A ‘Candle Cove’ puppetmaster is revealed — but what do they want?

With just two episodes remaining in “Channel Zero’s” first season, better known as “Candle Cove,” we’re finally starting to uncover the bigger story at hand. In Tuesday’s (Nov. 1) episode, “A Strange Vessel,” the relationship between Mike (Paul Schneider) and his dead brother Eddie (Luca Villacis) was explored a bit more — and what we gleaned from those scenes may hold the answers to some of the show’s main questions.

It seems that friendly Mrs. Booth is the mastermind behind Iron Hill’s plague of child murders — and child murderers — and while we don’t necessarily understand yet how she became involved with “Candle Cove,” it’s very clear she’s acting as a Pied Piper, so to speak. Leave it up to the show to present familiar imagery of middle American childhood, and then spin it all Stephen King-style, leaving a tingling on our collective spines.

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Now that it’s plain Mrs. Booth is the one who trained these kids to get all stabby on the town’s adults — R.I.P. Jessica (Natalie Brown) — we have to ask: What is her interest in Mike? We’ve seen her resort to some serious throat stabbing to keep him safe. While her interest in him is still a mystery, we do know she was his school teacher back in 1988. And in a flashback shown in Tuesday’s episode, we learned young Eddie Painter had an extra tooth in the back of his mouth.

Why is that important? We’ve only seen imagery of The Tooth-Child in present day, which leads us to wonder if Eddie’s strong connection to “Candle Cove,” and that extra tooth, could have created this odd creature to begin with. Maybe it’s that connection with the creepy series that sparked Mrs. Booth’s interest in the young boy. She may have “given up religion” a long time ago, but it seems that she had a hand in her son’s disappearance — maybe it wasn’t just Eddie’s doing.

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This leads us to the pirate motif of the show. While pirate puppets are creepy enough, the concept takes on a whole new meaning when you consider the children that have gone missing. First, they seem to become literal — and murderous — puppets of Mrs. Booth. And then, they vanish. What do pirates do? They steal things. So, it’s safe to say then that these pirate puppets are actually stealing the children of Iron Hill… right?

Eddie may have changed, leading Mike to kill him in the ’80s, but it seems his spirit is very much alive. TV twins always have a powerful, unspoken connection, and the one between these two brothers — even if one of them died almost three decades ago — may be of huge importance to Mrs. Booth. With Mike’s return, maybe she’s trying to finish what she started all those years ago. What exactly is her end game? And how many people have to die before we get there?

“Channel Zero: Candle Cove” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Syfy.

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