Is Edmund The Red-Haired Serial Killer In ‘Them’ Season 2? Character, Explained

In Them: The Scare, a red-haired man often came in front of certain people, and it gave them the most painful deaths one could ever imagine. The forensics experts, after analyzing the body, could never understand how a person, or even multiple people, could break someone’s body like that. In one of the scenes, an expert, after seeing the dead body of the warden of a foster home, said that the kind of injuries she had succumbed to could only take place if someone got hit by a speeding train. For Detective Dawn Reeves, it became an enigma, and she knew from the onset that there were certain supernatural elements attached to it. It became too much for Dawn to handle when a victim named Benny Alvarez died literally in front of her eyes. She had talked to Benny a day prior to the incident, as she had gotten to know that the poor boy was having some kind of trouble. 

The grandmother of the child said that she didn’t need the police as the father of her local church was going to come and perform an exorcism on the teenager. It didn’t make sense to Dawn, but when she saw Benny’s bones breaking when he was sitting at the back of her car, she knew that probably this was something she had no clue how to control.

Spoiler Alert

Who was the ghost? 

We were made privy to an eccentric, struggling actor whose name was Edmund Gaines. Mr. Gaines was not an excellent performer, but he was a stubborn man who just refused to give up. Once, he got an audition script for a serial killer, but he was not selected for the role. It left a deep impact on him as he saw the cameraman laughing when he was performing. Edmund’s ego was hurt deep down, though, at that moment, he suppressed his emotions and didn’t reveal anything. But slowly, something evil around him intensified those feelings, and Edmund started losing himself. He became a serial killer in real life, and he started losing his mind. He tried to kill a female escort, but before he could do that, the police arrived at the scene and took him into custody. The police officers suspected him to be behind the murders that had happened lately, but after a bit of investigation, they realized that he was just speaking the lines from the various audition tapes that he had at his place. Edmund was released, and he made Donavan, the cinematographer who laughed at him, his next target.

Till this juncture in Them: The Scare, Edmond hadn’t lost himself completely to the evil within him. I say that because just before killing Donavan, he stopped for a moment, and it felt like he was guilty of what he was doing, but he was not in control of himself. It would not be right to say that Edmund was the ghost, but probably his vulnerabilities and his fear of being rejected and abandoned made him an easy vessel where evil could take shelter. The evil was stemming from the Raggedy Andy and Ann doll, and it could be said that it was a symbol of racial innocence that, according to experts, had plagued American society for a long time. Eventually, Edmund completely surrendered to the evil, and it wreaked havoc in Dawn Reeves’ life. 

What did Edmund want? 

Them season 2 made it look like both the events, where Edmund was killing people and where Dawn Reeves was searching for the killer, were happening simultaneously. But later, a revelation was made, and we got to know that it was happening two years apart. Dawn got the shock of her life when she realized that she was adopted, and as if the information was not enough, she later got to know that she had a twin brother, too. Edmund Gaines was her twin brother, and for a couple of years, he tried to reach out to her and even went to meet her at her place. Dawn didn’t realize who he was since she was unaware she had another sibling. Edmund was already lost in his life, and when his sister didn’t recognize him, he felt a sort of rejection that he didn’t even perceive when he was not selected for the audition. Athena’s adoptive mother had agreed to take both children in, but after the death of her husband, she gave Edmund to foster care. Athena blamed Edmund for the death of her husband, even though she knew that he could not have done anything. Edmund was abused and tortured by her foster mother, and since then, he started developing this fear of abandonment. That fear kept on growing, and with time, Edmund just lost control over everything. The evil accentuated those negative feelings and made Edmund commit murder.

At the end of Them: The Scare, Dawn Reeves called out to the spirit of her brother, and she told him that she loved him. The evil released Edmund’s spirit, and his soul could rest in peace. Season 2 ended on a cliffhanger where we got to know that the evil was still lurking in the shadows and that it was looking for yet another vulnerable soul so that it could take control of its body. Probably in season 3 (if there is one), Dawn Reeves would become the vessel, as there were a lot of things she didn’t know about her past, which in turn made her susceptible to being preyed upon.