But there’s also the corrosive nature of their severely messed-up family dynamic, one that Shyamalan, show creator Tony Basgallop, and the rest of the cast and crew seem teed up to conclude in this fourth and final season. Just like each one before it, this season of “Servant” delights in upending the status quo of our not-quite-nuclear family and seeing how it rattles the psyches of everyone involved. The results here, at least in the three episodes available for review, are just as delectable as ever, even if the show feels like it’s rushing to its mandated end.
The first episode, “Pigeon,” brings some of the show’s major plot threads to roost (if you’ll forgive the pun), an almost entirely Leanne-centered episode that also takes her outside the confines of the Turner home for a rare street-level showdown with her former cult, the Church of the Lesser Saints. It’s a staggering work of small-scale suspense, director Dylan Holmes Williams shooing us out of the home into a fumigated street suddenly swarming, zombie-like, with cultists hungry for Leanne’s return. But her mad scramble for survival (including some great setpieces surrounding the Turner’s car, her one bid for safety) soon gives way to another of “Servant”’s brushes with the supernatural; whatever Leanne’s powers are, they’re growing. And whatever grand purpose they’ll be used for, it’s happening soon.
After that largely standalone premiere, “Servant” brings back the Turners and introduces us to the new, queasy status quo for the season. Dorothy returns from a months-long stay in the hospital, bedridden due to the spinal injury she suffered and more suspicious of Leanne than ever before. Sean (Toby Kebbell) has lost himself in the vagaries of celebrity-chef fame; the bits we see of his overwrought TV show, “Gourmet Gauntlet,” are darkly funny reminders that Sean’s detachment and anger push him ever further from his family. Julian (Rupert Grint, always fantastic) has relapsed, trying to figure out where he fits in the family unit, especially since he’s started sleeping with Leanne again.
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