The Midnight Club’s gamer episode does more than introduce the Playstation, released the year the show is set, but it explains the way the show thinks about horror and its kids with cancer.
Netflix’s new YA series The Midnight Club is the perfect horror starter kit. While there’s a central plot about a maybe-haunted mansion slowly unspooling across 10 episodes, it’s also a collection of short horror stories told by the story’s cast: a collection of terminal kids living in hospice at said mansion, bonding in their final days by scaring each other at night, Are You Afraid of the Dark?-style.
This means The Midnight Club can take any shape — in one episode it’s a film noir homage, in another, there’s a riff on The Terminator. And, in the fifth episode, “See You Later,” the show takes on the rarest of forms: the gamer thriller.
“See You Later” features a story told by Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), who spins a tale about Luke, an aspiring game designer (also played by Sapkota; in The Midnight Club each cast member generally also plays the protagonist of the story they tell) who meets his idol in a video game shop: Vincent Beggs (Rahul Kohli), a legendary game designer. And even better, he invites him over to play a game that he’s currently working on.
What follows is a twisty sci-fi tale where a seemingly unbeatable video game is the means by which Luke learns that his world is not what he thinks it is, and that his heroic ideas about life and his place in it might be distractions from more mundane things that really matter.
