Them Season 2 The Scare Ending Explained- Edmund Gaines, The Ties To Season 1, The Red Haired Man And Da Tap Dance Man

Them Season 2: The Scare, set in 1991, seemed like a completely different story than Season 1 of Them. Prime Video’s Anthology series was sold as stand-alone stories. This time, police officer Dawn Reeve(Deborah Ayorinde) is a divorced mom of a teenage boy who is investigating a string of grisly murders in Los Angeles. Simultaneously, we are introduced to Edmund Gaines(Luke James), an early thirties struggling actor whose mental health is seriously in question. Creator Little Marvin uses the same mix of supernatural dread and the underlying terror of living with racism and sexism in America.

Dawn faces rampant racism and sexism on the job. Her father was an officer, and she genuinely has a knack for investigating, even if she sometimes loses herself in the work. She is surrounded by predominately white men who range from passively unsupportive to vicious and vile. Her son struggles with crippling OCD and anxiety and lives in a constant state of fight or flight. Her mother harbors a decades-old secret that keeps her up at night, and bodies continue to be found in hideous positions.

Edmund’s story, which runs parallel to Dawn’s for the majority of Them Season 2, has problems of his own. He works at a Five Nights At Freddy’s style restaurant, where he wears a pig costume and interacts with the kids. He dreams of being a famous actor, however. His auditions, which we witness in excruciating detail, are terrible. He can’t control his self-doubt and doesn’t seem to have much talent. He has a tragic past that haunts him, and his fragile mental health makes him prone to outbursts and erratic behavior. After a gruesome encounter with a foster family who returned him to the state after they conceived a biological child, he spirals into madness. As we find out in the final act of Them: The Scare, though, he was a product of the past.

The ending of Them Season 2: The Scare

For the first half of Them Season 2, we are led to believe one of Dawn’s fellow office Detective McKinney was behind all of the murders. He and a gang of like-minded male officers had been terrorizing the community for decades. They targeted minorities and attacked them when given even the slightest chance. They all stood together to protect one another if suspicions ever arose. Dawn learned about their group from a retired officer who had been forced off the force when he refused to join them. Many of the witnesses to the current murders reported seeing a red-haired man outside their window. McKinney was a redhead, and his behavior was so awful it was easy to assume he and his group were the killers.

The way the bodies were left and the brutality of the attacks seemed like humans couldn’t possibly perpetrate them, even a group of them. The closer Dawn got to finding out the truth, the more Edmund’s story began dovetailing with hers. When it is revealed that he is Dawn’s twin brother and the woman who raised her was actually her adoptive mother, most of the pieces fall into place. Edmund was abused and neglected for most of his life, and as a result, anger and regret left him unstable and powerless against outside forces. Succumbing to fear, he became the red-haired man, a Raggedy Andy bastardization whose only job was to scare and hurt. He killed Donovan before committing suicide. Ever since, he has systematically been going after Dawn, her family, and anyone connected to them.

Two years ago, he went to Dawn’s house and acted so odd that Dawn asked him to leave. Her rejection of him and his already fragile state is what allowed The Scare to worm its way inside and possess him. It is why he took Donovan and killed him, and it is why he became The Scare after committing suicide.

The Scare gets inside his victim’s minds and makes them afraid of what scares them most. For some, it is becoming what others see. Dawn fears being seen as a hysterical woman. Dawn’s mother worries about being a bad mother for keeping the truth from Dawn by returning Edmund to foster care and lying to Dawn. Dawn’s son has his anxiety of impending nebulous doom used against him. After Dawn tried to save a child from an exorcism, she saw firsthand what the Red-Haired Man could do. The young boy died alone in her custody, and Dawn was suspended pending an investigation into his death.

After finally remembering everything that happened to her inside Bernice Mott’s house, she realized that what she saw that day and recorded was a memory, not what was actually there. She and Edmund had been abused by Bernice Mott, who lived there. Edmund got revenge on her, and he had been tormenting her before her death. He stuffed the first victim in the cabinet because that is where he would hide when she wanted to punish him. Dawn also realized that Edmund was her brother, and he had tried to protect her. She also fully realized that Athena had gaslit her into believing her brother was an imaginary friend. Poor Edmund was difficult, and two families returned him to Bernice because they couldn’t handle his special needs.

In the final moments, Dawn can convince Edmund that he isn’t a monster and to release Kel and not harm her. It worked, and Edmund died in the same way that all the others had died previously. Dawn found her son, and her husband was not fatally injured. Six months after the attack, we see Dawn with her son and ex-husband, and everything is better. She left the force when they exonerated her for the child’s death and for Detective McKinney’s shooting but refused to reinstate her. Dawn seems better for walking away from the force, however. She and her ex-husband are reuniting, and her son seems more carefree. All of that changes, however, with one final twist and the appearance of Da Tap Dance Man.

Da Tap Dance Man was one of the main antagonists from Them Season 1, now called Covenant. He encouraged guilt and rage to overtake his victims. In Season 1, he preyed on Henry’s guilt for not being able to prevent Chester’s murder or Lucky’s rape. He is racism in all its forms. He is prejudice, hatred, and violence personified. As was witnessed at the end of Them Season 1, he is also white. He is a constant specter waiting to whisper in sympathetic ears and encourage hate or influence those who are disadvantaged to become what they were most afraid of being.

How was Them Season 1 related to Them Season 2?

We thought we were through with the Emorys, but cycles of violence are hard to break. Ruby was the biological mother of Edmund and Dawn. We don’t know what happened to the rest of the family, but it is distinctly possible her parents were arrested, and both girls were placed into foster care. Ruby leaves her babies with Mott because she says she can’t raise them with what she experienced in her past, and their father is gone. She left them with twin Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, which became a symbol of racism and the cycle of violence. Da Tap Dance Man has been waiting for his time with the Emory’s descendants. hauntsted Edmund until goesent cr,azy and comesing for Dawn and her family now.

The Red-Haired Man manifested all of Edmund’s pain and fear. That is why he calls himself The Scare; he derives power from fear. It would be easy to say Edmund became a vengeful ghost who haunted everyone he thought wronged him. It is much deeper than that, though. Edmund just became what he was most afraid of becoming—a violent spirit who terrified and hurt everyone around him. He was hurt that he had to live with the trauma of what happened to him as a child while Dawn lived in blissful ignorance. The Scare used that to control Edmund and eventually possess him.

He tries to convince Dawn to join her brother and become another Scare, which we see in the shadows behind her, but she rejects him and manages to reach Edmund. He becomes the next victim of the Scare, and the spirit disappears. The Scare is gone from their family, but it will never go away as long as there is hate in the world. It went after anyone connected to Dawn and those to whom it related. The Kwan sisters and Benito’s family were easy prey.

The invisible threads of our past are hard to sever, red or otherwise. Likely, Hiram Epps, or the Black Hat Man, who was also Da Tap Dance Man, has been regrouping since he terrorized the Emorys. He made a pact with the Devil, and there is no going back. It’s possible he also created The Scare, although it feels more poetic that The Scare was born out of Edmund’s trauma and not Epps’ sick imagination.

Sometimes, there is evil so permissive it rots everything it touches. The inescapable decay it leaves is ruinous. Them Season 2 The Scare, shows that there are things that stick with you no matter how far and fast you run. Like Season 1, Them Season 2 shows that supernatural horror and everyday atrocities are equally scary. Season 2 drips with tension. It makes you feel everything Dawn feels, and you are always waiting for the worst to happen, just like Kel. That’s the whole point. Fear and hate are dual sides of a coin. Compassion and understanding are the foils. Acceptance of ourselves and each other is the key to defeating Epps and all the other evils in the world. If Them Season 3 gets greenlit, I unfortunately expect to see more of the same.