In the 4th episode of Hell Motel, Floyd secretly murdered Crow, who’d already had a bunch of nails hammered into his head by Baphomet, apparently. Since the body count was going up, everyone, except for Floyd and Shirley, wanted to leave the motel and strike out for the nearest town to get help. Given how that’d ruin Floyd and Shirley’s plans of conducting a demonic summoning ritual to have a chat with Baphomet, the former supposedly dressed up as the mythological entity and attacked Andy and Kawayan as soon as they set foot out of the building. This pretty much convinced everyone to not venture outside because, well, the killer was out there. Now, with all the guests back in their rooms, Shirley and Floyd took turns to confirm whether or not Kawayan was the 3rd killer. As soon as they realized that he was just an installation artist, they gutted him like a fish and left him to die in his room. Later on, the actual 3rd killer entered the scene and turned Kawayan into a macabre art installation. How did the inhabitants of the motel react to that?
Spoiler Alert
Women Versus Men
Episode 5 of Hell Motel opens with someone supposedly spying on the motel from afar, and then the focus shifts to Kawayan’s room, where the guests are freaking out about what’s in front of them. Just like usual, Paige overreacts because of the smell that’s emanating out of the corpse, while Adriana goes into “sicko mode” and says something “out of pocket,” i.e., she actually loves the smell. After the initial shock has died down, everyone convenes at the dinner room and begins pointing fingers at each other. This nonsense is interrupted by Adriana, who points out that someone is watching them from the woods. Without wasting another second, they rush out and capture the guy, who is revealed to be JP, the hearse driver who dropped them off at the motel on the first day. He is understandably shocked to see what has transpired over the last few hours and decides to bolt. Given how the guests aren’t done ascertaining whether or not he is the 3rd killer, Blake gets a hold of him and pins him down so he can’t leave.
The first point that’s raised is the fact that JP is horribly scarred, with glass shards poking out of his face. JP says that, due to the rain, he skidded off the road while coming to the motel and crashed his car; hence, the injury. Instead of waiting in the car for help to arrive, he decided to walk all the way to the motel. Paige wonders if he wasn’t afraid of all the wild animals out there. In response to that, JP pulls out his gun, which he claims he has only for self-defense purposes. The already anxious group of guests tense up immediately upon seeing the firearm. Once JP puts the gun back in his pocket, the ladies tend to his wounds, while the men go back into the dining room to decide what they should do with JP. Soon enough, Paige, Adriana, and Shirley (who is probably faking her allegiance to the women) turn on Andy, Blake, and Floyd for not consulting with them regarding any pivotal decisions. This then turns into a women versus men issue, which escalates to such an extent that Adriana takes JP’s gun, fires a round into the ceiling, and puts a stop to all the bickering. While the ladies retire to Floyd and Shirley’s room and barricade it from the inside, the men hang back at the dining room along with JP, free to do whatever they want with the supposed 3rd killer.
JP Is Dead
I’m not going to go into the details of the conversations that are happening in the ladies’ room and the discourse in the gents’ room, largely because it has nothing to do with the plot, it doesn’t unveil any information about the characters that we don’t know already, and there’s nothing about it that’s insightful enough for me to comment on it. So, I’m just going to get straight to the point of the discussions. On one hand, Shirley is trying to get either Paige or Adriana to confess that they are the 3rd killer, and on the other hand, Floyd (who makes a Point Break reference out of nowhere) was probably trying to do the same with Blake and Andy, but he gets distracted by the staring contest that Andy starts with him. Shirley realizes that Adriana is the most vulnerable and anxious one in the room and decides to target her by reading her fate via tarot cards. That causes Adriana to freak out because she feels like the walls are closing in on her and that she is about to face the consequences of her actions, i.e., obsessing over serial killers. All this triggers a flashback to the time she went to meet a killer named Wyatt (his surname is either Harvey or Carvey; I couldn’t figure it out due to the absence of subtitles) after she’d seen him on the TV.
Initially, Wyatt wasn’t interested in entertaining Adriana’s obsession, but as soon as he realized that she wanted to get freaky with him, he indulged her. He described himself as a wolf and Adriana as a chipmunk and talked about consuming her or something along those lines. In response to that, Adriana called herself a man-eating polar bear to attract him by intimidating him, I guess. I know this is supposed to be seductive and edgy, but the writing is giving “middle-school emo essay competition” levels of amateur nonsense. Meanwhile, Floyd gets physical with Andy and Blake, which leads to the revelation that he has a knife scar on his back (which was done by “Baphomet”). The fight keeps escalating until JP tries to make a run for it again. He barges into Shirley’s room to hide from the men, not knowing that things in there have also escalated, and that Adriana is waving his gun around, threatening to shoot Shirley or Paige. So, when JP gets in there, Adriana panics and pulls the trigger, thereby killing the poor driver. This episode is stupid anyway, but this death is one of the most idiotic things I have seen in this show so far.
Adriana Is Dead
At the end of Hell Motel episode 5, Adriana is first locked up in the bathroom and then transported by the guests to the utility shed right outside the motel. Adriana keeps pleading that she is innocent and that JP’s death was just an accident. But nobody is in the mood to listen to her anymore. Paige gives her some dry and warm clothes and a thermos full of hot beverage to protect her from the cold since the shed doesn’t have an internal heating system. And they lock her in there. Late at night, Adriana decides to break out of the shed and is immediately captured by “Baphomet.” She is knocked out by the killer, which triggers yet another flashback where she actually got freaky with Wyatt. However, she started sexualizing Wyatt’s crimes in such a weird way that it irked the criminal a lot. Imagine how messed up you have to be that you make an actual criminal uncomfortable. Unable to control himself, Wyatt tried to choke out Adriana. I guess the authorities intervened and saved Adriana. However, in the present day, there’s nobody around to save her. “Baphomet” ties Adriana to a tree, waits for her to regain consciousness, slashes her throat, puts a polythene bag over her head, and then hangs her from said tree so that the blood from her neck collects in that bag. Yeah, it’s pretty horrifying.
Back at the motel, Paige goes to Andy’s room and tells him that they should go and check on Adriana, because she can’t tolerate the idea of punishing her for something she did accidentally. When they see that Adriana isn’t in the shed, they follow the trail of debris left behind due to her escape attempt and her fight with “Baphomet” into the woods, and they find her dead body. In case there’s any confusion about Adriana’s fate, I can confirm that she is dead. I don’t know why, but I feel like Paige is the 3rd killer. Something about the fact that she always overreacts when everyone comes across a dead body and has now discovered a fresh kill twice. That’s suspicious. I’m not sure about her reasoning, but given how she is so hung up about her failing acting career, it’s totally possible that she is doing a summoning ritual by sacrificing all these people so that she can make a deal with the devil and become popular again. By the way, in the next 3 episodes, if she ends up dying instead of being the 3rd killer, don’t blame me. I’m just speculating over here. What are your thoughts on the 5th episode of Hell Motel, though? Let me know in the comments section below.
