Remember that spoilers are unmarked in Fridge and Headscatchers.
- It's likely that Erin not tying up the boat that Riley died in meant that it drifted away from shore, as she basically got out on the beach and made no attempt to even pull it up. This is why Leeza and Warren have to take Warren's canoe, and therefore traverse more of the island during the massacre, instead of taking a boat that should be across the street.
- Riley believes he cannot resist his bloodlust for very long, which is a contributing factor to his suicide. However, he and his parents show that it can be resisted, at least in the short term if they know the expect it. However, Riley's preexisting alcoholism means he probably finds it significantly more difficult, as it has a compounding effect on the hunger.
- A bit of early foreshadowing is the starfish framed in Dr. Gunning's office. The starfish being famed, among other things, for its ability to regenerate itself when wounded.
- While Bev Keane and Father Paul expound on the Godliness of their new "arrangement", they are oblivious to the fact that Erin is literally going through the opposite of Mary's annunciation — rather than becoming miraculously pregnant, her pregnancy 'miraculously' disappears. She is parallel to Mary in that her baby has no father, and she returns to her birthplace for her pregnancy: but after that, it becomes the unholy inversion of Mary's journey.
- Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt planned for a second chance and a new life with his wife and daughter, but in carrying out his plan he unwittingly killed Erin's baby, who had previously inspired her to leave her old life behind and start anew.
- Riley's own act of self-sacrifice is also a subversion/inversion of the Christ story. He kills himself not to take on others' sins but to bear his own; he proves his story is true to Erin by dying, rather than by rising again; he bows out and accepts that he is not strong enough to be the saviour, or even the final hero of this story.
- Come Episode 6, the congregation of Crockett Island believe that they have been visited by an "Angel," which is in fact a vampire, and thanks to Pruitt's schemes, they all become vampires as well, with a deadly weakness to sunlight. This is, of course, fitting, when you remember that the enemy of God and Christianity is the Devil — who has often been interpreted to be the fallen angel Lucifer, also known as the Morning Star and the Dawnbringer.
- All the older people who receive the Angel's communion, from Father Paul to Mildred to the Flynns, slowly de-age over the course of show. When they finally turn into vampires, they appear to be in their 30s. Paul calls this their "prime," and it's the age that influential Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas thought that people appear as when they're resurrected into heaven
. - The thematic appropriateness of "Nearer, My God, To Thee" as the swan song of the series is underlined by the fifth stanza: "Or if on joyful wing, cleaving the sky,/Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upwards I fly" — comparing and contrasting with Erin's joyous reconciliation to death and the doomed final flight of the Angel.
- The only survivors are Warren and Leeza, acting as a reverse of Book of Genesis (a man and a woman). They're also on a boat, paralleling Noah's family's survival of the Flood on the Ark.
- One of the signs of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is that the waters of the ocean will be poisoned and a third of the marine life will die, echoing the oil spill.
- When Father Paul is sickly after dying and becoming a vampire, Bev offers to call the town doctor, Sarah Gunning, to check up on him. Paul refuses Bev, citing the need to keep his condition "faith-based", but he had another reason for saying no: he understood he had a craving for blood, likely feared that with her job requiring her to be physically close to a patient, the proximity would be too much and he would end up and hurting or killing his daughter, when one of the main reasons he brought the Angel back at all was to get a second chance and live as a family with Mildred and Sarah.
- The show excels in portraying a Muslim family struggling in a predominantly Christian environment. But the more subtle touches are where the true brilliance lie:
- In prayers where there is a group, the worship leader, the most senior and highly regarded as wisest and strongest in faith, stands at the left facing Mecca. In all the instances where they are shown praying, Hassan, as father and head of the household, is at the left. But in the final scene at the beach, it's now Ali who stands at the left. It's a remarkable arc in that, not only does it represent Ali taking care of the household and of his father who is slowly dying beside him, it also represents the renewal and strengthening of his faith, having lost it by joining the church but returning and gaining wisdom from everything that happened that night.
- One of the noblest deaths a Muslim can have is dying in the middle of prayer, akin to being endowed with a state of grace. Hassan collapses and dies before he can finish, and Ali when the sun rays hit and burn him to death.
- It is also fitting, in that he is spared from having to witness his son as he burns.
- Erin probably stopped taking wine at communion after her spotting scare. One or two doses was enough to make her lose her baby, but not enough to show the same supernatural healing and de-aging that the rest of the town was experiencing. When her blood sample catches fire in the sunlight there's still plenty of her own blood left in the tube after the Angel blood burns off. Meanwhile, Mildred's blood sample incinerated almost completely—she's taken much more communion wine recently than Erin has and has a lot more Angel blood in her body.
- Daily Mass seems to take place in the morning, before school, because Leeza is able to attend and most of the town can make it on Ash Wednesday. That's the same time that most of the people living on the island, including many of the older kids, are out working on fishing boats. It's really unfair for Bev to judge people for not attending morning Mass (at all, really, but especially not on weekdays) when doing so would affect their livelihoods.
- A poster in the school house reveals that the older grades (taught by Erin) take two different history classes: the American Revolution and WWII. If Crockett Island is located somewhere off the coast of New England, as it's implied to be, those two points of American history would make the most sense to study, as the two main times its residents could not remain isolated from the rest of the country or the world. Crockett was probably settled by English colonists at some point in the late 1600s or early 1700s, along with the rest of New England. Its position in the Atlantic would have made it an easy target for British naval ships approaching the mainland, thus forcibly involving its residents in the war. Then, in the 1940s when the US entered the Second World War, that same position would raise concerns about becoming a target for German air raids like Britain had experienced. For the rest of their history, Crockett could have largely gotten away with keeping to itself, and its more fanatical residents (like Bev Keane) might not want its children studying what went on off the island if it isn't necessary to their own history.
- Paul tells Riley that he plans to turn down any kind of interviews or media attention in the aftermath of Leeza's miraculous recovery—because Father Paul Hill isn't real, and when it makes the news, the diocese is going to have questions about who this mysterious man claiming to be a priest is and what happened to John Pruitt.
- Riley isn't swayed by Paul's monologues because, due to his experience with alcoholism and AA, he recognizes what Paul is: an addict who is desperately trying to justify his behavior and avoid guilt.
- Pruitt stumbles upon the Angel in an ancient tomb or manmade cave of some sort that had been buried under the sand off the Damascus road for an unknown period of time. How the Angel got there and why it never left (surely it could dig its way out) are left a mystery. But given the Angel's insatiable hunger for blood and its eagerness to transform others in its image, the fact that the entire world hadn't been overrun by vampires in ancient times would suggest that it may have been deliberately trapped in there.
- Where this gets horrible, consider how the Angel responds to Pruitt's awed belief that it is, in fact, an Angel of the Lord. It immediately understands the concept, as if it's used to it, and feeds Pruitt its blood to connect it to a useful servant. Then later, in the Church, the Angel is entirely comfortable with being a figure of worshipful awe. So, was the Angel worshipped in the past? Was the gift of restorative Angel blood in return for human blood a trade it had familiarity with?
- Even worse, there is no door on its tomb, but especially given the series' deliberate evocation of religious imagery it's possible that whoever trapped the Angel in that chamber would block it off between sunset and sunrise, and would only remove it to offer the Angel sacrificial blood in return for donations of its own magically potent ichor. Is that where the ancient practice of animal and human sacrifice came from?
- The Angel had clearly been trapped in that manmade cave for a very long time. Long enough for starvation to make it degenerate into the almost animalistic predator we see in the series? Is it possible that, before its long captivity, the Angel was something nobler? Was it, in fact, a genuine Angel driven mad and feral by millennia of captivity? Are the horror hunger for blood and the abhorrence of sunlight that come with vampirism actually symptoms of the Angel's degenerated nature transferred down the blood connection to its converts along with the 'nicer' benefits of youth, health and immortality?
- When we first see the Angel, it's naked and dirty, but looks exactly the same as it does later in the series. No malnutrition, no weakness, and though it pounces on Pruitt rather quickly, it doesn't drain him to death to fill the thirst of millennia. In fact, based on what we see, it's quite possible the Angel doesn't 'need' to drink blood, it just really, really likes the taste, and that the horror hunger it transmits to its converts isn't a case of "Never grow old, never die, but you must feed" as much as it's a culinary preference.
- Where this gets horrible, consider how the Angel responds to Pruitt's awed belief that it is, in fact, an Angel of the Lord. It immediately understands the concept, as if it's used to it, and feeds Pruitt its blood to connect it to a useful servant. Then later, in the Church, the Angel is entirely comfortable with being a figure of worshipful awe. So, was the Angel worshipped in the past? Was the gift of restorative Angel blood in return for human blood a trade it had familiarity with?
- Assuming Leeza and Warren do make it to the mainland and can get help, what are the authorities even going to find? A bunch of burned-down buildings, piles of ashes, the bodies of the few who died without drinking the angel's blood (Erin, Sarah, Hassan), and dozens of mysteriously missing people who left no traces behind. The kids can't possibly explain what happened without proof. They may well wind up taking the fall for at least part of whatever bizarre, insane tragedy befell Crockett Island.
- The real Fridge Horror is - why wouldn't they be believed, if they didn't mention the Angel and simply told the authorities that the townspeople turned on one another? They can honestly say dozens of people fell under the sway of a charismatic religious leader. He came to their isolated, impoverished community and he told them a time of great change was at hand, but that as long as they had faith, God would reward them. Many were persuaded that he could work miracles, including healing the sick and raising the dead. His followers cut off communication with the outside world, trapping believers and non-believers alike. The congregation was whipped up to a religious frenzy, and murderous violence erupted. Real cults throughout history have come to even bloodier and more horrifying ends, even without actual demons around.
- Bev worked with Peggy Greene while she was still teaching, and thus would have been Erin's teacher in school. She clearly knew about Peggy's alcoholism and probably had a good idea of how she was treating her daughter. But there's no indication that she ever even attempted to do anything about it, despite the fact that teachers are mandated reporters for suspected physical or sexual abuse of a student. Not only does Erin have her mom's old house, her old job, and her old classroom, but she's also working alongside the person who could have at least tried to get her help but never did.
