Merry Christmas, Happy! style. “Happy!” is a dark comic but man, I did not expect the television adaptation to get darker. This is a much slower episode than the first two have been but that kind of thing isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “When Christmas Was Christmas” lets us catch our breath a little bit but is still, very, very dark. Let’s jump into this but be warned, there are spoilers for this episode throughout.
1. Attitude Adjustment
Nick Sax is and always was an a*&%$*e. This is a fact that we cannot get around. What’s really interesting about this episode is the flashbacks featuring Nick when he was still a cop because instead of giving us some kind of sweet origin, we see basically the same guy. I find that really intriguing as a choice because you could have easily gone a different route but what we get is Nick, months before his daughter is born, still a foul mouthed jerk and cheating on his wife. Happy! is not about making us feel better. It’s a really dark show that gets even darker in this flashback. Nick and Meredith are called on a domestic violence dispute and the guy in Nick’s sight is real garbage. After a not so good first meeting, their second meeting is even worse when they’re called again and come across a horrific scene that involves a dead mom and a baby in a microwave. Thankfully we don’t see this detail but this moment kind of flips a switch in Nick. While Nick is still not a great human, there is something held back inside of him. This is kind of the incident that lets him completely give into his worst side. He’s not even able to talk to his wife about her pregnancy (which she only talks about in hypotheticals) because this destroys him so much. It’s completely understandable to see why and I kind of value Happy! for this. It’s really diving deep into this dark stuff instead of trying to make us like Nick. I don’t want to like Nick but I want to understand him more and this does that.
2. The North Pole
This ain’t your childhood dream North Pole. This one has literal poles and strippers dancing on them. Nick ends up here thanks to a tip and this strip club is basically heaven on Earth for him at this point. You can imagine that someone like Nick isn’t exactly meeting women that he’s not paying for. When he gets here, he kind of tunes Happy out because this is his domain. What starts off fun gets really dark as Nick just brings the whole scene down. This club is apparently a hub for mall Santas and that’s what he’s looking for. He gets really depressed and gets asked to leave the main room and that leads him to get even more depressed despite getting a free lap dance. Basically The North Pole serves as this week’s surrealism as this place doesn’t even feel real. Everything Christmasy in this show never feels real and I think that’s a really good point of view to take. Christmas is so driven by material things now and Happy! kind of touches on that by all this holiday spirit feeling very fake and put on and this bar feels very surreal because of that.
3. The Hunt Is On
After popping Meredith a good one in the face that she absolutely had coming, Amanda and her team up to start finding Hailey. Amanda believes that Meredith is helping her because she owes her but really Meredith is using this as a way to get in contact with Nick for Mr. Blue. Their first stop on their hunt is to go to the house of a family who has reported their daughter missing. They haven’t received a card yet, the way the other families have and this is another situation that goes terribly wrong. Amanda, while snooping around, finds their daughter. The parents have been keeping her for reasons really unknown and that’s kind of the point. Again, this show isn’t about making us feel better. It’s this surreal exploration of the darkest sides of humanity but isn’t subtle about it but is upfront about that. What I do like about this particular part of the expansion of the story is that I care more about the repercussions of Hailey’s disappearance. It feels more real to me and I’m emotionally invested. When I read the comic (which was a long time ago so I may be wrong here) it felt very much like Nick’s story and really the show has become the story of everyone involved and I’m incredibly into that. The stuff with Amanda (in the present and past) was the most compelling part of this episode.
Continued below4. The Worst Santa
Very Bad Santa is very bad indeed and is easily one of the scariest characters on tv this year. “When Christmas Was Christmas” finally gives us more with him and while we don’t get lots of insight into why he’s this monster (we don’t need it), we get to see how scary he is. I mean, I am a grown woman and I was shaken by how gross and mean he is. He’s unhinged and poor Hailey could die at any moment. Very Bad Santa is a drug addict and possibly mentally ill and the show goes out of its way to make no excuse for his behavior, which I like. It’s okay to hate this man and the things he’s doing. He is our villain and the show does good work making him that. He sets up a dinner table and serves Hailey fruitcake. He reveals to her that the nice voice she heard while she was in the crate was Very Bad Santa himself, who may have some kind of split personality. TV is dumb folks. I know. I’ll probably have more to say about this next week. It turns out that Very Bad Santa put drugs in the fruitcake and he forces Hailey on some kind of drug trip that makes her remember seeing the photo of Nick. Very Bad Santa seems to know Nick and I’m sure we’ll get into what his beef with Nick is at some point very soon.
5. “I Can See You”
“When Christmas Was Christmas” ends in a fairly big way. It doesn’t quite turn the show on its head but it does add a pretty big wrench into what ever Nick’s plans are. Very Bad Santa goes to The North Pole and he beats Nick up pretty badly. Nick is bleeding and beaten and as Happy tries to talk to him, Very Bad Santa bends down and says to Happy that he can see him and that’s where things end. Happy is visible to this guy and Nick has had his first really bad interaction with him. I like this twist because it makes Very Bad Santa even more dangerous and unpredictable. I’m not in love with this show by any means but it keeps finding something to bring me back and this is it this week.
