Good night, children.
"Everything boils, everything bleeds. And that's why it's important to have at least one wet vac in the house. But everything becomes dust. And from dust we find that in the dust are entire worlds where anything can happen."
— Curtis BTS:34:47:MTR
A short webseries by Wham City, the comedy/horror collective that made This House Has People in It, The Mirror follows the Children of The Mirror, a Cult awaiting The Return, when Things will come through your Tindalos Doorways. They won't give you a running start.
The show is a series of six training videos for cult members, put together by cult leader Curtis, along with his closest disciples Reece, Fanny, and Wesley. Though there are evidently 98 in the series, we only see six — #5 Creativity, #8 Altruism, #13 Cleanliness, #28 Water, #56 Cleanliness II, and #98 Interstellar Telepathic Communication.
Though mostly comedic, the series gradually gets darker throughout its run, as Curtis begins to become more erratic. The end, though, leaves open the question of whether he's paranoid, or far too sane.
The Mirror provides examples of:
- Alien Geometries:
- Subtle and downplayed because the abnormal shift in perspective appears to be as temporal as it is spatial, but still noticeable. In the final episode, Curtis grabs the camera and bolts from his hideout. It can be hard to follow given how shaky the video is, but upon closer inspection, it appears that Curtis quickly starts backtracking, unknowingly running on the exact same path that he just took on the way out, but in the opposite direction. In the final moment of the video, Curtis runs into...himself, bolting from his hideout.
- Additionally, the way Curtis describes "Tindalos doorways," it appears that even completely normal, perfectly Euclidean geometric shapes are potentially dangerous if they have sharp angles.
- Cult Defector: The members of the cult known as "The Mirror" are, at first, obedient and happy to serve their leader, Curtis. However, in "Lesson 28: Water", the main trio of followers have to chase down a fourth child as he tries to make a break for it. This follower is not seen by the next video, and his fate is unknown to the audience. By the last episode, the three followers themselves are missing, with the implication being that they lost faith and defected as well.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: As silly and/or disturbing as some of Curtis's rituals appear to be, the last two "lesson" videos show that bad things happen when they are not correctly performed, and whatever happened to him in the final video probably isn't good.
- Downer Ending: The last episode features Curtis alone in a dark basement. None of his disciples appear in the episode. Curtis then rants, before running outside under a tarp. Filming the entire way, he runs, then turns toward the house, where he runs into himself, climbing out the same window he just did.
- Fun with Acronyms: The B.O.N.E.G.R.E.N.A.D.E.
- B - Begin with bones
- O - Observe your options
- N - Never forget your gloves
- E - Everyone
- G - Great time with the bones
- R - Really look at your bones
- E - Everyone
- N - Never forget your gloves
- A - Avoid mistakes
- D - Danger is everywhere.
- E - Everyone
- Mood Dissonance:
- The defining mood of the series. Each episode starts with happy, peppy music, and the first three episodes include fun "Activity Breaks", though they end up being about making sculptures out of bones or cleaning obsessively.
- After berating his disciples for touching their B.O.N.E.G.R.E.N.A.D.E.s with unclean hands, Curtis complains that he meant to do an episode on making Friendship Bracelets.
- Seemingly Profound Fool: Curtis's teachings sound deep, if you don't actually listen to them carefully.
- Shout-Out: Curtis's obsession with angles as "Tindalos doorways," and whatever it is that emerges from them, is a reference to the short story The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long, a contemporary and close friend of H.P. Lovecraft. In Long's story, the titular creatures are hunters of those who practice psychedelic-drug-based time-travel. They can materialize from any sharp angle in the environment, and kill their prey by draining their body of its fluids with their hollow, proboscis-like tongues. Much like Curtis insisting on his followers filling the angles in their bodies by drinking water, the narrator of The Hounds of Tindalos decides to protect himself by filling in all the angles in his house to make them curves. Ultimately, while Curtis was right to be worried about something, none of the supernatural occurrences in the series show evidence of being hunted by Hounds of Tindalos.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The first four episodes each features a different fourth disciple. The first three aren't named (the fourth, we find out, is Glenn). They never last beyond one episode, and their disappearance is almost never explained. The one in the second lesson at least tried to get the hell outta Dodge, but we never find out if he was actually successful.
