Channel Zero Season 3 Episode 4 Review: “Alice in Slaughterland”

Warning: This article contains discussion of cannibalism, violence, racism, and spoilers for Channel Zero.

“Butcher’s Block”‘s fourth episode, the aptly named “Alice in Slaughterland,” pivots to focus the drama on the interior of the Peach residence. It’s an intelligent move, given the first half of the season was dedicated to the idea of standing outside and looking in at something both deeply familiar and yet unnervingly incomprehensible.

Indeed, it’s this episode that might strike most truly to the heart of the season’s underlying anxiety: the very real idea of a (literally) consumptive and exploitative America. This idea is refracted through the extended cannibalism allegory which really doesn’t need to do much allegorical work.

In between the episode’s more alarming sequences are jumps back and forth between different time periods. These are used to unpack more of the relationship between the sisters that form the heart of the season. This narrative tactic might not be for everyone, but here, I think it helps to ground the mental health aspects of the story in something with greater gravitas and sensibility than the horror elements alone.

It doesn’t go as far as I’d like, but it at least hints at an understanding that there’s human beings at the core of the story. Which is something that seems noticeably absent when the season (accidentally or not) leans too far into “ooh, mentally ill people are so scary” territory.

Elsewhere, as the title suggests, the episode borrows rather evidently from Alice in Wonderland, and from fairytale logic more broadly. Overall, it works for the quality and tone the writers clearly wanted this episode to have. Using the convoluted yet somewhat childlike logic of a fairytale or a trip through the looking glass heightens the contrast with moments of abject fear. At times, it may risk feeling a little derivative, but for what it’s worth it’s enjoyable to see a writing room with solid grasp on the conventions and schemes of earlier works they’re borrowing from.

These elements, too, are helped along by consistently well-utilized set pieces and staging. The interior of the Peach household is very well-designed in ways that deliberately offend and unsettle. There are rooms that are too luxurious, too red, or either too big or too enclosed. It’s a space in which the luxury becomes an act of violence, itself. This is a particularly stark chokehold in rooms where there are no windows, and from which there is no exit save the door you came in.

At the end of the day, though, the episode (and the season) maintains some glaring issues. Despite efforts this episode to center depictions of schizophrenia back in the more sensitively handled family narrative, it’s still being relied on a little too much to mobilize the horror than is entirely comfortable. The tradeoff between debunking the idea of the “magical cure” and the solution the Peaches offer comes at too steep a cost to really be considered a fix for anything. Utilizing its logic doesn’t quite pan out, at least for me.

More concerning still is the pervasive lean this season seems to have toward enacting brutality against and upon Black bodies. This is (of course) a dimension that remains somewhat outside of my lane yet nonetheless bears mentioning. I am, as always, happy to be corrected. There may be experiences in the writing room of which I’m not aware that are being grappled with.

In the absence of that knowledge, though, it’s deeply uncomfortable that “Butcher’s Block” seems to be the goriest season to date. Moreso, it is uncomfortable that much of it seems to have been directed at the season’s Black cast members. My concern, in essence, is that the season’s anxiety about a society that consumes and exploits people — as mentioned above — has started using imagery that replicates exactly the thing one assumes it aims to condemn.