'The Purge' Season 2 premiere uses fratboy pledges and a 'Suicide Bridge' to play the darkest practical joke of all
This article contains spoilers for Season 2 Episode 1
'The Purge' season two premiere's biggest twist came from the most frivolous section of the society — the fratboys.
Maybe in the new America — a nation reborn thanks to the New Founding Fathers or the NFFA — fratboys are different from what they used to be.
Or perhaps it is just the Purge Night that called for things to get extra twisted and darker than it had to be, but Season 2 Episode 1 'This is Not a Test' did not mess around with the section of society and the practical jokes they play.
Episode one opens just two hours from the end of the annual purge. Ben (Joel Allen) and his college friend have been tasked with going out amidst the horrors of the night as all crimes including murder are legalized for 12 consecutive hours.
Ben and the other boy need to go out on Purge night, head a couple of blocks away to take photos of what is labeled as the 'Suicide Bridge' — a bunch of dead bodies hanging from the bridge.
It is unsure if this is suicide or just the sick twisted humor of the perpetrator, but the scene is eerie enough to leave chills even if you're a mere spectator sitting on the other side of the screen.
Ben, the relatively softer one among the two, takes a minute to register all this, while his friend just wants to crack a few morbid jokes, take the photo, and leave.
But things don't go as planned, of course. On their way back, they hear a woman crying for help, and once they walk into the alleyway the noise was coming from, they come across a woman chained to a car inside a storage unit.
Ben, being the nicer one, wants to help her, but sadly, his foot gets caught in a trap that he had missed out and he gets dragged straight inside, while his friend manages to run away.
Soon, a masked man appears from the shadows of the shabby looking place and he first tases Ben, before proceeding to slash the other hostage right across her stomach in front of Ben's eyes.
As the woman lies bleeding to death, the masked man forces Ben to undress right up to his underwear, lie down facing the ground, as he himself unbuckles his pants, resting atop Ben's back, inevitably attempting to rape him.
Luckily, Ben is fast; he grabs the knife from the woman's stomach and stabs it right into the masked murderer's guts. He doesn't stop at that either, stabbing multiple times as the man pleads to be spared, but Ben is relentless.
Soon the victim becomes the perpetrator and Ben goes into an aggressive frenzy, repeatedly stabbing as the blood splatters all over his face and body.
As the young boy loses his innocence trying to get back at the man who was trying to violate him, something even creepier happens when Ben finally stops as the siren denoting Purge night is over goes off.
He takes off the rapist-killer's mask, and for a brief second, it almost looks like the man was the same friend that Ben had come along with for their ritual.
It's possible Ben hallucinated, or the two faces are just alike, but it pretty much trickles down the spine to think that the masked-murderer could have been Ben's friend all along.
As Ben walks into the rest of the year with this weighing on his mind, fans can say the same too about the twisted beginning of the second season of 'The Purge'.
However, the explicit violence of Ben's epic murder scene has fans divided, with some of them claiming he wants more than just a taste of murder, and others complaining that all this graphic portrayal of violence on screen was uncalled for.
While one Twitter user on Team Ben, sharing, "Looks like he becomes a full-fledged killer after getting a taste of murder," another user was far from pleased.
The user tweeted, "honestly stories like the purge f**king piss me off. I see enough bullshit violence & hurting & death in real life online. I don't wanna see that shit for entertainment personally right now. Too many evil f**ks out there actually like that that deserved to be killed."
'The Purge' season two airs on Tuesdays at 9 pm only on USA Network.