Terror Tuesday: Extreme – Episode 8 “Viral Curse” Recap & Review

Viral Curse

Episode 8 of Terror Tuesday: Extreme begins with a newcomer in the community called Ple struggling to make ends meet. She’s called “white girl” by the other women and she runs a laundrette while looking after her daughter, Kaew.

The pair get along like a house on fire and Kaew works hard at her studies as she preps for moving up to first grade. As for Ple, she ends up listening to a radio show called Terror Tuesday (meta!) and it depicts a story of a single woman whose daughter ends up dying after being neglected in the batj. Apparently before this girl died, she was playing with her “sister”, although she never actually had a sister and the whole spooky factor comes into play.

Ple is behind on her rent and the landlord is not happy. She agrees to give Ple a two week extension given the hectic nature of enrolling Kaew but she’s on a tight window. Ple is also thrown into the hotseat the next day when the headmaster shows to check out the place Kaew is staying at to make sure everything is ok. The headmaster is not impressed. Ple though, decides to pay extra to make sure she gets a place.

Now, Ple isn’t exactly a responsible mother as she leaves her daughter all alone to go off to a party that night. Her two friends are well-off with great family lives but they’re worried about Ple. They offer her some extra assistance but she turns it down.

When Ple heads home, after receiving a rather alarming call, she sees a frightening vision of Kaew all watery and dead in the bed. Thankfully it’s just a vision but there’s definitely something sinister occurring here. Kaew has even drawn a picture of the pair… joined by some shadowy figure which she claims lives in the abandoned complex across the road.

The next day, Ple receives a call from the headmaster who wants even more money for the enrolment. She struggles to pay all the bills, but manages to pay the landlord a little bit between the tuition fees. However, when Ple returns home she finds an angry mob outside. It turns out Ple pawned gold jewellery she found in a customer’s clothes earlier on in order to pay for the tuition.

Stressed and overworked, Ple decides to go on a big trip and demands Kaew take a bath first. However, when she hears ghostly laughing, Kaew is nowhere to be seen. It appears as if she drowned in the bath.

After some frightening visions across the apartment, where Ple slowly loses her mind, we cut forward in time to see Hom, the landlord, has kicked Ple out. She points out how Ple wanted to study abroad and was out of it, but things take a crazy turn that night when Hom heads home. She finds water all over the ground and as she cleans up, she turns on the TV to hear Terror Tuesday playing. Ple is the caller and she points out that “it” has been following her. It took her daughter and she blames those on Terror Tuesday for what’s happened to her.

The Episode Review

So the final episode of Terror Tuesday closes everything out with a final chapter that does a good job tying this in with the Terror Tuesday podcast, paying homage to the source material. This works well in the context of the show, while the story itself really leans into that idea of poverty and overwork. There are echoes of Pursuit of Happyness here too, although there’s definitely not a happy ending to this one!

This has been a theme throughout the show – that being extreme stress and emotions – and could be why Ple has been seeing visions. Ple is up to her eyeballs in debt and she made a terrible decision in selling that gold jewellery that didn’t belong to her. Unfortunately this spells the beginning of the end and is indicative of how one small decision can have massive consequences.

All in all, the final episode does a decent enough job tying everything together, bowing out this turbulent Thai horror anthology.