So Teresa returns to her body and weakly opens the garage door, saving herself. It becomes clear that Teresa has slowly been dying of self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning this whole time, with Jack and Poppy representing different impulses in her brain: one telling her to let go and die, the other telling her that living is worth it no matter how hard it hurts. It all culminates when Teresa follows a little girl - a young Teresa, meaning a young Natsuki - into a garage, where she sees herself in the driver’s seat of a running car. There’s also the casual suggestion, maybe implied from the beginning, that the pair are a couple of killers. Weird smells saturate the air, Jack keeps uttering the phrase “It’s going to hurt,” and the two hitchhikers are locked in an ongoing struggle to convince Teresa whether to stop the car or not. There’s something quite unnerving about any nighttime drive through hell, and the relatively short time frame of this story gives it a momentum and escalating eeriness missing from many of the other Midnight Club stories. But the horror of the scene really comes from its cyclicality, the growing sense of disorientation and irrationality every time they pass the same walker, the same gas station. The two have an air of danger from the beginning, practically forcing her to drive them and bickering loudly most of the time.
Teresa stops to reluctantly pick up two hitchhikers, Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn, played by Flanagan regulars Henry Thomas and Alex Essoe. It’s about a girl named Teresa, clearly based on herself, and the long drive she takes one late night. So she tells him the story she would’ve told at the Midnight Club, the same story she’s been working on since she read Tristan excerpts over the intercom. But when he runs into her at midnight and gives her the okay to dump him, she explains that she wants to share the deepest parts of herself with him.
Amesh, naturally, takes Natsuki’s slight flakiness personally, interpreting her spending time alone in her room as avoiding him. Natsuki, on the other hand, gains some nice dimension from the specificity of her experience with depression and suicide. I’m glad Spence refuses to lie about who he is, but I struggle to engage when most of his scenes go through the typical motions. There’s nothing particularly novel about this angle, especially when the show so broadly lumps the stigma of Spence’s AIDS diagnosis with the general stigma of his sexuality. But Spence sticking up to his mom feels like the next obvious beat in this story.
I find Mark’s uncomplicated generosity touching in all their scenes together, sure. This is the type of teen-drama storyline that will always reliably move me, but I’m not convinced the show has done the work to invest Spence and his experience with real complexity. Take Spence, who’s newly emboldened to confront his mom after learning Cheri is out to her parents. Even the personal stories themselves are a bit hit-or-miss, with some resonating more than others. Does anyone else feel a lack of urgency here? “Road to Nowhere” features some solid storytelling on a personal level, but it’s difficult to feel like any serious momentum is building, especially with so little follow-up on the cliffhanger about one patient going home.
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