THEM: The Scare Deserved Better. We Covered Every Episode
- kristin0214
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
There is a specific kind of frustration that horror fans know well. A show comes out, it is genuinely excellent, critics love it, and then nothing happens. No cultural moment. No discourse. No season renewal conversation that gets loud enough to matter. It just quietly exists on a streaming platform while the algorithm pushes something louder in front of it.
That is exactly what happened to THEM: The Scare, the second season of Amazon Prime Video's horror anthology THEM: The Covenant. And we at Fear and Wine are not over it.
We covered every single episode. Start to finish. Because this season deserved a room full of people talking about it, and we were determined to be that room.
If you haven't watched Season 1, we covered that as well. You can find that here: CLICK HERE FOR THE COVENANT
What Is THEM: The Scare?
THEM is an anthology series, which means each season tells a completely new story with a new cast and new horrors. Season 2 drops you into Los Angeles in 1991. Not the glossy, cinematic version of LA. The real one. The city sitting on a powder keg, days and weeks after the Rodney King beating by LAPD officers was captured on video and released to the world.
That is not background noise. That is the foundation the entire season is built on. A city already fractured by racism, institutional violence, and a police department with blood on its hands. Into that environment, the show places a Black woman LAPD detective named Dawn Reeve, played by Deborah Ayorinde, and asks her to solve a murder so grotesque it has turned the stomachs of every detective who has seen it.
The horror is both supernatural and completely, devastatingly real. That tension is what makes the season work.
Deborah Ayorinde Is Doing Career-Defining Work
If you watched Season 1 of THEM, you already know Deborah Ayorinde is operating at a level that most actors never reach. She returns here in a completely different role, which is one of the privileges of an anthology format, and she delivers something even more layered and punishing than her first turn.
Dawn Reeve is one of the only women of color in her division. She is brilliant, driven, and quietly holding together a family while a supernatural force starts pulling at the threads of her life. Ayorinde carries all of that simultaneously without ever letting you see the seams. There are moments in this season where she communicates entire paragraphs of interior life with a single look. It is the kind of performance that should be generating awards conversation, and the fact that it largely did not is part of why we are writing this post.
Luke James Will Unsettle You in the Best Way
Luke James plays Edmund Gaines, an aspiring actor who is very much not what he appears to be. Without giving anything away: his storyline weaves into the supernatural center of the season in ways that are deeply unsettling, and James plays it with a stillness that gets under your skin. He is charming. He is wrong. You will not be able to look away from him. It is a performance that requires you to track something sinister moving just beneath a warm surface, and James nails it across every episode. Luke James is also a singer songwriter
He genuinely deserved much more attention for this role, and we hope he gets his flowers and we see him cast in more and more films!
Pam Grier Shows Up and Reminds Everyone Who She Is
Pam Grier plays Athena, Dawn's mother. She is loving, proud, religious, and keeping a secret. That is all we will say about the plot. What we will say is that casting Pam Grier in a 1991 Los Angeles horror story set against a backdrop of Black survival and institutional violence is a choice loaded with meaning. She is an icon of a specific kind of American cinema that centered Black women as powerful, complex, and fully human at a time when Hollywood rarely did. Watching her inhabit Athena adds a layer of cultural resonance to the season that you feel even if you cannot fully articulate it. She is magnificent.
The Rodney King Backdrop Is Not Decoration
This is important to say clearly. The show is set just after the video of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD officers became public knowledge. That event cracked something open in Los Angeles and in the country. The city was already in that suspended, volatile state before the verdict and the uprising that followed.
THEM: The Scare uses that historical weight deliberately. Dawn is a Black woman inside the institution that committed that violence. She is trying to solve a case while navigating a workplace built on the same racism the whole city is reckoning with. The supernatural horror becomes a metaphor for the very real horror of existing in that space. The show trusts its audience to hold both registers at once, the genre and the history. That trust is rare in horror, and it is one of the reasons this season is special.
Critics who saw it loved it. The Rotten Tomatoes score is perfect. The consensus called it a marked improvement over Season 1, praising its commentary on generational trauma and its genuine scares. And still the conversation never caught fire the way it should have.
That happens sometimes with anthology seasons. The audience that loved Season 1 does not always follow into a new story with a new cast. The algorithm rewards familiarity. Something that requires context and care to appreciate can get buried under content that is easier to consume.
THEM: The Scare was not easy. It was purposeful and painful and terrifying and worth every minute of it.
We Want a Season 3. Help Us Make That Noise.
The best way to get more of something you love is to watch it and talk about it. Stream THEM: The Scare on Prime Video. Tell people about it. Rate it. And then come find us.
If you never watched Season 1, THEM: The Covenant, do that first! While each season stands alone, watching THEM in succession definitely pays off in some great ways! We covered all of Season 1 as well!
Fear and Wine covered every episode of this season. We are talking about the performances, the horror mechanics, the historical context, the supernatural mythology, and yes, what wine pairs with watching a city on the edge of collapse. We are your guides through this one whether you are brave enough to watch it first or you need us to hold your hand through the scary parts before you hit play.
Either way, we got you.
If you are too scared to watch, start with Episode 1 of our coverage right here:
IF you like the spooky stuff, Stream THEM: The Scare on Prime Video. Come back and listen. And let's get loud enough that someone at Amazon hears us asking for Season 3.
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