Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Season 3 Episode 8, “Thresholds.”
Of Season 3, Episode 8, “Thresholds” provides the most revealing backstory about the “Anghkooey” children and how they died. The children first appeared in season 2, when Tabitha Matthews (Catalan Sandino Moreno) started seeing them around the city. During the Of At the end of season 2, Jade Herrera (David Alpay) also saw them when she entered the tunnels, where the children were lying on rocks and looking at the tree roots shaped in the pattern of the symbol Jade was seeing.
When Tabitha was in Camden, Maine, none of the others From the cast members I saw children around the mysterious neighborhood. It was only after Tabitha returned to the City that the “Anghkooey” children reappearedmaking it clear that Tabitha’s mission to save the children remains incomplete. She discovered that Victor Kavanaugh’s mother, Miranda (Sarah Booth), had visions of the children and the need to save them before she was trapped in the city. Thanks to Victor (Scott McCord) and Christopher’s (Thom Payne) restored memory, what previously happened to the children was also revealed.
Victor reveals that the children were killed in the city by people they trusted
They were murdered in the dark
Victor realizes that in the memory he has been trying to recall, it was the Boy in White (Vox Smith) and not the ventriloquist dummy, Jasper, talking to Christopher. He remembers the Boy in White telling Christopher that “the answers to the end are in the beginning” and that it all started with the children. As Victor explains to Tabitha and Sara Myers (Avery Konrad), the Boy in White said that children were born in the dark and were later betrayed and murdered in the dark by the people they trusted and loved.
The children were not betrayed by everyone they trusted, because someone they loved told them a story that gave them hope. When the children lay down on the rocks, they were able to channel their hopes into the roots that became the mysterious symbol of Jade, which created a distant tree. The Boy in White told Christopher that he would need to go through a distant tree to save the children. However, Christopher did not follow through on this and When Victor told his mother what the Boy in White said, she went to the distant tree.
Were the children being used for a ritualistic sacrifice?
Many signs point to a sinister ritual
It is still unclear in terms of the individuals who killed the children, who they are and what their motivations are, but they may have used the children as a ritualistic sacrifice. The stones on which children lay in the tunnels, the statues found in Of The woods and red rocks near the statues appear ritualistic, as do many of the city’s supernatural elements. Some of the the drawings that Victor and Tabitha see in the tunnels also have a ritualistic aspect.
The children may have been sacrificed as part of a ritual to appease the dark forces controlling the city. If that’s the case, the sacrifice apparently didn’t go as planned, as the children can still be seen and heard by Tabitha and Jade in their “Anghkooey” forms, and they even had the power to grow the roots of the symbol and the distant tree. Another ritual, although hopefully not involving the betrayal and murder of innocents, may have to be performed in the future to free the children.
How will saving the children from the tower end everyone’s trap?
Saving the children could be the key to everything
The Boy in White saying this “the answers to the end are in the beginning” suggests that the betrayal and murder of children are at the root of the city’s originsthe many horrors it contains, and that freeing the children may be the answer to escaping the city. As Miranda was seeing visions of the city and the children that needed to be saved before she and her own children were trapped, this indicates that the injustice done to the children occurred over 40 years ago.
If Tabitha et al. Of the characters can discover how to free the children from the Tower, can, as a synonym, secure their own freedom and be able to permanently return to the outside world.
It may be that no one can fully escape the City until the children are free from the Tower. Tabitha briefly escaped, unless her experiences were just a deceptive extension of the City, but she ended up being trapped again. If Tabitha et al. Of the characters can discover how to free the children from the Tower, can, as a synonym, secure their own freedom and be able to permanently return to the outside world. Tabitha can finish the mission Miranda started before the events of Of season 1 has started.