The Midnight Club – Season 1 Episode 4 “Gimme a Kiss” Recap & Review

Gimme a Kiss

Episode 4 of The Midnight Club starts with Ilonka in the basement. The matches out. She scrambles for another, lighting it quickly. The woman is gone. Kevin heads back down to pick up Ilonka, eventually alerting the rest of the kids and getting them to come check this room out.

With flashlights in hand, they notice the walls, ceiling and floor are all painted. There’s also a book there too, which is signed by Julia Jayne. The Midnight Club was actually founded by Julia, as it happens, and their usual mantra they recite before every meeting is written there too.

Sandra finds a ritual dagger and hoods for the cultists, which spooks most of the kids. They all leave, except Ilonka, Anya and Kevin. Searching through the book, they find a number of different stories and the hourglass symbol again… written in blood. Now, the other kids head up in the lift and leave the trio alone in the dark… the next scene we’re in group therapy. How did the trio get out of the basement with the lift gone? Wasn’t it established before they need to be inside?

An awkward group therapy session ensues, with Sandra indirectly telling everyone they need to find other ways to grieve the loss of Tristan rather than poking around things that should be left alone.

Ilonka heads into the forest, where she runs into that strange woman, Shasta, again. She leaves Ilonka her number and encourages her to read in the library. Section 600 is medicine and 619 is Experimental Medicine, to be precise. This could hold a clue to a cure for her condition.

When Ilonka leaves, she’s encouraged to head back at any time, pointing to a camera up on the trees where she’s been keeping an eye on proceedings.

While Kevin gets dressed up and heads off to his prom, Spence is checked out by Mark who takes some blood. As he wanders into the hallway, the comms for the recovery room crackles, with a faint voice whispering “hello.” Despite the room originally being locked, when Spence gets Mark to check it out, there’s nothing there.

Kevin eventually returns from prom, quipping about how everyone called him brave and they even made him prom king too, which feels like a pity move. Anyway, Kevin is back just in time for the Midnight Club to start up.

Tensions are still high between Spence and Sandra, while the former’s meds don’t seem to be working anymore. This time the story follows to Sandra, who tells her story: Give Me A Kiss.

It’s a detective story, with a black and white noir sheen and Detective Fisher played by Dr Stanton. Alice talks about her experience in school, including with her best friend Jake.

At school, Jake has a target on his back. He’s found kissing Kirk in the stands and news of this is spread across school, destroying his reputation. As a result, Jake decides to fake his death. Part of this comes from a big fight with Kirk, where the former falls off a boat into the water. Using scuba gear, Jake manages to get across to land, and waits it out at Sharon’s parents’ place. However, there’s a twist to this tale. Kirk also drowned.

We soon find out that Kirk was killed by Alice, our unreliable narrator. She also posted the journal and tried to kill Kirk by burning the cabin. All of this stems from her jealousy. She killed Kirk because he gave her oral herpes. Anyway, the story ends with Alice being killed in the story.

As the Midnight Club clear for the night, Kevin and Ilonka figure out the numbers from the sketches. It’s the Dewey Decimal System in the library. Checking the numbers, and going to 292.13, they find a strange book with an hourglass symbol on the front. This seems to be exactly what they’re after.

When they head back to Ilonka’s room, they find Anya’s wheelchair tipped over and Anya in a rough way. Moments before this, Anya checked the wall, where her shadow unnerving stood up and reached out with long, skeletal hands. Is she dead? We’ll have to wait and see.

The Episode Review

Well, so much for the series picking up. There seems to be a trend with these episodes where the last 5 minutes are genuinely quite scary and there’s a tale that shows off the artistic flair of the series but doesn’t have all that much horror involved.

The overarching mystery involving the cultists is quite good though, while Anya is easily the best character out the bunch. She clearly has a lot of demons in her past, and the ending with her being stalked by the shadow is certainly a throwback to her earlier story about her two sides.

Is Anya going to be okay? We’ll have to wait and see, as this one leaves the door wide open for where this may go next.