Oftentimes, the most nightmarish moment in a thriller is not when the multi-limbed monster or contorted white-faced woman emerges. Instead, that moment comes shortly after: The protagonist runs to someone, frantically explaining this horrible thing they saw, and as they stand there breathless, the other person’s face settles in a polite but patronizing disbelief.
I have a deep-seated fear of being perceived as unreliable — of knowing something is true, and being unable to convince anyone else of it. That torturous reality, of being seen as fundamentally nonsensical, is at the heart of “The Boroughs.” This new science fiction thriller series, created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Mathews, highlights how people are particularly vulnerable to being perceived as unreliable when they reach old age.
Horror has historically provoked fear using the tangible and the supernatural: monsters, hauntings and bloodshed. Recently, the genre has turned inward. The psychological thriller, defined by paranoia, distortion and grief, has paved the way for the horror and thriller renaissance we find ourselves in today.
For the curmudgeonly protagonist Sam Cooper, the unreliable label materializes shortly after his daughter admits him to a seemingly quaint retirement community, the Boroughs, in the middle of a New Mexican desert.
What makes this community peculiar is that the founders seem to have discovered immortality through a kind of fountain of youth, a concept borrowed from the 1985 film “Cocoon.” However, this condition comes at the expense of their residents — more precisely, their memory and cognitive capacities. The founders, a couple frozen in 1940s splendor, deploy creatures throughout the community that tap residents’ brain fluid as they sleep.
“While age is often presented as a thief of memory, what becomes increasingly horrifying is that it may first be a thief of likeness, even before we lose cognitive capacities.”
By the time he escapes the residence to plead with his daughter, the staff has so thoroughly undermined his credibility that she reluctantly authorizes his transfer to the Boroughs’ most restrictive memory-care unit: the Manor.
Unfortunately, weaponizing old age is not unique to Addiss and Mathews’ world. The creatures and villainous founders are simply an exaggeration of how the West treats the elderly. I think of my grandma, who was devout, stern and caring.
After losing her ability to speak in an accident, I watched as others belittled her, as if she no longer stood at the center of a family she created. Although she slowly learned to speak in broken English again, people still spoke over her, decided what was best for her and, if what she was attempting to say did not come out right the first time, judged that it wasn’t worth parsing at all. This happened everywhere, but especially in hospital settings, where doctors would decide for themselves when she was actually in pain, or when she was just “whining.”
Seeing her like this revealed something far more unsettling than a failure of communication: the way age and a loss of communicative capacity can strip someone of perceived intelligence and authority, even over their own life. And how horrible it must have felt for her perception to no longer be considered real.
This was not a cognitive decline, but a disproportionate, gradual loss of credibility that isolated her. “The Boroughs” draws attention to the severity of this all-too-common phenomenon: the way we cast aside the minds we cannot immediately understand and that do not arrive in the forms we expect. Then, our memory of them gives way to who the world insists they have become.
While age is often presented as a thief of memory, what becomes increasingly horrifying is that it may first be a thief of likeness, even before we lose cognitive capacities.
In grounding its horror in a structural, everyday erasure, “The Boroughs” — conceptually, at least — proves itself a worthy addition to the current psychological thriller landscape, which tends to pose age as physical decay.
That being said, the scripted dialogue was on par with that of “Stranger Things” season five, which is to say it was trite. I blame the Duffer Brothers, who were executive producers for both.
Amid the unfolding secret of their retirement community, there are moments of supposed turmoil and vulnerability littered with sci-fi cliches. On occasion, the elderly would shoot out kitschy remarks at one another.
To substantiate my claim, I offer a quote from a resident, spoken with total seriousness: “Hey, take it down a notch, cowboy.” And that is not the only time someone referentially uses the word “cowboy.”
What was supposed to be a community bound together by their sharp minds and commitment to autonomy instead seemed like a group of people entirely unfamiliar with one another — a hollow imitation of the profound isolation the series should have explored.
The show’s executional collapse seems to be a symptom of having the Duffer Brothers in the room, unable to escape their own worst habits.
Most notably, the brothers struggle not to lean on a cliché “Guys, that’s it! I have a plan!” scene — the eureka moment. They frequently reach for the humorous technobabble trope or the one where an everyday object conjures a haphazard epiphany for the character, which have become low-hanging fruit since “Doctor Who.” Perhaps this is why so many viewers have accused the latest “Stranger Things” season of seeming AI-written; it too fiercely adheres to stale genre conventions.
After seeing glimpses of writing reminiscent of this throughout the first episodes of “The Boroughs,” I braced myself for its eureka moment. And then there it was, a mere four episodes in: Sam and two other residents devised a plan to catch the brain fluid-sucking monsters.
“All right. New plan. We get it to come to us.”
“You mean, like, invite it over to watch the game?”
“No. To dinner.”
Whoever the culprit, quippy writing was, unfortunately, not enough to distract me from the very real, very terrifying social condemnation that “The Boroughs” depicts: losing credibility before you actually lose your mind. And, oftentimes, this loss of credibility can be the very thing that causes you to lose your mind.
Audrey Green SC ’27 is, shamefully, a big proponent of #conformitygate.
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