Goosebumps season 1 episode 4 recap: Go Eat Worms

The final member of what appears to be the main crew of kids finally gets an episode of Goosebumps dedicated to himself.

Lucas’ father was a stuntman and Lucas wants to be just like him. He wants to successfully complete the mountain run that his father died trying to complete, but it seems like he’s too scared. However, after coming home one morning from not doing the big stunt, Lucas notices his mother with Margot’s father in a full-blown affair. We’d gotten hints of this in earlier episodes but it seems to be further along than we expected.

The titular eating of the worm

Lucas asks Margot to come over to his house and shows her the footage of their parents together. Margot is understandably upset. To cheer her up, Lucas shows her his pet worms and says he’ll eat the one that he found at the haunted house on Halloween.

For those that remember the first episode, Lucas was trying to get somebody to dare him to eat a worm during the party, tying this worm back to the house, just like the camera, the mask, and the clock. While holding the worm over his face, Lucas accidentally ingests the worm anyway, even though a dare never took place. Then, that night, the rest of the worms crawl out of their aquarium beside his bed and crawl into Lucas’ mouth while he is sleeping, seemingly summoned by the original worm.

The next day at school, Lucas discovers that he can’t feel any pain. It seems the worms have somehow given him this power, and even though he can still be damaged, he doesn’t feel it and seems to get healed at a rapid rate, a pretty ideal superpower to have if you want to be a stuntman.

No pain or no feeling at all

While Lucas is testing out his newfound powers, the other kids are arguing about who they should trust with the secret that crazy supernatural things are happening. Isaiah wants to tell his girlfriend Allison, but the other kids don’t want her involved.

Unfortunately, he had already told her to meet the group and she ends up hearing that there is a big secret that’s being kept from her. Isaiah tells her that Margot let him cheat on her test in the first episode so that he could play in the football game. Unhappy with the relationship between Margot and Isaiah, Allison tattles on them to Margot’s father who happens to also be the school’s guidance counselor.

Margot’s dad takes her to his office to address the cheating issue, which gives Margot a pretty golden opportunity to gain the high ground in a cheating conversation since she knows about her father’s affair. The fight is postponed when Lucas jumps a motorbike off the roof of the school. He dislocates his shoulder but can’t feel it, which means that he’s ready for the big stunt that he had always been afraid to do.

Margot finds Lucas’ mother and together they go after Lucas to stop him from attempting the stunt. He tries to push them aside, but Lucas’ mother tells him that his father didn’t die in a stunt gone wrong, but that it was his way of committing suicide, and that he had left a note that she had kept from him. Lucas and his mother grieve, and the overwhelming amount of feelings is the opposite of what the worms do, so Lucas ends up vomiting up all the worms at once.

However, it turns out that the worms want to be inside Lucas and they transform into a single Lovecraftian worm monster that chases after the three of them. The humans end up at a sawmill where, through a bit of trickery, they end up sending the whole mass of worms through a wood chipper, getting rid of all of them.

While the two kids get away, Lucas’ mother stays behind to confront the police about the whole situation. But when asked to explain what happened, she goes with the truth, which gets her put in an asylum as the episode comes to a close.

Getting to the team-up point of the story.

The past four episodes have kind of worked as different origin stories for each of the main characters. We had a different lead character in each episode, dealing with a different supernatural situation. It’s been a pretty good way to try and adapt the format of the Goosebumps book series into a serialized story that viewers would expect from a modern TV show.

However, while the slow burn of the different stories slowly intertwining has been interesting to watch, one of the best moments of this episode were the handful of scenes where the group of kids were hanging out together trying to figure out how to deal with what was happening to them.

The show feels like it’s stepping into new territory, with the kids having to work together to deal with whatever might be coming next, and it’s nice to see how they’re able to balance out the different characters that have to fit together in the same scene. Giving us so much time with each individual character has helped us see how each one thinks, so getting to see them bounce ideas off of one another feels really natural to watch.

It’s exciting to think about where the show might go from here, now that all the major players are introduced and we still have so much of the season to get through.