‘The Underground Railroad’ Season 3 Recap: Crawlspace

In reviewing the premiere of The Underground Railroad, the word “dystopia” came up as a description of the slave state of Georgia—an attempt to apply this powerful fictional designation to the very real nightmare regime of American slavery. In reviewing the second, the word’s opposite, “utopia,” was used to in describe the illusory nature of South Carolina’s genteel “betterment” policies for its Black residents, all of whom still live and thrive only at the pleasure of their patronizing white overlords.

What I didn’t count on is for The Underground Railroad to traffic in out-and-out, alternate-history dystopianism. That’s what Cora finds when the Railroad runs into a roadblock, stranding her in North Carolina. There’s no betterment here. There’s not even slavery. There’s genocide.

As Cora learns from Martin, the station agent for the now-defunct Railroad stop, South Carolina has outlawed being Black entirely, under pain of death. In a horrific vista, the bodies of lynching victims—apparently both Black people and any white person who dares to help them alike—line the roadway into Martin’s town. “The savagery that Man is capable of when he believes his cause to be just,” Martin muses. He’ll have good reason to reflect on this line himself soon enough.

The Underground Railroad Episode 3 (“Chapter 3: North Carolina”) creates an atmosphere reminiscent of folk- and fundamentalist-horror works like Midsommar or the origin-story episode of Them. In Martin’s town, the people gather round an ornate cross altar, leaving candles and lamps to keep it illuminated when it isn’t providing a backdrop for the ritual execution of any Black person unfortunate enough to be caught within North Carolina’s confines. This, says the town constable (David Wilson Barnes), is what God’s vision of America truly is.

Cora does not get to see much of it. She stows away in a tiny crawlspace above Martin’s attic, a space she shares with a young girl named Grace (Mychal-Bella Bowman). Grace helps her learn the laws of survival in their terrible circumstances, during which they run the risk of incurring the anger of Martin’s far less committed-to-the-cause wife Ethel (Lily Rabe, steely and frightening) or out and out exposure by the family’s Irish maid, Fional (Lucy Faust). (The concept of Irish immigrants stepping in to fill the roles once occupied by slaves because otherwise these people couldn’t take care of themselves is the single note of dark comedy in this otherwise uniformly grim story.)

And then who should come strolling into town but Ridgeway, the slave-catcher with seemingly supernatural powers of detection, with his sidekick Homer in tow. The pair see through Martin’s feigned illness and the peephole in the attic eaves, and Homer sneaks in to spot Ethel frantically trying to get Cora back upstairs; rather than lead the hunters to Grace, Cora emerges from hiding to accept her fate. In the ensuing row, Ethel is carted off by the townsfolk, Martin agrees to show Ridgeway the location of the Underground Railroad, and Fiona burns their house down. Yes, with Grace still inside. Yes, you can hear her screaming. Yes, it’s awful.

So, too, is the state of Martin by the time of his execution by an associate of Ridgeway. We learn that he has been deliberately “damming” the course of the Railroad with dynamite, presumably to alleviate the responsibility of shepherding Black refugees through his genocidal state, though also quite possibly to consolidate his control over Cora and Grace as well. No wonder he agreed to let Cora come back to his house, without so much as warning her about North Carolina’s murderousness: He may have thwarted the Railroad, but still possessed by a glimmer of conscience, he could not bring himself to leave her in the tunnel to starve knowing no train would be coming anymore. But he’s dead now, and by episode’s end, Cora’s problems are once again hers and hers alone.

Though this is thoroughly upsetting television, its studious tension is mitigated somewhat, to its detriment, by composer Nicholas Britell’s slightly overactive score; I found myself wishing for long silences to match director Barry Jenkins’s long takes. (One of these takes, at a village book-burning ceremony called “the Culling,” stares into the fire so long that the camera seems to go night-blind afterwards.) Nevertheless, it places Cora in yet another do-or-die situation by having her fall into Ridgeway’s hands—once again, something I didn’t see coming this early in the series. The surprises are all very hard to swallow, but the power to surprise is no small thing.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Underground Railroad Episode 3 on Amazon Prime