"The Stinging Aroma of Sulfur" Quiz

Answer: Lois

After having visited Merritt, Lois asks Maisie to drive her over to visit Marshall in the home he purchased for Redd. When she arrives, he's out watering the plants in the lawn. He lets her in without discussion, seemingly having expected the chat.

Lois, Marshall, and Redd sit together with cups of tea for the conversation as Lois explains she knew about them for quite a while. She was never heartbroken over the affair-- she lost the ability to be upset over it. Between their failing relationship and his disdain for Merritt's weight gain in college, she knew it was only a matter of time.

Marshall wonders why Lois doesn't think sleeping with Merritt's husband was cause for regret, but Lois acknowledges she will always be sorry she did it.

All of this being said, Lois likes Redd. She was his nurse in her dream, but the real enemy was Marshall-- he wanted her dead, and not in a merciful way. It's why she brought the divorce papers.

Answer: Florida

When Lois puts down the divorce papers she says that she just wants to be at peace. He can take anything he wants, and whatever peace he can muster up should go with it. She will try to do the same, but elsewhere. As she puts her ring down with the papers, she considers Florida-- a little town called Tarpon Springs.

Lois says that she will always remember that, at one time, they were in love, and they had a complicated daughter together, but it's time to move on. Marshall angrily tells Lois that she's a beast of fury and she's going to be unable to change. He wanted her dead-- both of them needed to be dead-- because the world would be prettier.

Answer: Slaps her

After grabbing ice creams with Maisie, Lois still has another stop, heading back to Merritt's to speak to her once again. This conversation goes much differently from the previous one because while Lois agrees with Merritt in that she was a bad and unforgivable mother, Merritt was also a problematic daughter. And in that, Lois stayed by her side through nervous breakdowns, a cult, bad relationships, and on and on. None of it justifies her sleeping with Ed, but for twenty years, they did not have a good relationship.

The problem, Lois realizes, is that she and Ed had more in common than he did with Merritt. They both wonder whether or not the other loved Ed.

Lois lets Merritt know that she's leaving and moving somewhere warm. She slaps her daughter in retribution for the slap from their last visit and lets her know that if she wants a real relationship, she can come find her wherever she settles down.

Answer: COVID-19

Lois stops in for another session with Dr. Witticomb who cryptically tells her that her dreams are made up of reflections of past experiences, but Lois doesn't believe that's completely true. Some, she says, are more abstract than that, and she reflects that the man who gave her and Megan fire tents in the desert may have been an interpretation of her father, even if this wasn't true in her subconscious.

Inviting a colleague, Dr. Smythe, into the session, Dr. Witticomb insists that this brilliant man, who's an avid researcher in the field, has great insight into what may be happening. She agrees to letting him question her, but is surprised to see that his interest lies in the murders in her dreams which, as they all agree, never happened. The women in the milk bottling plant, for instance, may be indicative of her subconsciousness reacting to women's lack of agency.

It relates to how Lois got the COVID that put her in the coma; she and Maisie went to a civil rights rally and she caught it there. It's an issue, she admits, she almost died for.

Answer: A prophet

Dr. Smythe asks Lois more about the drug den in her dream. Again, Lois never had such a grisly case, but every detail was so vivid. Even the language on the walls was specific and peculiar. The Burnside family, she notes, is something she doesn't even want to broach again, even if Dr. Smythe is insistent; he believes it's the culmination of all her work.

Lois got a call at dawn, while she was at home. She pulled up, she found a nightmare, almost as though a gruesome tableau. Lois is terrified as to how such a nightmare could be buried within her, but Dr. Smythe thinks she envisioned the future. Dr. Witticomb agrees, believing that her sense of empathy is what allows her to understand what may be coming. She may be able to be the prophet that stops evil. It's an interesting choice of words for a psychologist, she says.

Answer: Banal

Returning home from the therapist's office, Lois finds Maisie at the kitchen table hosting Redd, much to her surprise. As Maisie departs for the store, Redd complains that she doesn't know what's what anymore; the world keeps changing. Worse, she's realized that she doesn't want Marshall anymore. After their last encounter, she was distressed by his reaction to the divorce papers, and worse, she has him full-time-- something she never wanted. When he started being around all the time, they lost their little rituals and she lost her independence; it's all banal.

Lois, sassily, notes that there are no refunds or returns, and Redd understands completely. That time has passed. But what Redd notes is that Lois' mention of Tarpon Springs got her thinking and looking online, and she finds it to be quaint and charming...and freeing. Lois' advice is to break up with him, rip off the Band-Aid, and find her silence.

Redd finds that answer satisfactory. She gets up to leave and asks Lois to send her a postcard. Away, after all, sounds so good.

Answer: The Burnside family murder

Still sleeping out at the desert motel, Megan awakens to the sound of her buzzing phone and picks it up to find that something has occurred that needs her attention. Elsewhere, on the news, she gets word of a devastating flood.

When Megan arrives on the scene, she finds a gruesome murder-- an entire family. That evening she phones Lois, despite her retirement, and begs her to come down to assist her.

When Lois arrives she finds something awful waiting for her-- an uncanny sense of deja vu as Megan leads her into the front door and explains it's the worst thing she's ever seen. The family inside has been tied to the dining room chairs and force-fed. In the kitchen, the father has been beheaded. On the stove, the family baby is in a bubbling pot. It's not the Burnsides, but it may as well be.

Answer: Sulfur

Lois, back home, attempts to sleep but finds that she's having vivid dreams of Megan, drenched in blood. She only awakens when the phone rings and, sure enough, it's Megan, claiming she's calling because she has no choice. Lois urges her not to keep calling-- it's her case and she'll just have to figure it out.

The problem is that the test results on what was in the kitchen came back. Lois presumes what her dream indicated-- sulfur-- but Megan won't tell her unless she comes to the motel. It's enough to convince Lois into driving out to her.

Answer: That Megan cut her

Lois drives through the night until she reaches Megan's motel, only to find it's identical to the one from her coma dream. Inside the truth is as Lois feared; the substance appears to be brimstone. And it leads Lois to the conclusion that someone must have read her therapy files and taken great pains to perfectly recreate the vivid murders of her dreams. Megan doesn't completely believe this, but Lois, worriedly, believes that she could have brought the murders into being, especially with Dr. Smythe's and Dr. Witticomb's insistence that she may be a prophet.

With that, Lois believes that she needs to wake up, and she implores Megan to cut her with a switchblade. If Lois gets cut and bleeds, then she's there and not dead. As much as Megan doesn't want to do it, she places a small cut on Lois' arm. Sure enough, she bleeds. It's enough of an indication as she needs, even if that comes with its own problematic realization.

Answer: Lois

While Lois goes to the restroom to wash off her cut, Megan turns on the TV and looks out the window...only for Justin to break in the front door, having tracked her down to pay a revenge call. With a bottle of booze in one hand, he attacks her with the other, forcing her into a corner. All the while, he doesn't notice Lois being in the bathroom-- at least until she comes out wielding her gun.

Justin gets to his feet and calls Lois out for having worse problems than they do, criticizing her for the woes of her own personal life while she points the firearm at him. Lois tells him to assume the position and put his hands on the nearby wall, and Megan asks him to listen, begging her not to shoot him due to his being unwell. While Megan tries to insist that it's a dream and it's not real, Justin keeps egging Lois on, even talking about empathy and that she can't kill him. As he puts his mouth around the barrel of her gun, she pulls the trigger.