Only Murders In The Building Season 2 Episode 8: Playing With Darkness

Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building S02E08 “Hello Darkness” got into the ways in which darkness can be a primal fear for many of us and something to fear within others. The collective focus on a power outage/blackout in the area had a lot of interesting power in driving suspicions and clearing doubts. Warning, potential spoilers are ahead.

Only Murders in the Building has a mixture of fantastic comedic and dramatic elements in this episode, such as Oliver’s obsession with leaving no dip behind while running away from a potential killer. Deciding to have the power go out in this episode was a fantastic move, it’s simple yet develops so many launch pads from which avenues for the story develop. The inner fear of what could happen to Lucy, as she’s alone in Charles’ apartment, drives the trio of Mabel, Charles, and Oliver to race against the most terrifying type of clock, one that has no clear indications on it. The ambiguity of it all is what is so scary, what helps mainly is Lucy’s ability to understand how to navigate the space between the walls.

Another kind of fear is unlocked via Howard’s own minor story happening in this episode of Only Murders in the Building. Howard finds comfort in his own style of isolation, but he knows it isn’t truly good for him as he desires companionship beyond owning a cat. At first, he sees the solution as getting rid of his cat when met with a blissful love match in a neighbor who has so much in his own life in common with Howard’s interests. But Howard sees fear at the moment as irrational because someone who wants to be in his life would find a way not to make Howard sacrifice in such a way.

Only Murders in the Building ends the episode with an all too common fear we can have that comes from other people, deception, and betrayal. The unseen injuries and arrival of Detective Kreps become very suspicious to Mabel, and rightly so. Initially, suspicion lands on Marv, the ultimate podcast fan who’s worked in the building before. But ill-timed good intentions were the only faults of Marv. This episode plays with expectations of where we may try and place our fears. We would fear Marv, but Detective Kreps may have used a primal fear of darkness as a way to compliment the position of “helpfulness” his job publicly aims to display. It’s a real-life fear for a lot of women and minority communities in society, hidden sometimes in a space it shouldn’t be expected as the norm.