Servant – Season 4 Episode 1 “Pigeon” Recap & Review

Pigeon

Episode 1 of Servant season 4 starts with us skipping forward in time. Sean’s big Gourmet Gauntlet TV show is a smash hit, adopting a Gordon Ramsay persona, while back home Leanne happens to be cooking. After heading out to the car and grabbing some flowers, she suspects she’s being watched and tentatively heads back into the house again. Paranoid, she locks the doors.

Unfortunately, she’s not alone. A shady man happens to be in the house but after thwarting his threat and scrambling outside, Leanne finds herself surrounded by guys. Leanne manages to get away though, scurrying to the car and hiding inside.

The others disperse while Leanne messages Roscoe. It turns out all the homeless guys have been ferried out the park and taken away, leaving her – and by extension the Turner family – without protection.

When Leanne tries to escape from her car, the hotdog vendor nearby shows up and begins to attack her. Leanne stabs the guy in the neck, while the nearby runner gets involved and splashes hot water over Leanne’s face.

Leanne rushes back to the car again but she leaves her phone underneath and she’s stuck alone… until she ferociously pounds on the horn and causes them all to disperse.

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it. A black car pulls up full of shadowy figures, one of which pressing his face against the window and telling Leanne she needs to go back. It’s “what’s best for us all” apparently.

When all those other figures return, blocking up her exhaust pipe and causing fumes to poison the air inside the car, Leanne fights her way out and somehow manages to control a whole flock of pigeons to begin attacking those outside. In fact, one even pecks a guy’s eyeball out.

After the attack, and with the villains gone, Leanne begins to clean up the mess inside the house. She burns her cooking, messing up the return of Dorothy, who’s back, still alive but confined to a wheelchair. She’s also not talking to Leanne, and even Sean isn’t exactly warming to her presence either. Dorothy could get better if she continues her physical therapy but Julian is not so sure she’ll recover.

As for the house, more cracks appear to trickle outside from the basement, leaving an ominous sign of things to come in the episodes ahead.

The Episode Review

Servant returns with an intriguing season opener, this time setting up a big conflict both inside the Turner house and outside it. With Dorothy back but clearly not in a very talkative mood, especially after the incident on the stairway last season, it’s perhaps no surprise to find everyone giving Leanne the cold shoulder.

At the same time though, we have the issues outside the house, and, most notably, the situation involving the cult and those who want Leanne to go back.

The whole chapter is pretty action packed and it seems like this season might actually be more urgent and bringing the central mystery into perspective, which is good.

It’s way too early to be casting judgments on this one though so we’ll have to wait and see what’s in store for us next.