Tearjerker page for THEM (2021).
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Season 1: Covenant
- The Emorys' Dark and Troubled Past. Lucky was alone at home with baby Chester while Henry and the girls were at the movies, leaving her at the mercy of a crazy old white lady and her three white companions who then raped her while making her watch them toss around Chester in a bag until he died.
- The Emorys discovering that Sergeant is dead in the basement. They lost another member of their family again.
- The flashback in the next episode's Cold Opening then shows us that Henry found him as a stray dog trying to get into their house in North Carolina.
- After Sergeant is found dead, Lucky immediately grabs her gun and starts threatening the neighbors, believing that her family's home is being invaded again.
- Henry's trauma over fighting in World War II and his bitterness over how colored soldiers were treated as more expendable than their white counterparts.
- In Episode 2's Cold Opening flashback, Henry, frustrated from the racism he endured at work and having acquired a wartime trigger of anything sweet, snaps and smashes the plate of pie that Ruby had made for him. Once he cools down, he's in tears over violently rejecting his daughter's gift.
- Ruby being mad fun of in class to the point that she cries, and when the teacher fails to quiet down the room, she waves her up to the front... and writes her up and her only for "distracting the class".
- Mrs. Johnson and her family went crazy from the ghosts, and the ghosts drove her to kill her husband and son. Even in the bedlam, she's still convinced that what she did was a Mercy Kill, as the Black Hat Man told her.
- The gradual reveal that Doris is actually one of the Black Hat Man's demons, meant to prey on Ruby's insecurities of not being able to fit in with her white peers. Ruby really was alone.
- Martha and Grafton. A black couple expecting a child, whose parents or grandparents were slaves, try settling in Sacramento to start a new life, but their wagon busts down a ways too south of their destination. They're taken in by the local reverend, who is also the only white man in the town who treats them kindly... only for him to apparently show his true colors and torture them before killing them.
- While she's still very much an Asshole Victim, Betty's death is still pretty depressing, with no one having a hint as to where she went or that she even died.
- Her Break the Haughty is also a bit depressing, as she's forced to get back into contact with her Abusive Parents and learns that Clarke has been secretly stealing their shared savings.
- Clarke angrily deciding to book it out of town when his neighbors have gone too far, along with his "friends" calling him a traitor and a "faggot". He briefly stops in his tracks when he finds the arriving Lucky standing in front of him, and the two silently stare at each other before continuing their separate ways. Clarke drives away more slowly now, ashamed that he chose to run away instead of help, and Lucky doesn't pay him more mind, not seeing him as any more than simply that — a coward who knew he could've done more.
- The heavy implication that Clarke is a Closet Gay, which really explains his actions throughout the show:
- He's afraid to speak up or compromise his identity, because knows that if he does, he'll end up like the Emorys. Not only that, but seeing how his own wife and friends treat the Emorys is also an example to him of their wrath on minorities in general and that they could easily do the same to him, a horror he manages to avoid by hiding and running away. Something that not all minorities can do.
- Him and Betty not having children might not be because they're infertile or he's simply a Henpecked Husband, but because he doesn't want to have children with her or possibly even make love with her for that to happen.
- Even before things fell apart, it really did seem that Clarke loved Betty, and now he'll never see her again, with her storming off to destinations unknown because he wouldn't help her hurt the Emorys. And this was roughly the best possible outcome for him — it's scary to imagine Betty's wrath upon him for not only using her for money, but also being a promiscuous gay in everyone's eyes.
