(As you might recall, last spring, an angel appeared to me in a dream and presented me with access to a most holy and beautiful artifact: Mrs. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the cooking blog that Emily Rogers, my cisgender self from an alternate universe, writes. What might seem to be a cooking blog at first is, instead, a window into the multiverse, I have also checked in on the other Emily at Christmas and at Pride. But doesn't she seem like she really gives it her all for Halloween? Yeah, I thought so, too. Let's see what she's up to! It is important to note, as always, that photos do not survive the transmission between universes, but the alt text descriptions of those images is provided in place of them.)

Important note: If you are not up on your Emily Rogers #lore or just want to refresh your memory, there now exists a Rogersverse Wiki that keeps track of all major characters, plot points, and emotional moods. Wow!

Additional important note: If you are not a fan of My Nonsense, I truly apologize and blame the painkillers.

Double, double, toil and trouble, Emmy's Army! Step over the threshold and enter my witch's cottage!

[Image: A tall blonde woman in a witch's hat, standing over an obvious prop cauldron in the Milwaukee West location of Hardy Party. (Hardy Party seems to be a major party store chain in Emily's universe.— ed.)]

If you've been reading my site for any amount of time, then you know Halloween isn't really my thing. I wasn't allowed to celebrate it as a child, as we were taught Halloween was the devil's holiday, and by the time I was old enough to make my own decisions, I felt a little silly about getting dressed up.

I thought the more I embraced working in the kitchen, the more I would love Halloween, too. But making party snacks isn't really my favorite thing to do, and Halloween is all about party snacks. It's the biggest holiday that doesn't have a big meal associated with it. One year I tried making the treats we gave out to kids at the neighborhood Trunk 'n' Treat, but they weren't as popular as when I just gave out candy.

If there's one reason I'm getting a little more into the spirit this year, it's because this is the first Halloween in two years that M and G can actually go out in their costumes and have fun with their friends. And that's doubly special for M, because she finally gets to go out as herself. This year, she's going as Kiki from her favorite movie, Kiki's Delivery Service, and when I tell you that she has spent absolutely every spare moment of the last few weeks planning this costume with her best friend, you should also know that I am guessing maybe five other people in our neighborhood have seen Kiki's Delivery Service. But she's excited, and she's so creative. G, meanwhile, bought a Princess Elsa costume at Hardy Party, and that was that. My girls have very different approaches to problem solving!

[Image: M holds a stuffed cat aloft. It looks a little like the cat from Kiki's Delivery Service. If you squint.]

I'm fascinated by how into this costume M has been. The older she gets, the more I ask for her permission to talk about her life here on the blog, and she usually says no. But she never says no when it comes to this costume. When it's all finished, she wants me to do a post to show it off to y'all. She's really proud of it, and it makes me think she might be a budding artist of some sort. I have no idea where that talent would come from. David's mom, I guess, was always a great seamstress, but I'm sure not. When I try to help M work on it, I always worry I'm just in the way.

I worry about being in the way a lot these days, with both girls. They're getting so much older and smarter and stronger, and now that the world is open again, and they're off with their friends, I feel superfluous a lot of the time. I'll show up to pick them up from a playdate, and they'll be racing around me, like I'm a piece of furniture to ignore or avoid.

Or, to put it in terms appropriate to the season... I feel like a ghost. Boo! Did I scare you?

[Image: The blonde woman pulls a bedsheet back from her face and tries to look terrifying. This photo is so poorly staged that M (out of focus in the background) clearly cannot seem to keep her composure.]

As I wrote about around Halloween a couple of years ago, my childhood home was haunted by a ghost we called the Top Hat Man. He was absolutely terrifying, but he never hurt anybody. My dad insisted he wasn't real and that we were talking ourselves into being scared. But he never had to be alone in the house with ol' Toppy. Even Hubby David met him! [And I don't like to talk about it.] And you know how much Hubby David likes to talk! (I should really resurrect that post for a "Classic Emmy" reup...) [Yes, please do, Emily!—ed.]

If you've been watching The Sinister Cliffs on Pudu (and everyone I know has!), then you probably know where I'm going with this. That show has a Top Hat Man ghost! The first time I saw him, I screamed, and David was, like, "Is this too much? Do I need to turn it off?" but I told him I was just excited in the way you would be if you saw someone you graduated from high school with in a starring part on TV. He rolled his eyes, and we kept watching.

The Sinister Cliffs is so good that I wanted to offer a quick review of it. But as regular readers will know, I am not the TV reviewing expert. No, the TV reviewing expert is Emily Sandalwood, the trans version of me from another universe who is a TV critic but likes to dabble in the kitchen. And, as you know, an angel (haha) gave me access to her writing for the site The U.V. Club, which I let you read here! Oh! Images don't transfer between universes but alt-text does. Sorry!

Just remember: The main point of divergence here is that Emily Sandalwood was assigned male at birth, which means an entirely different set of parents adopted her. She moved to California right after high school with her true love, Lizzy (who seems like she might be my Beth??), and she transitioned at some point in her 20s. Anyway, she reviews television. She seems pretty cool. I'd love to meet her one day (haha). [Honey, this is the weirdest thing you do.] No, not the weirdest. [long pause Okay, no, not the weirdest.] Haha!

Anyway, take it away Emilsands!

[Image: The sleek, modernist logo of something called "The U.V. Club." It is a cool, effortless purple, blending toward black, and it's covered in diamonds. It is hard to believe any version of Emily would write for a site with a logo this cool.]

The Sinister Cliffs: season 1, episode 1 — "The Lonely Life and Well-Attended Death of Dorothea Hargrove"

The newest series from horror maestro Alena Famking gets off to a smashing start. Also: A recipe for deviled eggs.

by Emily Sandalwood

Grade: A-

[Image: The actor Joey King sits at a long, empty table in clothing singed with burn marks. She stares at someone just off-camera. A single deviled egg sits before her.]

"Needs salt." — Dorothea Hargrove

Another Halloween, another prestige horror Wuhu miniseries from once disgraced, now embraced auteur Alena Famking. [Oh right! Some brand names are different in Emilsands's universe, which is why "Pudu" seems to be called "Wuhu" there. Also: Oscar winner Alan Fameking from our world is cult figure Alena Famking there.—Emmy] [At this point, I'm in too deep, but I assume this is... Hulu?—ed.] If you followed my reviews of last year's For the Lost, you know I thought Famking had delivered the rare dud, all hot air and empty scares, which was an odd thing to say about a series that concluded with the literal devil consuming first the set of the miniseries, then Famking herself. It had something to do with climate change. I'm told.

Famking herself seemed bruised by the criticisms, which might be why The Sinister Cliffs gets off with such a rousing start. This is an old-fashioned ghost story, with a proper haunted house and everything, as if Famking is intent on reminding us that she rose to acclaim via incredibly scary horror shorts she distributed on the early internet. I remember downloading those shorts, sitting at the family computer in the middle of the Montana night, waiting and waiting and waiting for the 56.6k baud modem to drag them in from the ether. The anticipation was almost scarier than the films in the end, watching the progress bar, sure my father would wander into the office, see how late it was, and snap at me to get to bed.

The deeper we get into The Sinister Cliffs, the more it will reveal itself as being in conversation with all of Famking's work, right back to those shorts. (Mild spoiler: The season's fifth episode even features a sequence where the image freezes, then an old-fashioned "download progress" bar opens while we hear something horrific happening, an idea that is vintage Famking.) But for this first episode, Famking mostly seems like she wants to remind you she is really fucking good at what she does. So there's a house in far northern California, there's a set of cliffs, there's a teenage heiress in the Great Depression, and there's a ghost wearing a top hat. Lizzy saw that motherfucker and left the room. [Well he was scary!] I know, sweetie.

We meet 17-year-old Dorothea Hargrove (Joey King) in the very first shot of The Sinister Cliffs. She stands, staring up at a massive mansion we will come to learn is named simply The Endless. She is just outside of Trinidad, California, and the sound of the surf overwhelms all else on the soundtrack, even the atonal synth score underlying the scene. A single cloud passes in front of the moon. (Famking told me via Twuzzler DM that this was a happy accident; it seems a little too convenient to me.)

We learn, in short order, that it is 1932, that Dorothea is an orphan but also an heiress, and that The Endless was granted to her in some sort of bequest. She has arrived here after a very long train trip, and all she wants to do is put her feet up, she says. But she very quickly begins making changes to her new home.

[Image: Dorothea and a butler played by Tom Noonan stare up at the ceiling in a vast room lit by moonlight.]

I will admit that when I saw this setup, I thought I was way ahead of Famking. Dorothea, clearly, was already dead, and she would be haunting this house. The fact that she is in badly singed, even burnt clothing suggested as much, as did King's slightly detached, dissociated performance. But that assumption was where Famking wanted me to land. She had given me so little firm ground to stand upon otherwise. The only other occupant of The Endless, after all, is a slow-moving butler-ish figure known only as He (Tom Noonan), and whenever Dorothea asks him to do even the simplest thing, he says, "The house is yours. Do what you will."

So, like, Dorothea is dead, right? This whole setup is a metaphor for a life that passed too quickly or something, right?

Well, The Endless is a metaphor, as is He, as are the sinister cliffs, but Dorothea is very much a real person and very much alive. (And the metaphorical implications of everything else won't really start to become clear for several episodes.) And Dorothea is the rightful owner of The Endless. She earned it fair and square. And she is an orphan, her parents having died in mysterious circumstances a few years earlier. Everything we know about her is the truth. She's not dead. She can still make the house her own.

Long sections of this episode play out as a kind of unholy mash-up of an HGTV home renovations show and a 1930s musical about a flapper who struck it rich. Famking never has King sing, but she doesn't have to. The sequences in which Dorothea begins to work on making the house vibrant and livable are meticulously choreographed, Famking's camera in a static wide shot that King moves through, pulling open curtains, tugging down drapes, and toppling old furniture. Mac Quayle's score trails her steps ever so slightly, as if giving the sense of the music itself trying to nudge her to dance. And then she says it: "It would be better if this wall wasn't here." And just like that, the wall isn't there anymore.

Famking makes a series of big asks here. "The Lonely Life and Well-Attended Death of Dorothea Hargrove" is what I like to call a "rules" episode, and a showrunner always risks losing viewers if they put the rules episode first. Famking gets around this by having viewers learn the rules of The Endless right alongside Dorothea. She can speak new iterations of the house into being, simply by saying the words. That's rule number one.

But every time she makes a change, she looks up at the large painting of a fox hunt that dominates the main hall in The Endless (and that she cannot get rid of, no matter what she says), and each time, it seems different. After one Endless alteration, she realizes one of the riders — a man clad in an unusually tall top hat — has turned. Another alteration, he looks back at her. Another, he dismounts. Another, he approaches her. Another, he leans forward as if to escape the painting. That's rule number two.

And what's genius about this is that it's always clear Dorothea could simply stop renovating her already amazing home or could at least pay a team of carpenters to do it. She could leave the Top Hat Man poised on the edge of the painting for the rest of her life. But this is a ghost story. She will always want more life.

So rule number three: Once the Top Hat Man escapes the painting, he doesn't do anything. He's just always there, in the room, with Dorothea, and when she tries to change something, he walks over to her, extends a hand, and says, "Give." (I didn't realize Oscar Isaac was playing the Top Hat Man until I heard him say "Give," which is probably a tipoff that there's a Top Hat Man episode coming. It's the best of the season.) And he willfully takes whatever body part Dorothea decides she doesn't need at that point. A finger here, a tooth there. That sort of thing.

This is when the deviled eggs show up.

When I said Famking makes a "series" of big asks, this is what I mean. Setting up a series of fairy tale rules for your moldering old house is an ask, but this 15-minute sequence of the episode — which culminates in Dorothea surrendering all of her toes to the Top Hat Man in order to acquire a library stocked with any book she would ever require — almost seems like it's daring you to notice she's still wearing those burnt clothes. And then Dorothea nearly leaps out of her skin when she sees a deviled egg sitting on her end table, and you wonder what the fuck is all this anyway?

[Image: The Top Hat Man, played by Oscar Isaac, sits beside Dorothea's bed, watching as she sleeps.]

I will admit that the deviled egg tried my patience just a little. Famking certainly has built a reputation for trying to turn non-sinister objects into something terrifying, a nod to her DIY online filmmaker roots. (Her most memorable early short film, after all, turned a ladder into the most terrible monster of all.) And I found myself rolling my eyes just a bit. But those burnt clothes kept catching my eye, and I wondered...

As you know, readers, I am an easy mark for most Famking stuff. Her work is radically queer and downright liberationist in places, and I'm on her side. But even with that caveat aside, I just couldn't dismiss this episode, even with how ridiculous those deviled eggs are. (Alena Famking, at an imagined Wuhu pitch meeting: "Of course deviled eggs are terrifying! The word 'devil' is right there.") And here's where I tell you why I'm an easy mark for this story in particular.

When I was 17, I was up late, downloading the Famking latest, when the sky lit up. From the big picture windows overlooking the Montana dark, a massive fireball was belching into the night. One of our "neighbors" — so he lived two miles away — had gotten caught in some money trouble, so he decided to burn down his house with his family inside it. His two oldest daughters escaped.

There was a moment when the only people who knew about this fire were that family and me. No other houses were close enough to really see what had happened, and everyone else at my house was asleep. I think sometimes about the girls who escaped, and I imagine the hell they must have gone through, not just as they fought for their lives but as they realized literally everything they thought to be true wasn't true at all. And then I think about me, in my ill-fitting boys pajamas, watching from far off, the only witness.

Then my parents woke up and asked what I was doing still awake, and I had to clear my internet history so they didn't know I was looking up information on how to transition. We watched the fire from the big picture window. Someone must have called the fire department, and it must have been one of us. I don't know who else would have.

This detail sticks with me: The man's oldest daughter insisted that he hadn't done it, that when she went downstairs for a glass of water that night, her dad was unconscious, facedown on the table, and a masked man was spreading gasoline all around the kitchen. He held a finger to his lips, lit a match, then dropped it. She turned and ran and grabbed her sister.

There was no evidence of anyone else on the farm that night. Her father was found clutching the gas can, a pack of matches in his shirt pocket. But if you talked to that woman today, she would insist he didn't do it. And her insistence was so strong that soon enough, the whole town thought he hadn't done it. He had been framed by a powerful outsider. Of course he had! Our little town wasn't the kind of place where things like that happened. No, not at all.

But what's more likely? That a vast, untraceable conspiracy existed to frame this one guy or that a girl saw her father preparing to kill her entire family and then her brain simply invented a reality she liked better, and she chose to live there instead? We do this all the time, right? We find something we don't like in this world, and we insist there must be some other one where some tiny thing is different and from that, everything else spins.

I spent years chasing myself in the dark, certain that if I had been born a cis woman, I would have wound up somewhere better than Montana. Maybe I would have been adopted to a couple in California. [Florida, Emilsands. Sorry!—Emmy] But so much of what I have, particularly this career and my marriage, hinges on the weird accident of my birth. I felt, always, like I was watching the conflagration from afar, in the dark, unable to do anything but see the flames consume something that had been someone else's whole world. Then I realized I was in the flames, too, and I resolved to do something about it.

You can surely see, then, why the revelation of what led Dorothea to The Endless hit me as strongly as it did. The last 20 minutes of the episode attain an almost operatic power, which becomes so over-the-top that it can be a little oppressive. In a series of short, brutal scenes, Famking shows us Dorothea's family joining a church led by a doomsday preacher, her father hollowing out into a husk, her mother attempting to escape, her father brutally killing her mother. And then Dorothea's brother kills their father, before he is arrested, leaving her with no one.

[Image: Lin-Manuel Miranda dressed like a 2020s techbro sits in Dorothea's very 1930s kitchen.]

And this is when The Stranger (Lin-Manuel Miranda, very much against type but all the more effective for it) arrives. There is a place Dorothea can go, he says, if she will simply do what she already wants to do and rack up a debt high enough that she will be accepted. The place she will be taken is neither Heaven nor Hell. It is beyond those things. And once she does what she must, a train will be waiting for her out there in the dark.

The sequence in which Dorothea sets the church that hollowed her father out ablaze is a shot-for-shot replica of the sequence in which she renovates The Endless. (I checked.) Except now, Quayle's score is overtaking her. She simply cannot move quickly enough. But Dorothea creates and Dorothea destroys, and Dorothea moves with purpose.

When she arrives in the pastor's office to see him look up at her, wan-faced, over a single deviled egg, I briefly thought we would be treated to one of Famking's famously ornate scenes where two characters monologue at each other. (This episode is perhaps the least dialogue-heavy thing Famking has ever made; future episodes will be more in keeping with her usual style.) But instead, Dorothea says, "The world would be better if you weren't here," and the pastor says, "Can you pass the salt?" and she lights the match. She goes outside, and there's a train. Waiting.

The episode ends with Dorothea, now imprisoned in her bed by all she has given away to the Top Hat Man, reaching, finally, for one of the deviled eggs that surround her. She takes a long bite and moans. She barely has a tongue with which to taste or speak, but she says, "Needs salt," and then she dies.

What we're to make of this will become clearer with more episodes. But this episode beautifully sets the stakes: The Sinister Cliffs is a loose anthology show about the ways in which we constantly try to get back to the things we cannot have, from a home that was never a home to begin with to a simple salt shaker sitting just across the room. The last shot of the episode is of Michael B. Jordan, the next occupant of The Endless, except it sure seems to be the 1980s. We are all held prisoner by decisions made so long before any of us were born that we can all feel like we're watching a fire from afar, no way to stop it. All we have left to do is hope we're not the ones consumed by it the next time.

Oh, one other reason this episode spoke to me so much: I fucking hate deviled eggs. [She really does!] Thank you for not making me eat them, honey.

Grave observations:

• As you can tell, I've seen the whole series as I'm writing these recaps. I promise to keep these as spoiler-free as possible, but I do want to share this photo of Topher Grace dressed in the May Queen flower dress from Midsummer. Because it's a lot! It comes up in episode six.
• [Image: Yes, indeed, it's Topher Grace dressed in a dress made entirely of flowers, except all of them are blood red.]
• I laughed when the train conductor (a very good Harvey Guillen) started in on a vintage Alena Famking monologue, and Dorothea just told him to shut up and drive the train.
• Speaking of "shut up and drive the train," there are moments throughout this series when people seem to speak in a modern argot. Keep an eye out for them. They might be pointing somewhere. Hmmm... (Actually, this really isn't a spoiler. I just want to speculate about it in comments!)
• Lizzy was scared of Top Hat Man, but she really wants to call everybody's attention to Severe Mom in the upper right-hand corner of the painting as the truly terrifying figure within it.
• Yes, that's Clarke Peters as the narrator. You'll hear more from him.
• The closing credits song — and thus, this week's reading music — is "Working for the Knife" by Mitski.

Emily's Kitchen Corner:

Everybody's favorite occasional segment is back! As you all know, I dabble in cooking. (I briefly had a recipe blog before I fell into the TV recap grind, and no you can't read it.) And the presence of deviled eggs made me want to try making pumpkin spice deviled eggs.

Anyway, boil some eggs. Easiest way to do this is put them in a saucepan, cover them with water, then boil that water. Once the water boils, reduce to low, cover, and cook for one minute. Take the eggs off the heat entirely and keep them covered for around 15 minutes. Then you can peel them.

Split them in half and scoop out the yolks. You'll want to mash the yolks together with a ratio that's roughly three parts mayonnaise to one part mustard and one part vinegar. (I actually like slightly less mayonnaise and slightly more mustard, but I'm a rebel.) Season with salt and pepper! Then scoop the yolk mixture back into the whites. Sprinkle with paprika.

That's a perfectly inoffensive deviled egg, and you should probably just stop there, because when I mixed in allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg, it was disgusting. I honestly might be getting a divorce. That's how bad it was.

See you next week, for episode two of The Sinister Cliffs, when those cliffs get even more sinister!

[Image: It's the blonde woman from before, and she's huddled up under a blanket watching TV.]

It's me! Emily Rogers! I'm back!

If you ask me, Emmy's Army, the scariest thing in that whole recap was Emilsands trying to mix pumpkin spice into deviled eggs?? Did she lose her mind? I think I need to invent a dimension hopping device and teach her something about cooking. [Please don't.] Anyway, the rest of her deviled egg method is solid, and deviled eggs are always a good party food. So consider that your recipe for the day!

And you know what? I'm taking to heart what she said about chasing yourself around in the dark, trying to figure out who you might have been if one or two things had been different. It's fun to pretend sometimes that I'm a TV blogger from Long Beach, California, but I'm not. I'm just me, and that's okay. At a certain point, you have to accept that you got dealt the hand you did, and you have to eat a couple of deviled eggs, even if you can't stand them. (I'm with Emilsands; deviled eggs are kinda bad.) So maybe it's good for me to stop pretending there's "another universe" where I'm somebody else. [You don't have to stop!] No, I think it's time. Imagine someone pretending to be me! [Kind of the point of Halloween though, right?] Oooh, yeah, buy an Emily Rogers costume for Halloween, mysterious stranger! [I have no further comment at this time.—ed.]

Now please tell me in comments what you thought about THE ROAD TRIP EPISODE OF SINISTER CLIFFS?????? AHHHH???? The show is so good! That's the official Emily review!

Happy Halloween from all of us here at Mrs. Rogers' Neighborhood. Stay spooky.

[Image: The blonde woman, her slightly sleepy husband, and two girls in costume — one a surprisingly elaborate representation of Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service, the other a store-bought Elsa costume — dig into a large pile of candy. They're not looking at the camera, so WHO'S TAKING THE PHOTO??? J/k alt-text readers, it's just Bryan. He's visiting! We'll talk more about that next week!]

Okay it's Emily VanDerWerff again, I promise!

Thank you, as always, for putting up with nearly 5,000 words of what has somehow grown into a surprisingly elaborate alternate universe that is now... two alternate universes? I'm recuperating nicely, and the newsletter will be slightly more itself next week. See you then!

Episodes is published three times per week. Mondays feature my thoughts on assorted topics. Wednesdays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. Fridays are TV recaps written by myself. The Wednesday and Friday editions are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.