‘The Rain’ on Netflix Episode 6 Recap: Fools in the Rain

In The Rain‘s storytelling arsenal, group dynamics are its secret weapon. Netflix’s consistently surprising (is that an oxymoron? oh well) post-apocalyptic drama treats its band of six (previously seven) thrown-together young adults not as a collection of types, but as people, capable of making their own decisions but shaped by the response of the group around them, both individually and collectively. Turns out the best way to show off that skill is to focus an episode on the one person who doesn’t fit.

Patrick, the brooding and cynical odd man out of the crew, provides the throughline of the show’s sixth installment (“Keep Your Friends Close”). His flashback material starts out funny, with a series of face-on shots in which his boss, his case worker, and his girlfriend all tell him he’s a loser. It graduates into sad when his father, who’d seemed like a pretty alright guy, gives him the gift of a car on the express condition that he get the hell out of their house and never come back. And it turns horrifying when he dozes off in his hotboxed car near a beach and wakes up hours later to find all of the beachgoers lying dead in the sand. The resulting character is a person who desperately needs to be wanted and needed by others, but who’s too certain they don’t want or need him, and thus self-fulfills his prophecy.

In the present timeline, Patrick’s intense jealousy of anyone and everyone who comes between him and Martin — including Martin himself, who tells him “Come on, we’re not really friends” and walks it back only in the most unconvincing manner imaginable — leads to his rashest action and his most isolating moment.

Joining Martin, Simone, and Lea in their journey to a nearby bunker to pick up food for an allegedly ailing and immobile Rasmus (he’s faking, for reasons, but more on that later), Patrick raids the bunker’s snack supply despite evidence that a family, with a child, live there. It’s he who discovers their fate on a tablet device: They were experimented on by Apollon, Simone’s father’s company, in an attempt to immunize them that kills them instead. Mr. Andersen, visible via videoconference in the recordings, signs off the the lethal experiments. This just seems like an extension of Patrick’s own every-man-for-himself worldview, as does his impulsive, abusive attempt to punish Simone for coming between his friendship with Martin (he commits attempted murderer by shoving her out into the Rain, but more on that later too). In the end he’s expelled from the hatch and the group, Even when Rasmus begs for his help (yes, more on this later as well) upon Patrick’s return to their previous shelter, he flees in terror instead; rejection and infection run neck-and-neck in his list of life-leveling fears. The last shot of the episode shows the unseen Strangers putting a bag over his head, making his isolation from the rest of the world a real physical phenomena.

But all along, Patrick was simply getting in his own way, because this is a group that’s surprisingly adult about its emotions (Patrick excepted). Rather than drag us through a protracted love-quadrangle angle any longer than necessary, for example, this episode shows Martin and Beatrice making peace about their newfound romantic interest in other people, Simone and Rasmus respectively. Smiling and laughing, they joke about how they never really got along as a couple, or whatever it is they were. “We mostly argued,” Beatrice teases, “all the time.” “Yeah, we really nailed that part,” Martin laughs in reply. Survival-horror stories frequently depend on ratcheting up every interpersonal conflict to lethal levels; what a pleasure it is to see these two people handle their business like adults and part as friends instead.

Writer Lasse Kyed Rasmussen takes advantage of this maturity to tell a pair of stories involving sexuality in an actually mature way. After faking illness so he and Beatrice can have the run of the place, Rasmus spends the day in a blissed-out haze of infatuation with her. They share their first kiss and, eventually, his first sexual encounter.

The same thing happens in the group that travels to the bunker for food, when Simone and Martin finally kiss as well. In their case the physical relationship culminates in Martin holding something for a very drunk Simone to puke into , but the principle’s the same.

There’s a real drive, and a real heat, behind these couplings. The circumstances of the Andersens’ lives underground, and the dire straits in which they’ve repeatedly found themselves since leaving, lend urgency to their romantic and sexual (re)awakenings. Watching at home, you feel the pull between the pairs as an almost physical sensation in your gut. You want it to happen, you want it to be good, you want it to work out, because the sci-fi scenario behind it all is the best approximation of the emotional chaos swirling around all of our own first experiences with new love.

The Rain understands that this is the real purpose of its titular liquid, from a storytelling perspective anyway. And so these kisses take place in the aftermath of an amazing discovery. When a leaky roof drizzles rainwater onto Beatrice’s face as she kisses Rasmus, and when an angry, isolated Patrick reacts to his own romantic rejection by Simone by pushing her out into the rain, and when Lea voluntarily steps out in to the rain to protect Simone from potential execution by Martin…nothing happens. All three characters live, as do the characters they kiss in the celebratory aftermath, thus joining a plot breakthrough to personal breakthroughs. It’s love in defiance of death, and it’s lovely to watch.

But it doesn’t last, and that shocked me as much as the ostensible end of the rain-borne version of the virus did. The apparent emptiness of the rain threat was such a perfect subversion of the show’s own high concept that I just figured they had to stick with it. Beatrice’s death in her sleep (it’s unclear from what, but Rasmus clearly blames the rain; I think suicide using his painkillers is a possibility and that the rain really is safe now, but it’s irrelevant in the moment), Rasmus’s discovery of her body, and his Sisyphean struggle to pull her corpse to the nearby bunker for help came across as one punch in the face after another. Actor Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen lays it all on the line in those scenes, unafraid to scream and wail and sob and, finally, hoist and drag the body of his beloved. Leaning into the melodrama of the moment is the smart choice, because some moments in life really are melodramatic.

One final note: This is not anything that’s explicitly addressed or even alluded to, but the feel of the group, and the show, is deeply affected by Martin being the only character with a gun. Again, most survival-horror and post-apocalyptic stories arm everyone you meet to the teeth, to enhance that kill-or-be-killed atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it was made in Denmark instead of our own gun-sick country, but It’s refreshing to see only one character packing, to see that he is judicious in firing on people (he’s been backed down by individuals with no defense whatsoever multiple times, and usually they’re women), and to see that the struggle to find more guns, or for the other characters to try to wrest control of it from him, never takes place. You don’t realize how much oxygen that kind of tough-guy shit eats up in stories like this until you watch one without it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Rain Episode 6 ("Keep Your Friends Close") on Netflix