Next door to Mark and Eleanor is another parent and child, Naomi and Isaiah. The aforementioned budding magician, Isaiah (Ian Foreman) is near Eleanor’s age and has a long list of bullies. His father Frank (Ato Essandoh) has become absent, though he has previously made clunky efforts to pull himself together and be more present. But his mother Naomi (Anika Noni Rose) is trying to hold it all together, which includes supporting Isaiah’s love for magic even though she worries about the other kids picking on him. She finds a shred of relief when Isaiah makes a new friend in Eleanor.
Naomi is a homicide detective investigating a series of gruesome murders in the New York underground, which may be connected to some type of new pill that puts lights in people’s eyes. That Naomi’s path becomes intertwined with Mark’s night hunting might seem like too convenient, but it works within the show’s intimate scale. “Let the Right One In” is more or less a series of interconnected New York Stories, in which everything and everyone is held close to the chest.
A new storyline is added in the form of Grace Gummer’s Claire Logan, begrudgingly taking on the work of her father Arthur (Zeljko Ivanek). Now on his deathbed, Arthur too has been looking for a cure, for Claire’s vampire brother, who nearly burns alive in the show’s opening sequence after standing out in the sun. Claire is disgusted by her father’s history as a painkiller manufacturer that make him a Sackler stand-in, but she also wants to ease her brother’s suffering. With the help of an enigmatic assistant played by Nick Stahl, Claire takes over her father’s business and the illegal operations that come with it.
This third is easily the slowest, basing many of its big beats on emotional outbursts, exposition dumps, and failed science experiments with CGI chimpanzees. But it works as a chorus for this show’s different ideas of predator and prey, while affirming how characters are rarely distinctly bad or good in this world. “Let the Right One In” does not allow an ease in what decisions people make that then change the lives of others.
Bouncing back and forth between these people, the series also stays true to its most engaging facet: the emotional stakes of these relationships. Everyone, even most of the vampires, is vulnerable, lonely, and fighting for their sense of self. This “Let the Right One In” feels bigger than the long-lasting menace of bloodsuckers; it’s a story of three different households trying to navigate the pain that threatens to define them. These New Yorkers are desperately looking for a cure but find something equally as formidable in the compassion of others.
Five episodes screened for review. “Let the Right One In” premieres on Showtime on October 7th.