Teacup Finale Recap: What Is Going On?

The first (and, for now, only) season of Teacup ends with Yvonne Strahovski’s Maggie pointing a gun at some supposed members of the anti-Visitor resistance and declaring, “We’re not going anywhere until you tell us what the fuck is going on.” This is a maddening way to end a season that has taken great pains to explain what is going on to its detriment! What is left for Maggie to not understand? Who the new people are? Seems pretty self-explanatory, but perhaps more importantly it doesn’t seem interesting enough to pursue should Teacup get renewed for a second season. Teacup could have benefitted from more mystery. Instead, the final episodes are a disappointing, sloppy denouement that replaces the show’s initial creepy confusion for bored exhaustion.

Instead of tight paranoia as the characters attempt to figure out which one of them is hosting Assassin, episode seven has everybody casually just going about their business and doing things that are not at all conducive to determining Assassin’s identity. Nicholas is standing guard outside Arlo’s door as if the hammer he’s holding could stop any of the gun-toting adults if one of them was secretly Assassin and really wanted to get inside. Maggie opens the door to Meryl’s room to check on her sleeping daughter. Shouldn’t this be against the rules if they want to be assured that the teens aren’t Assassin? I’m not trying to pull a CinemaSins here; it’s just that Teacup’s premise needs to be executed with precision if it wants us to be really invested in the stakes. As it is, the penultimate episode comes off as a bunch of waiting around until Assassin reveals itself and something — anything — happens.

Ruben, frustrated by the waiting-around plan (you and me both, man), decides to take action. He heads to the Navarro’s farm where he tries to burn down the rainbow tree that’s the origin of the trap. Donald initially tries to stop him but ends up going along with Ruben. They burn down the silo but the tree, and by extension the trap, are unscathed. However, there’s somebody else at the Navarro farm. McNabb, who fled into the woods in the last episode, almost decided to end it all by walking through the barrier. Just before he does it, though, he remembers something: He gave Travis a little vial of rainbow goo. McNabb goes to the Navarro farm, finds Travis’ body, and retrieves the vial. He’ll use this in the final episode to give Ruben just enough resistance to the tree’s disintegration powers that he’s able to break off a branch, which quickly dissolves into a whole bunch of goo when they put it in a jar. Great. Now they all have a way out of the trap. Unfortunately, Assassin is still inside one of them.

Back at the house, Maggie and James are having a heart-to-heart where she resents being the competent one. It’s unfair for James — who told Valeria that Maggie was “so fucking cold” — to automatically expect her to be the one who will tackle drowning whoever it is they determine Assassin is inside of. Maggie also has some concerns about the drowning plan. Will Assassin just inhabit one of the people doing the drowning the second they take their mask off to try to resuscitate the old host? It’s apparently been done before, as according to McNabb’s notebook, which Travis is reading, the resistance forced an Assassin out in Maine. Nicholas and Meryl are getting closer, literally, as a conversation about how near the Assassin needs to be in order to inhabit somebody else quickly turns into a smooch. My initial thought upon seeing this was that their parents would probably hate that they’re dating, seeing as James and Valeria had an affair. (That, uh, ended up being a moot point by finale!)

The two most likely suspects throughout the penultimate episode are Ellen, Assassin’s last confirmed host, and Valeria, who begins the half-hour by lurking in the hallway outside of Arlo’s room with a big knife and also some cereal. It almost seems like Assassin is indeed inside Ellen during a sequence where she empties the freezer and is way too deliberate in picking up Valeria’s knife and giving it back to her. This is perhaps the most tense moment in the entire series and it’s a bit deflating to learn that it was just a fakeout. There’s no reason why Ellen would’ve been that weird with the knife other than just to orchestrate a scare for the viewers. But it’s not Ellen. It’s in Valeria, which we learn when she easily gets Nicholas to abandon his post and come with her. Assassin leads Nicholas to the edge of the trap, positions Valeria just so, and then transfers into Nicholas so that he can easily push his mother across to her death.

Listen, I was promised gore in this series! The fact that we don’t see Valeria’s rib cage explode through her melting body feels like a tease for the horror fans who are Teacup’s ostensible audience. The reveal of the prosthetic Valeria corpse is gnarly, but my dark passenger is not sated by Teacup’s gore, which was essentially limited to Claire, that dog, and Donad’s forearm in the second episode. They all go over the line at night, so even then it’s kinda hard to make much out. I feel cheated.

While Assassin is having Nicholas kill his mom offscreen, Meryl and Arlo are in his room trying to make sense of the pattern Harbinger keeps having Arlo draw. Meryl cracks the case by making a wild logical leap when she overlays the drawing with a map of the United States. It’s a map, one that leads to a place called Belknap Mountain, and, presumably, the machine where Harbinger needs to go. Meryl also breaks protocol when Assassin (in Nicholas’s body) lures her outside. Assassin gets props for weaponizing their earlier kiss to get Meryl close enough to inhabit, and he smartly puts a rock by her so that it’ll be easy to knock Nicholas in the head once the transfer process is over, but its plan is ultimately as bad as the humans’ plan for identifying it was. All of this happens right outside of Arlo’s window, so Arlo quickly informs James and Maggie that Assassin is in Meryl. So, now instead of Assassin being able to covertly enter Arlo’s room since Meryl’s one of the only two people allowed inside, Assassin has instead trapped itself in the smallest, weakest body of all the possible options making itself physically easy to drown.

It is not emotionally easy, though, and after Maggie and James confront Assassin in the kitchen, they’re able to restrain Meryl and force her into the tub. Maggie’s cool-under-pressure facade briefly falters (understandably, as she’s drowning her daughter!), but she and James are able to hold Meryl under until the bubbles stop. Unfortunately, James’s mask gets knocked off in the process, and Assassin transfers to a new host. James is somehow able to hold off Assassin’s possession long enough for Maggie to resuscitate Meryl and issue a warning for them to “run!”

Assassin doesn’t end up making good use of James as a host. He fights with Ruben before Maggie scares him off with some gunshots, although they both know that she won’t actually shoot her husband and that killing the host wouldn’t stop Assassin. Arlo, though, has the answer. It’s just like the wasp that Maggie captured in a teacup at the beginning of the very first episode, and Maggie manages to trap James inside of the freezer in the barn. It’s an emotional moment, but I can’t help but notice the limitations of Arlo’s comparison to the wasp. The whole point of that teacup maneuver was to safely release the wasp outside, but James suffocates to death inside the freezer and Assassin is trapped inside where it will hopefully never, ever escape.

Having gotten rid of Assassin albeit at the cost of James’s life (another offscreen death, I should note), it’s time to escape the trap. McNabb pours everybody a shot of rainbow goo and they all step across the line unharmed one by one except for Ellen, who offers to stay behind with the animals. They get in Olsen’s truck and hit the road, seeking medical attention before they drive to Belknap Mountain. They’re stopped by two people, including a woman we saw preparing a bag in the finale’s cold open. Although they claim to be friendly members of the message boards that McNabb and his alien-hunting buddies ran with, they’re soon obliterated by a speeding hot rod. It’s Hayden, McNabb and Olsen’s former partner. He and a woman get out of the car wearing gas masks, and they encourage everybody to follow them. This prompts Maggie to declare “We’re not going anywhere until you tell us what the fuck is going on,” and the episode ends.

I guess there’s a big, widespread alien invasion happening and other “bad” Visitors are waking up all over the country. The problem is the show has been so self-contained until this point (thanks to the trap) that it’s jarring to have these higher stakes and new faces introduced and discarded at literally the last minute. And since the way the self-contained plot got resolved (“they trapped a guy in a fridge, drank some goo, and left”) was underwhelming, I’m not especially excited to deal with any of this new nonsense. I think I have a pretty good idea of the answer to Maggie’s question about what the fuck is going on — a hilarious note to end a season on — but I don’t care enough to fill in any gaps.

If you were counting on Teacup’s final episodes — which came out on Halloween — to be a nice capper to spooky season, you’re probably feeling let down. Peacock has lots of horror titles that are actually good! Teacup ended up being a mediocre-at-best knockoff of The Thing, and the real deal is streaming on the very same platform!

Crossing the Line

• It seems like Scout, the horse from the first episode, survived despite my fears, although he’s trapped inside forever. Makes you wonder why they didn’t just drink a little goo, break off another branch of the tree, and make enough goo so that they could give it to the dog and the horses so Ellen wouldn’t have to stay behind. The wolf managed just fine last week!

• I got very nervous with the way McNabb laid out all of the glasses of goo in a straight line on an uneven surface, and then even more nervous when everybody walked directly over them to leave the trap. What if they’d accidentally clipped one with their shoe and spilled it!?