Terror Tuesday: Extreme – Episode 1 “Our Little Sister” Recap & Review

Our Little Sister

Terror Tuesday: Extreme kicks off episode 1 with a Happy Birthday jingle contrasting a horrific car accident. With the car upturned, a girl called Elle stumbles out into the road… and is immediately hit by a truck.

Unfortunately, all of this is witnessed by Aye, who finds herself suffering from PTSD as a result. She can’t go to work, she’s struggling to move on, and she’s suffering from horrible visions. Her mother isn’t much better though, who’s also taking Diazepam as a way of combatting her grief.

Aye’s mother comes up with a solution… a creepy doll. There are rules to this though. They have to feed the doll both main meals and desserts. Secondly, put the doll back in the box at midnight. They can’t miss this deadline no matter what because… reasons? And thirdly, there’s a binding spell around the house and going beyond this point with the doll will break the illusion. 

It would appear that Elle’s essence is apparently inside this doll, and predictably things are not right in the house. The doll seems to be moving on its own, it’s smiling at Aye and even manifests itself as her sister, right in front of her.

While hugging Aye, things take a nasty turn. The guilt Aye is feeling starts to manifest, as Elle tells Aye that she’s the black sheep of the house and nobody loves her. All of this eventually manifests in… Aye waking up. However, when she does so she finds her bird, Jib-jib, gone.

Her mother is in the kitchen cooking, but she looks possessed. She’s thrown her pills away, chops rhythmically and even lashes out at Aye when she confronts her behaviour. Snatching up the doll, Aye notices strange symbols all over its body, which seems to be linked to dark magic.

That night, Aye’s mum sedates her and when Aye awakens, she finds herself tied to her chair. The Elle doll is also there too, while her mum fixes her up… bird soup. Yep, she killed Jib-jib. Its clear that Aye’s mum is possessed, as she flits back and forth between two states; she seems to be herself and apologizes and then screams at Aye, calling her a terrible daughter. All of this is linked to the Elle doll, who is manipulating Aye’s mum into doing her bidding.

To begin with, she swallows a cup of oil and then tries to get Aye to do the same. She doesn’t, thankfully, but as flames lick across the ground from a spilled candle, Aye’s mum grabs a knife from the kitchen sidE and starts attacking Aye. Her hands are completely cut up but she manages to knock her back.

When Aye gets up, she turns and finds herself confronted with a monstrous beast. It chokes her out… until Aye’s mum gets a knife and hits it back. She urges her daughter to get the doll out the house, and our protagonist does just that. Aye crosses the boundary and as she looks around, there’s both an Elle doll.. and her mum is a doll too. Oh, and she doesn’t have any cuts on her hands either.

So what’s going on? Well, it turns out Aye hasn’t been taking her meds. We know she’s been prescribed these from the start of the episode but now we find out the truth of everything. It turns out Aye’s mum actually died that night with Elle and it was Aye herself who contacted the shaman to get both Elle and her mum as dolls. This explains everything that’s happened, and now it hits her. Aye breaks down and starts sobbing as the camera pans out and shows both dolls alongside her.

The Episode Review

The first episode of Terror Tuesday gets things off to a decent start. Sure, the chapter itself isn’t exactly ground-breaking in what it achieves here, but the tale is good and there’s a nice little twist at the end too.

PTSD and grief can do crazy things to a person and that much is especially true when it comes to Aye. She’s suffering really badly and now it becomes clear that everything she experienced was just her grief manifesting, which makes sense given some of the imagery and the wild swinging between differing states. Whether these dolls actually had the essence of her deceased family members inside or not is up for debate, but undoubtedly this is a decent episode to kick things off with.