REVIEW: ‘Nocturne’ Season 1 Episode 3 — “Eyes on the Inside”

Context is everything. It’s how our brains make meaning. When we don’t have context for something – can’t make it fit with the stuff we know and understand – our brains tend to throw it out. We make different meanings. We miss the crucial stuff that would lead us to the truth. We wander through dark rooms slowly, hands on walls, moving forward through the black, hoping light will eventually come. Nocturne Episode 3 “Eyes on the Inside” continues the series’ slow-burn mystery. 

This episode is interested in questions, not answers. What does this mean? What’s happening here? How will we solve this problem? The fun is in trying to piece everything together before someone pulls back the curtain for the grand reveal.

Jonah (Liev Schreiber) has noticed a pattern: strange markings on trees near where the people who were taken were found. Individually, they are nothing. They have no meaning. But stand at the right angle, and they come together to form an image: an arrow bisecting a circle. What does it mean? What is it for?

Nocturne Episode 3 deepens the mystery in this Lars Kepler adaptation.

When Jonah searches the area, he finds a small box with a picture of Sally Gilford (Kersti Bryan) inside. She works at the facility where Jurek Walter (Stephen Graham) is being held, and hasn’t shown up for work in a while. When he shows Michael (Landon Valentin) a picture of the symbols, the boy has a visceral reaction. He knows that image. It belongs to the one who took him and kept him in a hole, in the dark: a masked man Michael calls The Sandman.

Valentin is great at selling a kid trying to process an enormous amount of trauma and fear – there’s a lovely moment later in the episode when he tells his mother that his eyesight has recovered enough that he can see her face – but this part of the episode belongs to Schreiber.

Jonah is running herself ragged to try to solve this, and he’s in the uncomfortable position of being “the expert” even if he’s not really a cop anymore. You can see him carry that weight as he tries to navigate this; it’s a quiet performance, but a good one.

In the facility, Jurek continues to take advantage of Karl (Rory Culkin)’s kindness, repeatedly injuring himself and asking for Vaseline to help. He scrapes it off his back with a shoe and keeps it in the Jell-O cups he receives since, after choking, he no longer gets solid food. Like everything else, he hides it in his toilet. What is he building? A bomb? Something worse? We don’t know. We lack context. But Jurek does. And it isn’t good.

“Eyes on the Inside” is about set up, not context.

Saga (Zazie Beetz) has her own problems. Everyone in here is crazy, which is expected, but what she doesn’t expect is to have the wrong crucifix necklace returned to her. Hers is supposed to have a microphone, but it gets mixed up with another patient’s. There’s a funny repeated line about how she needs the cross for “religious reasons,” which is what Jonah has told her to say.

Beetz plays Saga as a character who is deeply uncomfortable with where she is (she’s clearly put off by how crazy everyone else is), but doggedly dedicated to her job, to trying to figure out how to get to Jurek and how best to get that cross.

You also get the idea that she’s used to much more prep, and that makes her uncomfortable. But she volunteered for this. She’s a professional here to do a job, and she’s going to make sure it gets done.

Case in point: it’s goofy to hear her repeat that line about “religious reasons” for the crucifix (why else would anyone carry one? C’mon), but it also shows how this entire operation is happening on the fly and that Saga trusts his judgment. She gets the crucifix back, but the other patient loses it when she starts speaking into it and ends up breaking it. Unable to send the all-clear signal, Saga resorts to trying to steal a doctor’s phone to send a text. It does not go well.

That leaves Jonah and Nate (Gary Carr) to figure out how to contact her, which they accomplish by committing several felonies. When she finds out, Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan) is less than pleased.

Nocturne Episode 3 is all about setting up more of the puzzle, we just can’t solve it yet. 

Things come to a head when the police ask for help locating Sally and her family. Jonah finds her van empty on the side of the road. No signs of a struggle. But things get interesting when The Sandman calls and demands they call off the search because they belong to him. We find he’s telling the truth when we see Sally underground, in the dark, being held by a man with a mask.

“Eyes on the Inside” isn’t a character-focused episode. Every actor here does well with what they’re given, but the point is to move the pieces along the board. How do they fit together? We don’t know yet. We lack context.

Nocturne Episode 3 is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box, eyeing the edge of the pieces to see how they might fit together. It will take some time before an image comes into view, but the act itself is enjoyable, if not revolutionary. And I remain intrigued and curious to see what this image resolves into. See you next week.

Nocturne Episode 3 is streaming now, exclusively on Apple TV with new episodes every Friday. 

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