With Mother’s Day only a couple of days away, I thought of how fitting it would be to review the latest episode of the Into the Dark series All That We Destroy. This episode has a few twists and turns compared to its past episode. A mothers’ love is a very powerful thing, check out below why.
Dr. Victoria Harris is a geneticist who is very gifted at creating clones. The show starts out with a girl emerging from black goo and being washed off by Dr. Harris. It all appears very ominous as she is prepping the girl to meet her son Spencer. Spencer seems nice enough at first but things take a dark turn when he starts choking the girl and ramming her head against the floor, killing her. He then drags her naked body outside and tosses it in what appears to be a metal bin.
Dr. Harris is watching what he has done from recordings she keeps in his room. She is hoping to curb his appetite for killing as he continues to have serial killer tendencies. Over and over she talks with a gentleman in a virtual wooded area about the complications of these failed experiments. Showing that she does this same process many times with no success. He kills each clone in the same fashion and drags them to the same spot. The clone is being remade from the tub he puts them in by Dr. Harris.
Dr. Harris tries a different approach to make Ashley feel more real to Spencer so that he doesn’t feel the need to kill her. In this attempt, she tells him to leave Ashley alone and go pursue other hobbies in the meantime. During that time he meets Marissa, a girl who is house watching her parents house for a while.
The time he spends with Marissa is upsetting to Dr. Harris because of his serial killer tendencies and the fact that she doesn’t want him interacting with people. More and more a void comes between a mother and son.
Spencer is a very talented artist and isn’t afraid to show his work to Marissa the next time he sees her. He typically focuses his art on the Ashley clones but starts to shift more towards a real human connection. It ends up not working because she still feels too artificial like the previous times.
It’s a little disturbing to say the least because the reason these clones exist is because Spencer killed the original girl when she spurned his advances.
Eventually, after Ashley has been cloned a few more times she starts to become aware of what and who she is. As the show progresses you start to root for her finding out who she is and getting out this horror loop. Even though she is cloned, she is still a person with feelings and thoughts. What Dr. Harris does out of love for her son is nothing short of horrific.
Final Thoughts
While I enjoy the pure science of cloning, I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed this episode. There is a sense of male entitlement in the character Spencer as he seems to want to control but when that is pulled away he feels the need to make them disappear. The ending was satisfying for me in regards to Ashley and how she makes it out. What I can say is that this is a mothers love twisted into something else was very tragic. I view both her and her son as being villains in this episode and I suppose that was the point.
6/10
All That We Destroy is on Hulu now.
