Written by John Robin Baitz And Joe Baken
Directed by David Gelb
Daniel: "Why am I here?"
Roman: "You know why. They're coming for you, father."
I'll admit, while I've heard of the term "backrooms" in passing, it's not something I've massively looked into. Going by the reactions for this episode, the show might not have nailed the concept altogether.
Personally, that doesn't surprise me. Too often the show has these great ideas but often due to the shortened length, they don't always pull them off so good. My bigger concern was this episode slightly wasting the talented Michael Imperioli a tad. I mean he's fine but he could've been given more to do here.
The crux of this episode had Imperioli's Hollywood writer, Daniel Hauseman-Burger, grieving the disappearance of his son, Roman (Matthew Eby). It's a grief that caused him to separate from his wife, Riva (Natalie Gold) and also alienate himself from his agent, Aaron (David Pittu).
In fact as the episode unfolded and we saw through flashbacks that Daniel was more fixated on his writing career than his family, there was the aforementioned backrooms themselves. Daniel found himself venturing through to the point of them driving him mad but not providing him with the answers he needed in regards to his son.
Fortunately there was prisoner Eli (Matthew Maher) to fill in the gaps. It turned out that in order to get the most of the backrooms experience, you needed to tell the truth. For Daniel, that meant confronting a part of himself that he really didn't want to face up to. However for Daniel, he no longer had the option of denial.
The twist of Daniel being the one who murdered his own son was a bit shocking, I won't lie. It's a good twist, tying into real time as his awful deed was uncovered and then there was his reunion with Roman in the backrooms. Did Daniel end up in a form of purgatory while awaiting Hell? This episode of course very much decided to leave that one up to interpretation.
- Joe Baken and Jon Robin Baitz have been co-writing episodes of Grotesquerie and Doctor Odyssey, only this time there was no Ryan Murphy present.
- The Red Lady looked unsettling enough as did the others that terrorised Daniel in the backrooms.
- It seems that Daniel was talented enough to have won an Emmy by his nightmare sequence.
- Chronology: It does seem to be a 2024 setting, though the general creepypasta is a couple of years old now.
Overall, I thought Backrooms was generally okay. A bit of a weak opener to the second half of the third season. It was a concept that could've been better explored and as I said earlier, it did waste Michael Imperioli a tad. Generally meh.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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