still on the bed where she was raped and only half-dressed, the video is already up on social media. She cries and probably feels like her life is over. Lea calls her mother for a ride home, but her mother’s seen the video and doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that Lea was drugged. All she cares about is that everyone else has seen it, too, and she’s embarrassed. She refuses to pick up Lea, and tells her not to come home.
Martin is still exploring the mansion and reaches a different part of the basement, where some kind of butchering is happening. An imposing woman stops him outside of the kitchen area and tells him he can’t be there. He runs into Simone, who tells him about the Apollon guy who lives there. They swap their competing conspiracy theories. He takes her to the kitchen, but it’s been cleaned and emptied out. Martin wants to get out of the mansion, but Simone wants to stay and question them more about Apollon.
Beatrice visits Rasmus alone in his room under the pretense of looking for Martin. She stays and they decide to share secrets. Beatrice tells Rasmus that he doesn’t have to be a hero and pretend he’s not in pain. Rasmus asks if she and Martin are a couple. Beatrice says she’s not sure. When Rasmus is confused, Beatrice explains that Martin is more emotionally closed up than Rasmus. She prefers Rasmus’ openness and honesty.
Simone comes back to the room, and everybody sticks to a cover story about what they’ve been doing. Simone says she hasn’t seen Martin, while Rasmus and Beatrice say that she’s just looking for Martin. After Beatrice leaves, Rasmus and Simone look at each other and giggle, figuring out the truth.
Meanwhile, Martin decides to sample the kool aid eat a tomato to see if it’s weird or makes him feel weird. When Beatrice finds him, he tells her that he’s been in the basement. She says it’s an odd place for a first date. She’s no dummy, and knows what’s going on between the four of them. But her jealousy of Simone is blinding her to anything else.
Martin tries to explain to her that it’s not about Simone, it’s about his Spider-Sense tingling. And about the way he’s losing all of them to this creepy cult. Simone just continues to snipe at him about her perception that he and Simone are already secretly seeing each other. I don’t know if she hopes it’s true, believes it’s true, or is trying to push them together in order to clear the way for her and Rasmus, but Martin is clearly clueless. He really is focussed on saving the group, and Simone is also mission-oriented, so they tend to gravitate together for that reason alone. Their attraction is in addition to the way they complement each other as leaders and investigators.
Rasmus initiates a sex talk with Simone. He wonders if Martin and Beatrice aren’t a real couple. He thinks they could be sex buddies. He wants to know if she’s ever had sex (no) and if she wants to try it (a vague yes mixed in with embarrassed noises). But she mostly wants to figure out if they should stay and continue their investigation, or go. Rasmus comments that sex seems so natural for the others, and so natural to talk about. But Simone doesn’t want to talk about intimate details with her little brother. Rasmus suggests that she talk to Martin about it if she wants to try it.
Martin calls a group meeting and tells them all that they need to find his gun and leave. Patrick asks why he gets to decide that. Martin says that this cult is destroying their brains, or snatching their bodies. He’s not sure which yet, but it’s pretty ominous.
The others all have reasons for wanting to stay. Rasmus and Beatrice want to canoodle, and Rasmus needs to rest. Lea has a replacement mother and religion to explore. Simone wants to find out what the scientists know about her father. Patrick is thrilled to be on the side of the majority for once, and is enjoying the vacation. None of them think these sweet people could be a threat. They take a vote, and decide to stay. Martin is appalled. Simone asks why he can’t just give in and stay with them. Beatrice says that it’s because he can’t handle not being the one in charge. Her bitterness is getting the better of her.
Karen comes in to get Lea for their meditation session, but she won’t tell the others what they’ll be doing. I guess all information is on a need to know basis.
With Karen’s encouragement, Lea remembers back to the morning after her gang rape. She wrapped a blanket around herself and wandered downstairs. The other kids were still outside, drinking and grilling food. (Hopefully they’re not grilling each other.) Lea prays to God for help. Within moments the plague rain begins, and all of the kids in the yard die. Lea calls her mother back. This time her mother is sympathetic, and promises to come pick her up right away. Before Lea can stop her, the mother has gone out to the car and become infected.
Lea sobs to Karen that she killed her mother. Karen comforts her, and tells her that they all lost someone. Lea asks who she lost. Karen says a daughter, and a grandchild, who now live here- she puts her hand over her heart.
The next day, while everyone else is distracted with the traditional monthly celebration, Martin gets serious about his search. He starts by breaking into restricted areas.
The leader makes a speech before everyone eats:
“Welcome to this, our traditional monthly celebration. As usual, we will observe absolute silence, both to honor the meal and to open up to this boundless love that will flow through us from the meal, dissolving us as individuals. We are each other. We are in each other. We are nothing without each other. Now eat. I hope you like it.”
The group looks like they find these words inspiring, but they are actually meant fairly literally. The meal is a meat and vegetable stew.
Martin is in the back areas of the basement industrial kitchen. He sees blood on a floor drain. Inside a walk-in freezer, he finds a human torso hanging from a meat hook.
They are cannibals. The monthly meal is a ritual sacrifice.
Once they are done eating, the leader speaks again:
“I hope you all enjoyed the meal. Now it’s time to find the next person who will gratify us with their body, thus receiving eternal life. It’s the ultimate love and a fantastic experience that you’ve all been fortunate to share.”
The group finally figure out that something’s wrong, mainly that they’ve just had people stew and one of them could be the main ingredient for next month’s fantastic experience. Patrick vomits up his dinner. They start to get up to leave, but are forced to sit down. A basket of tokens is being passed around. The person who gets the flower inside theirs is the lucky devotee who will literally become one with the others very, very soon.
The two male leaders explain that everyone who eats the meal has to be part of the ritual to choose the next sacrifice. The sacrifice will be taken to the basement and killed immediately. Martin comes in during this explanation and punches the main leader in the jaw, but the medical guy uses Martin’s gun to subdue him.
One by one, the little bundles are opened. Lea has the flower. Guards begin to drag her to the basement, as she asks Karen what this is about. Karen comes over to Lea and the guards, and tells the guards that they gave the wrong person the flower. It was meant for her. Then she makes her parting speech to the group, about how lucky she feels to have known them and to have the opportunity to become one with them in this very special way. Lea is nearly as devastated as if she were losing her own mother. Karen tells her to keep living.
The leader tells them that now they can stay or go, as they choose, but there isn’t a better home than this. The survivors can’t get out of the mansion fast enough. They don’t even ask for their backpacks and the gun until they’re outside.
Simone asks the medical man one more time about the syringe. He tells her that he and her father destroyed the world. He starts to tell her that it will be better when… but Martin and Patrick cut him off because they’re ready to leave.
The leader tells the other man that he also has to leave the cult, because he’s stuck in the past. The medical man says that Simone has the right to know. They have to stand by what they’ve done. He follows the survivors, and when he catches up with them, tells Simone that the syringe has the virus in it. He thought it would save the world, but instead it killed everyone. He injects the virus into his neck. He quickly becomes symptomatic, then Martin shoots him in the head.
Patrick says that Martin always knows what the right choices are. What’s his plan now? Martin says they need to get out of the quarantine zone, but first they’ll stop at Apollon. Simone uses a discarded shirt to pick up the syringe and take it with her.
As we learn by the end of the episode, Martin has the right idea when he tells the others not to eat the food. If this isn’t a symbolic castle run by some sort of malevolent old style fairies, I don’t know what is. The European fairytales all very specifically say not to eat anything while you’re in fairyland, or you’ll never be able to leave. The fairies cultists keep telling the survivors that this is a place with no past or future, which the survivors are now part of. That’s a different way of saying that you’re a captive and time doesn’t exist here.
The cult’s beliefs are a subversion and fantasy version of religions that favor selflessness and sacrifice. The original members couldn’t live with what they’d done, so they chose willful dissociation from reality, and now they live in a pretend world where they make-believe that their past actions are irrelevant. Nothing of the world is allowed in because that will break the spell that allows them to pretend everything is fine and escape the guilt that would otherwise consume them. When the spell was broken, two of the three cultists that we got to know chose death over continuing on with their guilt closer to the surface.
The cultists give up their individual identities and pretend that the monthly sacrifice is a selfless action. But the ritual cannibalism shows that their guilt still eats away at them. They may be cannibals because they’d otherwise be lacking in protein resources, but one human a month wouldn’t be enough for that many people. They share the burden of the Apollon guilt by sharing the cannibalism guilt, and they have one ritual execution each month to satisfy their inner need for justice against those among them who helped bring on the plague. Except now they are all one, so the executions can be spread among the community and even newcomers, leaving alive the founders/leaders/those who are truly guilty.
They draw people in using a perversion of the way Christianity draws people in, by claiming that members can confess their sins, then leave them behind and be reborn in the cult. The monthly sacrifice maintains everyone’s guilt-free state, like a twisted Holy Communion, with the sacrificed person standing in for Jesus. Christianity uses wine and wafers as a spiritual stand in for Christ’s blood and body in their Holy Communion, which bonds the community together in their purpose. The cult uses the actual blood and body of the sacrifice, like the ancient pagan rituals Judaism and Christianity replaced.
Using human flesh bonds the community together in sin and fresh guilt, as well, as they all now have a secret that will cause the rest of society to shun them should they ever want to leave. It’s somewhat brilliant circular reasoning: A monthly kill relieves the tension of guilt for past mistakes, but also creates new guilt for complicity in the murder and cannibalism itself, which gives the members a reason to stay together.
No matter what they say about the reasoning and wisdom behind their system, they obviously know it’s wrong and have the underlying fear that no one else will understand what they’re doing. They went to great lengths to keep the cannibalism a secret until after the group had been tricked into becoming cannibals themselves. Once you’re part of the club, your criticism doesn’t have the same weight, and shame might make you stay even if you hadn’t intended to.
The cult must be in constant need of new members, since they lose at least one a month. And their guilt must be terrible, if they need to kill that often to assuage it. Or, they really do need the protein boost. You have to wonder, though, if the normal practice is to choose and promptly execute one of each group of newcomers, how many of the rest choose to stay? Maybe people normally arrive alone, and are eaten the next month.
Lea is still healing from her severe trauma and wants to believe in something, and in someone, so badly. Karen gave her the maternal warmth and acceptance she’s been craving, and she knowingly sacrificed herself for Lea like a mother would (and Simone and Rasmus’ mother did). But she also withheld some profoundly important information from Lea and thus misrepresented everything that her cult is actually about.
Still, it was a welcome surprise to see that Karen was a genuine person, even though the leaders at the mansion were putting up a huge front to keep from falling apart completely. Lea may have lost Karen, but she gets to keep the knowledge that someone thought she was worth dying for. That’s a powerful message for anyone (see: Christianity). After the way she was treated by everyone in her previous life, even her mother, who was at best ambivalent and only died for her accidentally, and then the loss of Jean, Lea needed that message desperately. It would have been better if Karen had lived and been a decent mother figure to Lea with no cult involved, but that option wasn’t possible in this universe.
Martin has always had two sides, the “dude” side and the more empathetic side. Like many guys, he just needed time and the right conditions to be able to grow up and express his emotional, mature side. Patrick pulls on one side of Martin, and the girls, especially Simone, pull on the other. After he failed to shoot the mother and baby, for a while he had to swing to the side of burying his feelings and shooting to kill, much like the cultists are doing. Now that he’s learned to live with the guilt and has more experience, he’s able to make those nuanced decisions more easily. It’s always difficult, because the sick aren’t always obvious in this world, and the untrustworthy, who might kill you or rob you for any reason, could be anyone. He’s developing a need to keep this group safe and alive and get them out of the quarantine zone, to atone for the group he inadvertently killed. He’s this episode’s example of a healthy way to deal with guilt: redirect it into good works that help you atone for your misdeeds.
As always, Beatrice’s motives are complex and confusing. She seems to want to string along both Rasmus and Martin. They showed us in episode 3 that Beatrice has never had deep feelings for Martin. She’s mostly been with him in order to make sure he wants to keep her and her people in the group and because of a lack of other options. He’s the one who’s wanted more. Now she’s jealous that he’s attracted to Simone, she’s jealous of Simone, attracted to Rasmus herself, and wishing Martin would be jealous of Rasmus. I think her feelings for Rasmus are real, though they may not have started out that way, but she’s still also playing the survival odds. In the end, she’ll do what she thinks will keep her (and Lea) alive.
Images courtesy of Netflix.
Metawitches 
Awesome review!
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