Movies & TV The Terror: Devil in Silver The Terror: Devil in Silver Is Altering the Themes of Its Source Material in “Disturbed” The rat will, sadly, not be getting a POV episode. By Alex Brown | Published on May 14, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share The second episode of The Terror: Devil in Silver has Dorry stealing cookies, a teenager beating the ever-loving crap out of Pepper, and Pepper coming face to claws with the horror haunting New Hyde hospital. Pepper’s 72-hour hold is now a two-week hold, and he isn’t happy about it. Come hell or high water, he is getting out. Our dearly departed cop wasn’t the only one trying to get someone from the outside to help bring awareness to New Hyde. Coffee spends his days calling folks and recording them in a binder. “I mean to get the world to come in and see what’s here.” But just like the staff, the people outside dismiss him. No one looks into it. No one takes him seriously. No one cares. After his latest call to the comptroller fails, New Hyde comes calling, literally. A man’s voice on the other end of the pay phone tells Coffee to keep Pepper there or he’ll kill him. “The new man must not leave the hospital. Make sure he stays.” Pepper doesn’t get the message. He searches for Josephine’s keys he saw under the bench in the first episode, but he’s not thinking clearly. If he breaks out, obviously they’ll go after him and he’ll probably go to actual jail. But he’s angry and reckless and often only thinks about solving whatever problem is right in front of his face. He ignores the root cause of the problem and the likely consequences of his actions. He needs drums, so he buys drums, even though that makes things worse for Marisol and him down the line. Pepper thinks of himself as a spice that gives things a kick, but he’s also just kind of a dick. It seems to be mostly performative, like he’s trained himself to behave that way to get attention or diffuse a tough situation. As soon as he sees that dickishness causes harm, he typically backpeddles (or, he does when he isn’t drugged out of his noggin). He may make mean comments, but he isn’t a truly mean person. That said, when given the choice to help himself or hurt Josephine, he makes the selfish choice because getting out is the immediate problem. If he took a moment to think, he might have saved himself a world of hurt. Pepper begs Marisol for help getting out, but what can she do? When she leaves at the close of visiting hours, Pepper chases after her and accidentally knocks down the grandmother of patient Loochie (the actor is credited as “b”). Loochie flips out and beats the stuffing out of him, but he’s the one punished for it. After drugging him up even more and strapping him to his bed (complete with a mouth gag), Pepper is prime pickings for the evil in the hospital. Something oozes out of the ceiling hole above his bed. The only thing keeping him from getting eaten alive are those straps.  Scotch Tape is in a real “glass houses” situation with Miss Chris. He’s happy to poke at her and make it seem like she’s the one hurting patients capriciously and he’s being helpful and considerate. After all, she ordered him to strap Pepper down and break Charlie’s bones while he cuts the hair of an older Black patient and lets Loochie threaten people. That said, he also goes out of his way to intimidate and hurt Pepper. On the other other hand, he’s not a bad person. None of the staff are. Josephine is trying to send money home to her family. Scotch Tape is trying to finish his medical residency to become a physical therapist. Who knows what Miss Chris, Anand, or Badger are there for.  The scene at the book club has a lot of layers. Dr. Badger doesn’t know his patients at all and doesn’t seem interested in getting to know them. They attend because they are forced to—“Everyone in here has to comply. You gotta take this pill, eat this sludge, endure this torture, this humiliation. If you don’t, you get a needle in the ass. You got 1,000ccs of knockout magic.”—and he gets to tell himself he’s helping. In reality, he treats the patients like children. He reads One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest like he’s Robin Williams inspiring a new generation of the dead poet’s society rather than a man telling a bunch of other grown adults what they already know. One of the old Black men Pepper sarcastically calls Statler and Waldorf (Larry Marshall) refers to the main character not as McMurphy but as Nicholson, as in Jack Nicholson who played the character in the movie. He’s old enough that he probably saw it in the theater when it came out in 1976. The younger patients probably read the book in high school. Badger isn’t enlightening anyone. While Badger acts like the New Hyde patients are similar to the voluntary patients that McMurphy hangs out with in the book, the patients know they’re really the others in the “disturbed ward” that McMurphy thinks being like is “worse than death.”   He talks about how the book is sympathetic to the patients, but he hasn’t taken that lesson to heart. In the book, McMurphy brings sex workers onto the ward, tries to kill Nurse Ratched, destroys property, and indirectly leads to another patient’s death. All these people did was tear up a couple books and Badger threatens them. Then you have Pepper, who finally asks for the barest modicum of human decency, for Badger to ask rather than order. The reaction from Badger is to respond with the world’s most petulant “please,” and for the patients to roll their eyes at Pepper like he’s McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When the patients get a tiny taste of power with Badger capitulating, they savor it long enough for him to reassert dominance by ending the meeting early. It’s easy to try to slot the characters of the show into similar roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Pepper as McMurphy, Miss Chris as Nurse Ratched, Josephine as “The Japanese Nurse,” Scotch Tape as an amalgamation of the Black nursing aides, Anand as Dr. Spivey. But the show and the book aren’t interested in a modern retelling. It’s more complicated than that. Author Ken Kesey was critical of institutionalization and psychiatry, but his book came two decades before Ronald Regan pushed for deinstitutionalization and defunding, which forced many mentally ill people onto the streets and into prisons. We’re four decades into that process and the Prison Policy Institute estimates 43% of people in state prisons and 44% in local jails have mental illness diagnoses, and 66% of people in federal prisons haven’t received any mental health care while incarcerated. State hospitals have lost funding, closed, and cut staff and services over the last several decades, and the so-called Big Beautiful Bill cut another $2 billion in funding for addiction and mental health services. That’s the soup Devil in Silver is cooking in. This isn’t Kesey’s legacy but Regan and his ilk’s.  One of the reasons politicians like having prisons in their districts is that inmates count as residents in terms of the census—which means more money from the state and federal governments—but don’t get to vote or have a say in the local community. They’re resources to be exploited and politicians don’t have to earn their votes. The patients at New Hyde are treated the same way by not just the staff but by local politicians. Coffee calls his local comptroller and gets brushed off as a valued voter, but he isn’t anything more than a tally on the census.  Image: Emily V. Aragones/AMC At every layer, the patients are dehumanized, even and especially by the people charged with protecting them. Scotch Tape chooses to drag Pepper down the hall by his feet instead of picking him up or putting him on a gurney. And he does this during visiting hours, which seems counterintuitive after the staff just cleaned things up to make the hospital look nice(-ish) for guests, but it serves a bigger purpose. It reminds not only the patients but also their loved ones that the patients aren’t people, and that the hospital has the ultimate authority over their lives. Pepper also dehumanizes the patients—like when he mocked Sammy for her jokes—but at least he can see what he’s doing and feels bad about it. Breaking down Sammy felt good in the moment, but made him just as bad as everyone else. It’s not that no one cares for these people, but that no one with any power cares. I think that’s why Coffee is trying to call the president. Others get visitors, but he doesn’t. He and Dorry are one of the few who have no one to advocate for them. Dorry seems to have given up and settled in, but Coffee is pulling on whatever strings he can. Unfortunately, it’s the same result as those with advocates: nothing. The president doesn’t care and won’t help. Marisol does care but can’t help. Coffee and Pepper are still trapped in hell. This show makes it impossible to know what’s real and normal and what isn’t (complimentary). For example, from Coffee’s perspective, we see the fluorescent lights flicker above the mysterious silver door right after the sinister phone call threatening him and Pepper. As a viewer, we immediately think it’s the Devil of New Hyde. Later we see Scotch Tape fixing the bulb, but from Pepper’s perspective. He’s still clearheaded, and from this vantage point the flickering bulb seems innocuous, one more damaged thing in New Hyde the staff is trying to patch before visitors arrive.  Every episode has several small details I appreciate. This week it’s Coffee writing just off from the lines on the lined paper. His handwriting is neat and tidy, but it wanders across the page. I also liked the contrast of the faded “community” sign with the crack in the ceiling and the deflated balloons. From the off-center camera angles to the discordant music to the worn down production design, this show is firing on all cylinders. I know the overarching plot, but the show is different enough that I’m intrigued to see how it changes Pepper’s path.  We’re leaving Pepper lying on the floor bloody and beaten for the second time in two days, but was this act perpetrated by a buffalo monster or another patient? Quotes “New Hyde won’t let you go.” “I hate to yuck your yum, but here’s what I know. White president, Black president, lady president, they’re all the same person. They ain’t worried about you or me for a second.” “I fear no man. You hear me?” Yes ma’am! “Folks like us, we’re the buffalo. And New Hyde is the cliff.” “They don’t need to convince you. They need to convince themselves.” Image: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Final Thoughts When CCH Pounder tells you to “mind your space,” you better mind your damn space. Hey! Don’t kill the little rat! Poor thing! In the book, the rat has a name and gets a chapter from its POV.  Dr. Walter is the Devil in the show, a clever twist on the book. It also changes the tenor of one of the themes. In the book, the violence we see ends up being—and I’m saying this as spoiler-free as I can—about what people do to each other when they are no longer seen as people. With a doctor (ghost of the doctor? Devil taking the form of the doctor? The actual doctor somehow?) as the Big Bad, the story now becomes about what the system does to people when they become resources to be consumed. Marisol visiting Pepper in New Hyde is new for the show, as is the revelation that Pepper has a son, Anthony.  Pepper is scarred like every other patient at New Hyde. He’s one of them now. Coffee has been at New Hyde for at least seven years, if his letter is any indication. That’s a long time to be ignored by the outside world. Dorry says “he makes the rules” (he being Dr. Walter) “and the other two enforce them.” Other two? What other two? How many devils are in this place??? Alright New Yorkers, what is “Yips on Cross Bay”? It’s not that unusual for someone who isn’t mentally ill to be imprisoned in a mental hospital. Matthew David Keirans was in the news recently for it happening to him. He was put in jail for more than a year, then forcibly drugged in a mental hospital for months.  Speaking of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the dead guy from the first episode was named Charlie Bromden, which is very similar to Chief Bromden. And Loochie wears a beanie that looks just like the one Jack Nicholson wore in the movie. This week’s songs: “I Am the Law” by Anthrax and “Red Eyes And Tears” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.[end-mark] The post <i>The Terror</i>: Devil in Silver Is Altering the Themes of Its Source Material in “Disturbed” appeared first on Reactor.