PLOT SUMMARY: When a new priest arrives, the people living in an isolated island witness miracles and omens.
There's some appeal to small towns and tight-knit communities.
You grow up in a place where everyone knows your name. Everyone knows pretty much everything about you. You will never feel alone because you won't be in a large city full of strangers. You will always have someone to greet.
In small communities, people often help each other out too. How many stories have we heard of people coming together to help their neighbours? How many times have you heard similar stories taking place in large cities?
That's the appeal of small towns especially those based on islands because what else is there to do apart from knowing and getting invested in the lives of your neighbours?
The drawback? Everyone knows your business. Your secrets are hardly yours anymore. One mistake, and you will be stigmatized forever.
Midnight Mass is based on such a community. Crockett Island is far from the mainland and it takes more than an hour to get there via ferry.
Yet the people are content with their simple lives and their neighbours' personal lives even though they are not personal anymore.
Caution: Spoilers Ahead!
MIDNIGHT MASS Plot
The story opens with Riley, a young man who is sitting by the side of the road watching the paramedics revive a young woman. He was drunk. He got in an accident and suffered a few scratches. The woman, on the other hand, loses her life. He says a little prayer and a medic reminds him of the unfairness of it all. Riley gets to live. The young woman has her youth and life taken away.
Riley is sentenced to imprisonment and on the first day, he's given a bible. As he lays down on the bed, he is haunted by the young woman whose life he snatched away.
Four years pass, and we are taken to Crockett Island, where a woman is awaiting the arrival of Monsignor Pruitt. Instead, she sees a young man carrying a large trunk but she doesn't pay him any attention. Her name is Bev and she is disappointed to learn the elderly Monsignor John Pruitt did not make it to the ferry.
The next passenger to arrive is Riley. His father deliberately avoids him yet his mother makes sure he feels welcomed. Riley understands the situation and tries to be polite during dinner and reconnects with his younger brother Warren.
But when he reveals he isn't too much into going to church, his father walks away in a huff. Later, however, he comes into the room to tell him that he would have to go to church for the sake of his mother although he doesn't need to take communion as it wouldn't be right.
Later that night, Bev sees a light in the house next to the church and assumes Monsignor has returned. She goes inside and meets with someone else.
The next morning, at church, everyone is surprised to see another man taking place of Monsignor Pruitt. The man introduces himself as Father Paul and tells everyone he's a replacement as the Monsignor recovers from an illness on the mainland.
He delivers his sermon and everyone takes a liking to him. We meet a disabled girl Leeza, her father is the mayor. Then there's Joe, the burly drunkard who accidentally shot Leeza causing her disability. He also has a dog. Then there's Erin Greene who is pregnant but without a husband, and her friend Dr Sarah and her mother Mildred who has dementia. And then there's Sheriff Hassan who is reminded he's different because he's a Muslim and his son Ali.
While everyone takes, Riley doesn't and Father Paul does take notice of it.
Later, Father Paul spends a moment with Leeza and sympathizes with her. Warren clearly has a crush on Leeza and helps her whenever he can.
A pivotal moment takes place wherein Leeza is beckoned by Father Paul to stand up and take communion. She doesn't hesitate and immediately gets up and climbs stairs too.
Everyone is shocked.
More surprises keep coming. Father Paul is revealed to be the much younger Monsignor John Pruitt. Joe's dog is poisoned and it is insinuated the Bev is behind it because she is in charge of the pantry where rat poison is kept. Erin suddenly loses her baby. There is no indication she was ever pregnant in the first place.
Monsignor Pruitt thinks he was blessed by an angel and given a gift when actually he's been turned into a vampire and needs his "sacrament" which is blood from the "angel". He feeds on Joe and feels no remorse because Joe was a bad person, to begin with.
Mildred is not only cured of her dementia, but she becomes younger every day.
Riley's weekly meetings with Father Paul turns into a nightmare when he catches him in a lie and returns later only to find the Angel pouring its blood into a decanter. Father Paul mutters a regretful "Oh" before the Angel attacks and feeds on Riley.
MIDNIGHT MASS Ending Explained
Riley is turned into a vampire too and he goes to Erin to tell her the truth, even warning her to escape to the mainland but knowing she wouldn't because she was kind and courageous and would try to save everyone.
She does exactly that after Riley burns and disintegrates before her eyes. Riley had his own scientific beliefs regarding death, but when he dies, he finds the girl he had accidentally killed, taking his hand and leading him away, showing that she has forgiven him and that his regret has given him a place in heaven.
Erin returns to the island to warn everyone, is dismissed and only finds support from her friend Sarah who believes her because she's seen her mother recover.
Erin, Sarah and Mildred do try to escape the island, but the ferry is conveniently no longer in service because it is almost Easter and it is time for the Midnight Mass.
Erin decides to attend the service.
On the other side, the sheriff struggles with his son wanting to change his faith and trying to convince his father to come with him. At first, the sheriff declines but then agrees only when Ali tells him that another miracle is promised.
The miracle is Father Paul revealing he is Monsignor John Pruitt and that for weeks he has been feeding everyone a gift from God via communion. All they have to do now is kill themselves by drinking poison. They all willingly do when they are assured they will wake up minutes later.
They do but chaos ensues when Monsignor Pruitt is shot by Mildred who tries to stop him from convincing people to kill themselves. While he recovers slowly from the gunshot wound, Bev takes charge and does the opposite of the Monsignor's instructions. She lets out everyone who go on an eating frenzy.
They want blood and will attack anyone, even the innocent neighbours.
Warren and Leeza go find a rowboat to escape. Erin, Sara, the Sheriff and Riley's mother try to stop the killings and come up with the idea to burn all the boats so that islanders won't escape and infect the people on the mainland.
Bev meanwhile is obsessed with the idea of creating Noah's Ark and instructs for all the buildings except for the rec centre, to be burned down.
Later the Monsignor recovers and sort of apologizes to Mildred for letting everything get out of hand. He didn't want to create monsters, but heal and help the islanders after they suffer a financial loss following an oil spill that destroyed the fishing industry.
Mildred is young now and it is revealed that Sarah is the Monsignor's daughter. He leaves the church to find Bev taking charge and asking him to be a shepherd to the others. She also tells him to choose who deserves to be given a place in the rec centre before dawn approaches.
The Monsignor is disgusted. He doesn't believe God would want him to choose who gets to live. He invites people into the church but finds Sarah throwing gasoline everywhere.
He tells her to escape and reveals he is her father. Just then, she is shot and the Monsignor is devastated that his plan for the community has gone so wrong that he ended up creating monsters that killed his daughter.
Meanwhile, Erin and the Sheriff have doused the rec centre in gasoline. The Sheriff is shot while Erin is attacked by the Angel. She has a knife that she uses to put cuts on his wings as he feeds on her. She is about to die and in her last moments, sees Riley sitting beside her.
The Sheriff is taken away by his son who wants to perform a Muslim prayer before they die.
Bev is in a quandary when the church and the rec centre burn down. There is no other shelter from dawn. She watches the Sheriff practice his faith and gets smug. Then watching the dawn approach, she desperately tries to dig a hole where she can hide.
The rest of the people gather to sing songs. The world is burning around them, and they are going to die horrible, fiery deaths. But this is the last time to show community spirit, so okay, let's sing.
Warren and Leeza are on the boat and in the middle of the sea. They watch their island burn down. They see the Angel barely able to fly with damaged wings. The singing stops and Leeza announces she can't feel her legs anymore. Is it because the Angel died? He dies and the miracles dies with him? So there is no longer a risk for Warren and Leeza to turn vampires, right? Because the main Angel, who changed everyone with his blood is killed?
The whole story can be recapped in a couple of hundred words. The problem is, that the actual show takes seven hours to tell the story.
Midnight Mass feels more like a discussion about religion. In the first three episodes, the monologues and the discussions are engaging. We get to see things from a different perspective. We get to learn about the characters and try to guess where the story is headed.
In the episodes afterwards, the monologues become a deviation and the pacing suffers considerably. The truth has been revealed, now what?
It looks like every character's thought is told. Every. Single. Thought.
And the problem lies with the way that it is no longer about two sides of the coin, it becomes about the one side and how that is right.
What do we think about death? Half an hour is given away to Erin and Riley to discuss what they think about death. The problem is that Erin has just suffered a very personal loss. She should be trying to figure out how her baby simply disappeared from her womb. Instead, she spends an hour talking about the cosmos, religion, and who knows what. All so that the characters can be thought of as those with profound knowledge.
Editing was clearly needed there. We have just been handed a mystery and a surprising twist about the charismatic Father Paul. Let's move ahead, shall we? Rather than dwell on lengthy monologues that are not necessary to move the story ahead.
At least in the previous episodes, the discussions are concise and give an insight into character behavior especially when the Sheriff finds a Bible in his son's backpack and believes there is an agenda to convert him.
Bev disagrees with him and tells him with what she believes to be a convincing argument, that she should let his son decide where to search for God.
We get to learn how the Sheriff is afraid his son would change his faith without getting to learn everything about it. We also learn Bev will do whatever to get her say.
At least the discussions led us somewhere.
There are more instances in the story which could be considered plot holes. Ali tells his father he had converted for his wife. But he reveals a story in which he's been Muslim since he was a child.
Riley's father in the end, very conveniently tells his wife that he is hungry but that he doesn't feel the urge to be violent with his neighbours and the "gift" doesn't change who you are.
So everyone else on the island was inherently violent? Especially the mayor? The very mayor who was against the idea of dumping Joe's body in the sea even though he was responsible for putting his daughter in a wheelchair?
Riley too shows no urge to eat after consuming some blood. He watches his parents and brother sleep, and somehow managed to write them letters and put them in envelopes and leave it by their bedside before going off to meet Erin.
Then he takes a long time to tell his story when Erin should have told him to just shut up and tell her where he had been the whole day?
And the turnaround by the Monsignor wasn't completely believable either. He wanted to create God's army and had to problems feeding the islanders blood. But when he learned that Bev was taking leadership, he decided that all this was wrong. In the last episode, he decides he has made a mistake after all.
Okay, so he was trying to feed on cats in the beginning and not on the islanders, but since he had finished off the cat population, how did he intend to feed the islanders after they were turned? His idea was to just keep the doors to the church closed and give them an orientation?
The show has its thrilling moments, no doubt, and we do get to see a lot of cast members from previous shows by Mike Flanagan. The cast does a good job, especially Hamish Linklater who brings shades and layers to his character as the Monsignor.
However, there isn't much to see from Zach Gilford's Riley except for a frown throughout the series. No matter what happens to him, he's stuck with one expression throughout.
Midnight Mass is definitely a must-watch show but perhaps not a show you would rewatch again without fast-forwarding through the droning monologues.
Tighter editing would have greatly helped this show.
Scare Scale: 3.5/5
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