'The Purge' Season 2 Episode 2 addresses the night's psychological impacts through Ben's bloodlust and Marcus' vengeance
Contains spoilers for Season 2 Episode 2
The Purge's second episode of season 2 is titled 'Everything is Fine'. The trailer also offered a very meta remark about the new America re-birthed by the New Founding Fathers - where one isn't really someone unless they are being purged. But what the second episode establishes is the lingering trauma and the dark, psychological impact left in the people being purged, as wells as those doing the purging.
Episode 2 dissects what happens when purging goes wrong and it portrays it scarily well through the aftermath of two characters - Ben and Marcus Moore.
Marcus was purged out of the blue by a masked man, whom his Purge-loving neighbors managed to shoot down, right after Marcus had chased him out of his own house on the streets. When the siren denoting the end of the annual event went off, Marcus found the gunman lying on the yard of one of the houses on his block.
Later, he comes back to the spot with his wife Michelle and finds the body missing, assumably picked up by the ambulances that patrol the streets on Purge night. The man's phone was however left behind, and a series of images stored in it revealed that he had been stalking Marcus for a while.
As Marcus tells Michelle, this changes everything for the couple. In a sudden vengeful stance that makes him look almost untrustworthy, Marcus begins talking about taking matters into his own hands and hunting the gunman down to find out who tried to purge him.
The shift in his body language - from the kind, compassionate well-to-do doctor to the man subtly raging with vengeance, earns a concerned look from Michelle - revealing he too is a man changed after the developments of the previous night.
This is further amplified by Marcus going to the hospital where he works, and forcibly taking in a bleeding patient because of the mark on the back of his palm that Marcus had spotted on the unconscious body of the man who tried to kill him.
Using a poorly judged dosage of Narcan, he tries reviving the killer but is able to get one word out of him before the man flatlines. The word turns out to be the name of a dark web platform, where bounties are raised on people's names and anybody can acquire that money by killing off the person listed.
Overcome by the need for vengeance, Marcus had totally lost sight of the bigger problem - the bounty on his head still being active. This mirrors the way Ben loses his mind when he kills for the first time, and turns into an aggressive, maniacal killer on the man who tried raping him on Purge night.
In the aftermath of Ben's close escape after he murdered his attacker, he comes back to his frat house a visibly changed man that you'd want to maintain a distance from. There's a certain godlike aura about him, which is clearly the impact of having repeatedly stabbed the man who attacked him for no reason.
He goes from a sweet college kid to a borderline psychopath with no visible signs of any remote empathy in either his words or actions. He keeps doodling the same mask that his attacker was wearing, with the words 'God' written on its forehead, while his subconscious keeps going back to the memories of him vehemently stabbing the attacker.
In the end, Ben walks back to the deserted garage where he was attacked, and on finding the mask lying in a pool of blood with flies swarming all around, he clearly feels a power rush surging through him.
Someone's unnecessary attack on Ben not only got them killed, but turned a seemingly perfect man into a psychopath with bloodlust - one who spends hours inside virtual Purge gaming stations and gives menacing looks to kids begging for a chance to play.
The fact that little kids are even allowed to play the very realistic murder game seems like government propaganda if you look at it like that. And with the way things turn out for Ben, one can only wonder if this was just latent aggression turning into something worse, or whether the Purge is a concept to aid serial killers better.
'The Purge' season 2 airs on Tuesdays at 9pm, only on USA Network.