WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Nevers, Episode 5, "Hanged," which premiered Sunday on HBO.
In The Nevers' previous episode, Mundi caught the Touched serial killer Maladie after she came to the police station to demand that he make the papers stop reporting that she was behind Mary Brighton's murder. As she explains it, "I only kill angels," and apparently Mary wasn't one. Nonetheless, Maladie has killed many people, so at the beginning of the latest episode, "Hanged," a judge sentences her to die by hanging in the public square, an event the majority of London seems eager to witness. Yet, in the end, it turns out Maladie's execution is just another way for her to take out the spectators who would watch her die -- even as she's devised a way to ensure she doesn't die at all.
In last week's episode, a new character was introduced: Effie Boyle, the only reporter who seems to be defending the Touched in the press. In this week's episode Effie is back attempting to land a last-minute interview with Maladie before she's hanged. Yet, while Mundi won't grant her request, when she enters his office, she shows a particular interest in a photo of one of the murder victims on his wall. It's a murder Mundi was called in to investigate in The Nevers' first episode. The people who found the body attributed the murder to Maladie, but Mundi knew it was the work of a copycat. Nonetheless, he wasn't able to identify the victim or the killer, so the case remains open. After seeing the pictures of the murder, Effie comments on the poor execution of the copycat crime. She also observes that she has a coat just like the one the victim is wearing.
Later, at the public execution, Mundi notices Penance's presence moments before the plan she's designed to rescue Maladie begins. Yet, when Maladie jumps through the hole in the platform and hangs herself instead of welcoming the help, Mundi immediately realizes Maladie wanted to die. He works out that she wanted to bring as many people to watch her die as possible. Unfortunately, his realization comes way too late, and as he springs into action, dozens of the people holding onto the metal barriers guarding the gallows are electrocuted by the Colonel, a member of Maladie's gang, while the rest panic and start a riot. Effie Boyle is there to witness it all and even manages to pull Harriet away from a crowd that's trampling her.
After the crowd has cleared out, the authorities lift Maladie's body out of the gallows as Mundi watches. One of her shoes falls off, revealing a foot missing several toes, and Mundi realizes the body in front of him isn't Maladie's at all. In The Nevers' second episode, we learned that Clara, a member of Maladie's gang who isn't Touched, had cut off her toes as a sacrifice in the hopes it would bring on a turn. While it didn't work, Clara apparently agreed to impersonate Maladie and get herself captured by the police, a choice that led her to sacrifice her life.
It's this conclusion that causes everything to come together in Mundi's mind. While Clara was masquerading as Maladie, Maladie was impersonating Effie Boyle, who she'd killed weeks earlier. However, she didn't treat the body in the same way she normally treated her victims. Effie's death was a means to an end, a way to give Maladie access to Mundi and other parts of society she couldn't have as herself, and a way to publish articles defending the Touched.
Whether Maladie came up with her plan to have Clara impersonate her when she murdered Effie is unclear, but regardless of when it happened, Maladie has proven she's much more of a mastermind than anyone realized. Given how effectively Maladie has played the role of Effie, should we assume Maladie is a role she's playing as well?
While it seems like a convenient plot contrivance that Maladie's been in custody for weeks and no one's caught on to the fact that she isn't the genuine article, in the world of The Nevers, the revelation that Maladie's able to carry out such sophisticated plans makes her even more dangerous than she originally seemed. And the fact that many of the things she's done, from publishing a final "interview" with Maladie to the very public murder of dozens of bystanders, have only further eroded perceptions of the Touched, it could be that she's working to bring them down just as fervently as Lord Massen is.
Created by Joss Whedon, The Nevers stars Laura Donnelly, Olivia Williams, James Norton, Tom Riley, Ann Skelly, Ben Chaplin, Pip Torrens, Zackary Momoh, Amy Manson, Nick Frost, Rochelle Neil, Eleanor Tomlinson and Denis O’Hare. New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
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