"The Midnight Club": Perfection as the enemy of the Good

On Mike Flanagan's new series and the nihilism of insisting people are perfect as they are.

In Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix offering, The Midnight Club, (as in the novel it’s based on) the members of the Midnight Club gather round a large table to “make ghosts” – that is, to tell scary stories. In the fireplace behind them, a great fire rages defiantly against the shadows swallowing the room, just as these eight teens resist death by giving life to the stories they tell each other. Each of them is living under a death sentence; the library in which they meet is part of the Brightside Home hospice where they spend their remaining days, quickly approaching the termini of their terminal diagnoses.

Tonight, a young man with AIDS makes his ghost for the club. His name is Spencer, and he tells a sci-fi story inspired by The Terminator, in which a young man named Rel (played by the same actor who portrays Spencer) falls in love with an engineer. The new couple eventually discover that Rel is an android from a future that has eradicated feelings such as fear. He’s travelled back in…