Twenty Minutes with Cassandra
Written By: Jamie Flannagan
Lorna Snell (Samantha Sloyan), video game journalist, enters her house after a busy day on the job, ordering a pizza, pouring herself some wine, and putting on a classic record to unwind. Seconds later, an incessant pounding comes from the front door. Through the peephole, Lorna spots a young goth girl by the name of Cassandra (Ruth Codd) who begs to be let in, claiming that something is after her. After some coaxing, Lorna lets Cassandra inside and calls 911, only for Cassandra to throw her phone out the door. Cassandra tells Lorna she's being hunted by a bloodthirsty monster that's out to kill her and anyone who tries to help her. Cassandra also declares that trying to fight back against it is hopeless since it will always make its move after twenty minutes, and now that Cassandra has come into contact with Lorna, the monster is set to kill her next, so she offers to make her last few minutes as memorable as possible.
As Lorna comes to think that this is a sort of joke, she and Cassandra are interrupted by a delivery man (Nick Heffelfinger) who comes to the front door to deliver a new record. After signing for the package, Lorna asks the delivery man if can get her phone, to which he agrees. As he returns the phone, something extremely fast suddenly slashes his arm off, then lacerates his throat with three large claw marks. Shocked and horrified by what she's just beheld, Lorna tries to fashion a weapon to fight back against the culprit, then opens a window in an attempt to escape. Cassandra quickly recommends not doing this, as the monster, a giant, hairy, rat-like creature with one arm (Carey Jones), tries to grab her, but she is able to stab it and drive it away.
Now realizing just how large the monster is and the fact that it can be injured, Lorna takes the initiative to craft a better weapon, duct-taping a bunch of knives to a baseball bat. In spite of her "host's" paranoia and fear, Cassandra tries to get to know Lorna better, offering a glass of wine and telling Lorna she’s getting hungry, prompting Lorna to remember that she ordered pizza. Lorna tries to get some information about the monster, which prompts Cassandra to reveal that her apartment had a mouse infestation. She decided to lay down some glue traps, but the next day, she found that a mouse got stuck in one trap, ended up chewing its own paw off to free itself, and got stuck in a second trap, believing that the monster is the same mouse out for revenge.
Lorna's pizza soon arrives, and she runs to the upstairs balcony to repeatedly try convincing Okwe (Franckie Francois), the kindly and optimistic delivery man, to drive away, even bribing him by letting him have the pizza instead. Noticing that Lorna looks frightened, Okwe insists on letting Lorna have her pizza, placing it on the bloody porch for her. After thanking her for their conversation by mentioning it will help him feel safe and cheerful when he goes to sleep, Okwe prepares to drive off, only for the monster to butcher him next, his car drifting down the driveway.
As the distraught Lorna comes back to the living room, she finds Cassandra going through her old photo albums. Grabbing the pizza to split it with the young goth, Lorna discovers a message on the underside of the lid written in blood, reading "Meet in back room." After excusing herself, Lorna approaches the back door to find the monster standing at the window. Revealing that it can speak, the monster tells Lorna that it overheard her conversation with Okwe and how it feels bad for killing him. It further tells Lorna that Cassandra is the real monster, as she's replayed this ruse several times to continue involving people in her personal issues. In her growing fury, Lorna grabs a can of hairspray and a lighter to set the monster on fire before storming back into the living room.
Lorna viciously confronts Cassandra about the monster, asking why she chose her to be its latest victim. It soon dawns on Lorna that she saw Cassandra at a cafe earlier that day. Growing despondent and refusing to answer her questions, Cassandra admits that she just wanted to be Lorna's friend, but tells her that she squandered the opportunity by caring only about how to save herself. Making a swift exit, Cassandra bitterly says goodbye to Lorna, leaving her monster as a parting gift. With the 20-minute deadline over, the monster enters the house. Armed with her makeshift weapon, Lorna prepares to go up against the creature, but requests a minute to herself in sheer exhaustion. The monster tries to rebut that she already had 20, but Lorna retorts that she hasn’t actually had those minutes because she’s been dealing with Cassandra the whole time. Thankfully, the monster relents and lets Lorna have her extra time, bemoaning how frustrating it is to wait outside all the time.
Lorna and the monster calmly sit down for pizza and wine, where they engage in some meaningful conversation, starting with the latter's origins. The monster reveals that Cassandra's father had died from loneliness and her mother didn't return her calls because she died of heart disease, and the incident with the dead mouse just caused a lot of unnecessary extra grief, slowly ruining her life. Not wanting to go out like her father, Cassandra tried to make friends, but it just never worked out for her, and it was her depression and loneliness that created the monster, to put the "mice" she met out of their misery like she failed to do for the first. Cassandra also wanted to try and befriend Lorna because she saw her at an open mic night and thought she looked sad.
The conversation then moves onto the locked chest in the middle of Lorna’s living room. Rhythmically knocking on it, Lorna reveals that it houses her own monster, resembling a hairless human-sized cat. Contrary to Cassandra and her monster, Lorna has a healthy relationship with hers, and she prefers to let it stay in the trunk because it feels safer there. After this discussion, Lorna decides that her time is over and she's ready to die. Cassandra's monster, however, touched by Lorna's love for her own monster, decides to spend a little more time with her, which she accepts. The monster wearily complains how tired it is, prompting Lorna to pat its shoulder and claim she understands.
This episode contains examples of:
- Aerosol Flamethrower: Lorna uses flaming hairspray to get the monster to go away when it talks to her through the back door.
- An Arm and a Leg: The mouse Cassandra caught ended up gnawing its paw off to free itself from one of her glue traps, only to end up in another one. The monster, which symbolizes Cassandra's trauma from the incident, similarly has one arm. The delivery person who brings Lorna her record gets his own arm lopped off by the monster in question.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Cassandra evidently plays the part once her monster gains its first onscreen victim, hinting that she pretends to be scared by it to watch it kill people. This isn't actually the case, as the monster itself goes into more depth about it in the end.
- Bittersweet Ending: It's pretty much assured that Lorna's gonna die, but Cassandra's monster takes a liking to her and offers to let her have a little more time, as he enjoys her company and respects how kindly she treats her own monster.
- Blessed with Suck: Cassandra has such a high level of grief thanks to her life, it manifests itself as a monster that brutally kills everyone she tries to make friends with.
- Blood-Spattered Innocents: Lorna gets splashed with the delivery person's blood early in the episode, and she spends the rest of it stained in such a way.
- Bottle Episode: The episode is spent entirely in and around Lorna's house.
- Cassandra Truth: Cassandra might've been named after the trope, as Lorna doesn't believe that there's some kind of monster out to get her. At least until it kills the delivery man bringing her a record.
- Decoy Damsel: Cassandra is noted to pretend that she's frightened that a monster is out to kill her, essentially duping everyone she comes across to letting said monster kill them. In fairness, she tries her best to ensure that her victim's last minutes are memorable, trying as hard as she can to be their friend.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Lorna ends the episode sharing her pizza and wine with Cassandra's monster, where they engage in some deep and philosophical conversation about the creature's origins and how it operates.
- Enemy Within: Cassandra's monster was manifested from her grief at the world around her, from her parents' deaths and the mouse incident. Lorna has such a monster herself, but she treats it with much more kindness and friendliness than Cassandra did to hers.
- Face Death with Dignity: When her time window ends and she becomes too exhausted to fight back, Lorna prepares to let the monster do her in without any complaints. Thankfully, the monster's pretty affable, and lets her keep living (if only for another minute or so) so he can continue to enjoy her company.
- Foreshadowing:
- The beginning of the episode has the camera focus on a set of locks Lorna has on what looked to be her coffee table. The ending reveals it's the chest her personal monster lives in.
- As she prods Lorna about any sort of pets she might have, Cassandra keeps bringing up cats, to which Lorna doesn't want to hear about. We learn at the end that she has her own monster, which looks like a human-sized cat with no fur.
- She also gets hesitant when Cassandra mentions a chubby, sweaty, smelly kid in an old high school picture. We learn that nobody in school liked him since he lived with his Crazy Cat Lady grandmother, and Lorna considered her greatest failure to be when she saw him crying in the hallway and just kept walking instead of comforting him, hence why her monster resembles a cat.
- Freudian Excuse: The monster explains Cassandra's backstory to Lorna at the end of the episode, revealing that her father died of loneliness and her mother died of heart disease. The tipping point was that incident with the mouse, which let her spawn the monster from her misery and tasks it with killing people rather than letting them stay with her.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: The monster itself calls Cassandra the true monster, as she keeps making people get involved in her personal traumas, forcing it to kill them.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Cassandra, having already lost both her parents, just wanted to be Lorna's friend because she thought she was similarly depressed. Lorna instead spends the whole time trying to protect herself from the monster that hangs around Cassandra, who she calls the real monster for dooming everyone she comes across to a grisly death.
- Insistent Terminology: When offering to let Lorna's monster out so they can fight like Kaiju, Lorna corrects Cassandra's monster by telling him that the fight would be a Kaijin brawl.
- I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Samantha Sloyan and Ruth Codd play Lorna and Cassandra. The women also play Tammy and Juno on The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) by Mike Flanagan, brother of the episode's director Jamie Flanagan.
- Karma Houdini: Cassandra leaves Lorna's house heartbroken that Lorna refused her friendship, letting the monster she created free to kill her after it killed two innocent people and countless other people beforehand, and will no doubt continue to kill countless more.
- Meaningful Name: Cassandra tries her damndest to convince Lorna that the monster is going to kill her no matter what she does.
- Mood-Swinger: Thanks to how broken she is, Cassandra goes from scared of the monster, to a chill and relaxed free-loader, to utterly depressed about Lorna apparently not wanting to be her friend.
- Mythology Gag:
- The ashtray from "Father's Day" is seen on a table in Lorna's living room, notably as she enters the house for the first time.
- Lorna's house is said to be located on 27 Nelboit Street. Stephen King fans would recognize that this street is where the Well House lies, where Pennywise was known to hibernate every 27 years.
- Lorna also enters the house carrying a latte from "Stillson Coffee", a reference to Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone.
- Never My Fault: Cassandra wanted to be Lorna's friend and is saddened when she doesn't accept her offer because she's too busy keeping herself and others alive. What she doesn't comprehend is that the monster that follows her everywhere and kills anyone she tries to help, which she brought to the house, is the reason why Lorna isn't interested at the moment.
- Nice Guy: Okwe the pizza delivery man is a complete and total sweetheart, to the point where the earnesty and trustworthiness in his voice leaves Lorna confused about whether or not he's being sarcastic. He refuses to hear it when Lorna doesn't want her pizza, leaving it on the porch when he sees she's covered in blood and scared out of her mind. He says goodbye to Lorna thanking her for their conversation, noting that it'll help him go to sleep safe and happy tonight... before the monster slaughters him. The monster itself even tells Lorna that he feels really bad about what it did to the poor guy.
- Noodle Incident: During their conversation, Okwe tells Lorna that he once had to call Child Protective Services because of the toppings one of his customers wanted on their pizza, as well as the way they wanted them arranged. He doesn't go into too much more detail, but he tells her that he's not joking and that the whole thing was "quite alarming".
- Only Sane Woman:
- Lorna can't believe that Cassandra is making herself comfortable drinking her wine and leafing through her albums when there's a monster on the loose waiting to kill her, after she begged Lorna to keep her safe from said monster in the first place.
- She also spends several minutes trying to get pizza delivery person Okwe to leave the house before he too becomes monster food.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Cassandra's monster isn't evil in the slightest, as he only kills people because he's forced to by an unspecified collection of rules Cassandra set for him, even expressing deep regret at having to kill the ever-pleasant Okwe. Before he kills Lorna, he sits down and enjoys a nice meal and some pleasant conversation with her about its origins and Cassandra's motives, and offers to let Lorna unleash her own monster so they can duke it out and give her a fighting chance to stay alive.
- Rat Men: Cassandra's monster takes the form of a giant humanoid mouse covered in glue and missing an arm.
- Real Time: The episode realistically takes place over the span of 20-30 minutes, as the monster is set to kill every person Cassandra interacts with in 20 minutes.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Averted. Lorna's own monster resides in a locked trunk in her living room, but it's not evil at all, and prefers to stay in the trunk because it feels safe there.
- Shout-Out:
- Lorna duct tapes a bunch of knives to a baseball bat as a weapon against the monster, referencing the Spiked Bat from Dead Rising. It's appropriate because Lorna's a journalist who writes articles on video games.
- Cassandra's story about the mouse gnawing off its paw and getting stuck in glue traps is also told by Hannah in The Haunting of Bly Manor, also directed by Jamie Flanagan.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: Lorna is revealed in the end to have her own monster, and she treats it much better than Cassandra does hers.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: Cassandra becomes one in the 20-minute countdown to Lorna's death, drinking her booze and looking through her old albums while not lifting a finger to help against the monster she claimed was going to kill her.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Cassandra desperately wants to alleviate her perpetual misery and have a true friend, but she keeps going from person to person and letting her monster butcher them in the process.
- You Are Already Dead: As Cassandra says, once you help her, you only have 20 minutes of precious life left.
