‘The Changeling,’ Episode 1 Recap: A haunting fairy tale begins

OPINION: LaKeith Stanfield's new Apple TV+ series takes viewers on a dark journey into terror and trauma.

Sep 8, 2023

The Changeling, LaKeith Stanfield, theGrio.com — LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo in "The Changeling." (Courtesy of Apple TV+)

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

Thanks to Disney, our collective consciousness thinks of fairy tales as delightful love stories and happy endings. But those of us who were traumatized by Grimm’s Fairy Tales as children know that these stories, at their core, are horror stories with fantastical elements and magic and creatures and creepy crawly things that go bump in the night. Apple TV+’s new series “The Changeling” is a fairy tale in that classic vein.

Starring LaKeith Stanfield as rare books seller and collector Apollo, “The Changeling” — based on Victor LaValle’s award-winning novel of the same name — follows what appears to be a New York love story between Apollo and a librarian named Emma Valentine (Clark Backo). Melina Matsoukas, the visionary director behind Beyoncė’s “Lemonade” and “Insecure,” helms and executive produces this pilot episode from “Venom” writer Kelly Marcel’s adapted screenplay.

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Narrated by LaValle, “The Changeling” opens with a mysterious ship voyage carrying Norwegians who were escaping religious persecution over troubled waters to new lands. “Tell me your life’s voyage,” LaValle begins the fairytale, “and I will tell you who you are.”

Apollo’s voyage begins in 2010 in Queens, when he first meets Emma in the library. He asks her out once a week for months, and every time, she says no, but is more and more charmed each time. Finally, months after their first meeting, she says yes to dinner.

She shares pieces of her traumatic childhood — Emma’s parents died in a fire when she was 5, though Apollo doesn’t share his with Emma, we see that Apollo’s dad abandoned him and his mother when he was 4, and he still has nightmares about it. Unfortunately, Emma has plans that don’t involve Apollo and do involve her moving permanently to Brazil.

“I’m the god Apollo and I command you to stay,” he says, jokingly, but it appears this fairytale might be about the horror of having a man trying to control your life. Still, she leaves for Brazil and is gone for a year.

The story pivots to 1977 and the story of Apollo’s parents: Lillian, a Ugandan immigrant escaping the trauma of witnessing her cousin’s murder by police, and Brian, a white cop from Syracuse. Apparently, Lillian did not connect her trauma to the cop pursuing her so she winds up falling for him. Their first date mirrors Apollo’s and Emma’s, as Brian also eagerly shares how much he wants children and what a great dad and husband he thinks he’d be. They marry and have Apollo, named after “Rocky’s” Apollo Creed, but still Brian calls him a god. It becomes a mantra that the shy, bookish nerd would use to hype himself up, even through adulthood.

In the present, Emma is acting really white in Brazil, going to haunted forests and messing with witches that the locals told her to leave alone. After her year is up, she emails Apollo her return date and asks that he pick her up. He waits and waits at arrivals, but her flight is so delayed he falls asleep. Like a reverse Sleeping Beauty, Emma kisses him awake. They go to lunch where he cuts her sandwich (???) as she tells him what she did in Brazil. Mainly, she went to a lagoon that she was told not to go to, and she brags about not listening and meeting a witch sitting by the water. The witch tied a red string around her wrist into three knots that corresponded to three wishes Emma had for her life. “Be careful what you wish for,” the witch instructed Emma. She’s to let the string fall off for her wishes to come true, not cut it. That was more than six months ago and it’s still on her wrist. Now here comes this clown Apollo cutting it off with a knife, saying “I’m the god Apollo … with me, all three of your wishes will come true.” The witch feels the cut, all the way in Brazil.

Instead of seeing that act as extremely controlling and frightening, Emma finds it charming and marries him. They get pregnant. Weeks away from Emma’s due date, the two of them have dinner with their friend Michelle. While Emma is in the bathroom, Michelle tells Apollo that he’s already made two of Emma’s wishes come true: a good husband and a healthy baby — even though the baby is not yet born. Michelle also tells him that there’s a frightening nude photo of Emma in a gallery in Norway where she’s looking like a sorcerer. Just as she’s about to say what Emma’s third wish was — apparently dealing with the Norwegian photographer who owns the nude photo and is displaying it in a gallery — Emma goes into labor.

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Instead of going to the hospital like sane people, they commit to their home birth plan and take the subway home while the absolutely annoying showtime subway performers perform. Emma can’t wait til they get home. In true New Yorker fashion, she gives birth on the subway to an apparently healthy baby boy. They name him Brian, after Apollo’s dad, who disappears. Seems like a bad omen!

As LaValle recites the old adage, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage,” we see violent images of Apollo being chained, beaten and drowned. The horrors of this fairytale are just unfolding.