Upamanyu Biswas
The third episode of ‘Terror Tuesday: Extreme,’ titled ‘Ode to My Family,’ dives into the dysfunctional dynamics of a family who moves to an isolated house in the middle of nowhere. In the confines of their new eerie shelter, a spirit begins haunting them after they accidentally release it from a secret, locked room upstairs. As the narrative progresses, more and more inexplicable phenomena start occurring, and the family wonders what could be behind these events. Subsequently, a series of bizarre altercations breaks out in the ending, threatening to light the family’s precarious bonds into flames as a dark force takes over them. The finale leaves several key plot elements deliberately ambiguous, leaving more questions than answers about the fate of the characters! SPOILERS AHEAD.
A Disgraced Family’s Exile
The narrative begins by following a family of four, a husband, wife, son, and daughter, who are traveling to a remote location away from the city. They arrive at an empty house in a secluded area, where they begin unpacking their belongings and heading upstairs to find their rooms. It is revealed through a flashback and slight hints that the family is fleeing the public’s attention after the father, a senior police officer, got embroiled in a high-profile casino bribery case. He was subsequently outed for his dubious role by his son, Win, who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with him.
Upon entering the abandoned house, the family soon discovers a secret room guarded by a warding charm. Win cannot stop thinking about it and wakes up at midnight to see what is lurking behind the door. As he tries to unlock it, he begins hearing strange slithering and whispering moans that alert him to some strange entity lurking behind the door. His efforts at unlocking it fail anyway as he peers through the door’s crack. A mysterious silhouette appears next to him and takes over his mind for a few seconds. Win is brought back to reality when his sister, Linda, passes by the landing and sees him strangely zoned out.
The following night, Win’s mother, Sirin, and his father pry open the door. However, upon entering, they do not find anything that looks out of place. As the episode progresses, each family member begins hearing strange, creepy noises inside the house. Meanwhile, Win and Linda find themselves trapped in the web of their parent’s unresolved relationship issues and the problems surrounding a ghostly pursuer who seems hell-bent on creating further chaos. Things start going very bad when, one morning, the siblings wake up to see their mother acting very different from her usual self, indicating that she may have been possessed.
What Happened to the Family?
After Sirin is taken over by the evil spirit, she starts doing things that are completely out of her comfort zone, an observation that alerts Win and Linda to their mother’s alarming behavior. She cooks food for them, something she never does of late, causing them to wonder whether the spirit has latched itself on to her. When night comes, more shocking developments take place as Sirin makes noodles for the whole family. The siblings are worried that she is preparing to poison the whole family as they read online that a family of four was murdered through poisoning in the house previously.
However, a fight between Sirin and her husband breaks out, as she starts attacking him and her children with harsh verbals that dig into their flaws and inadequacies. She vents her frustrations at them, becoming increasingly hysterical and maniacal as she does so. Eventually, she loses control over herself and starts chopping up meat with a giant cleaver, unconcerned about the mayhem she is causing. She lops off her own hand during the action, utterly unfazed by the pain as she continues laughing. Her husband launches at her, leading to a scuffle. She ends up getting killed by him as he slashes her to bits.
Subsequently, the spirit takes over Win and Linda’s father. He chases them through the house as Win races off to get a weapon for himself. He finds his father’s hidden revolver and returns to the stairs, only to witness him beating and choking Linda to death. He is relieved when Linda wakes up all of a sudden and beats up her father, disposing of him by launching his head against the stairs. This time, the spirit takes over Linda’s body. Win flees from the mess around him as the zombified corpses of both his dead parents and a bloodied Linda, who he also shot accidentally, follow him around the house. He locks himself inside the room where the spirit is trapped, hoping that they do not get to him.
Which Win is the Real One?
At the end of the episode, Win finds himself in a precarious situation with no way out. His dead, reanimated family seems to be slowly hunting him down while he is sitting ducks in the room where the spirit itself should be locked and shut. However, before anything can happen to him, he slips into a strange vision of his family sitting around the dinner table enjoying their meal while getting along with one another. He then wakes up with blood pouring out of his mouth while a strange entity that looks exactly like him drags the bodies of his deceased family into the room before taking a picture. It tells him that he will never be alone anymore before walking out of the room, resealing it with the ward, and shooting himself with the gun. But the person he sees is the real him.
As Win grew up in a highly dysfunctional family, he longed for the type of warmth and affection they were never able to give him. His elder sister is more concerned about herself as she wants to leave home and go abroad so that she never has to deal with her family again. Meanwhile, his mother and father are having affairs behind each other’s back, while his father has no affection for him because he is not even his real biological son. Within his heart of hearts, all Win wants is for his family to be together and not fight amongst one another. Therefore, many factors have made him feel disappointed in his upbringing and how he witnessed everyone drift away within the household.
Longing for a family that is united in its relationships, he carries the dead bodies of all of them into the room before clicking a family picture. Therefore, the entity that Win sees with blood pouring down his mouth carrying his family is none other than himself. Only he is witnessing it from an out-of-body spot. The young boy finally gets to bring his family together in one location before keeping their memory saved through a photograph. It ultimately took them to be dead for him to get them to agree with one another finally. However, now that they are all gone, he has nothing to live for. Consequently, he kills himself right after he sticks the ward on the room’s door, ensuring that their spirits never leave and the whole family stays together forever.
Who are the Ghosts?
As it turns out, the ghosts haunting the house were the spirits of Win and his family all along. Although this part of the narrative is a bit convoluted, it is shown that when Win stares into the warded room’s interiors through a crack, he is looking at the spirits of his dead mother and father. Earlier, Win and Linda discover that the house’s previous inhabitants were a family of four who were killed in that room. By the end of the episode, Win and his family’s predicament mirrors the story he heard on the internet, alighting upon the fact that the ghosts were ultimately his own family. However, he has no idea about it at the time.
Additionally, it makes sense that his family would be the spirits, as when Sirin gets possessed, she starts talking about the frustration in her own life, which would be a strange thing for a ghost to have access to. In reality, she must have been possessed by her own spirit that finally let go of its own inhibitions. Therefore, from various angles, the narrative is a haunted house story where the things haunting the house’s residents are their own spirits. However, there are still unanswered elements within the story’s plotting, making it difficult to answer completely. But it looks to be the case that the ghosts are the family haunting themselves.
Read More: Terror Tuesday: Extreme Episode 1 Ending, Explained
