Shyamalan’s Servant on Apple TV+ is helping show off the streaming service’s range with its mysterious storytelling. Throughout the series, a frequent source of stability for Dorothy has been her job as a news anchor, but recent evidence suggests she may have lost her job.
Apple TV+ is one of the newer services to hit the streaming market and while many of the service’s programs reflect more sanitized stories, Servant marks their push into the horror genre. Servant is full of the classic twists and turns that Shyamalan’s films have practically become synonymous, but it remains a difficult show to nail down. Each episode seems to tease an entirely different brand of mystery and at this point every character has some kind of secret associated with them. This has turned Servant into quite the addictive program that has viewers eager for answers, but in many cases there may not be big reveals and the audience is putting their own theories onto a standard story of domestic grief.
On its surface level, the biggest question marks that drive Apple TV+’s Servant forward are the circumstances surrounding the Turner family baby, Jericho, who may or may not be alive, as well as what exactly is going on with the family’s new nanny, Leanne. Leanne and Jericho are both fascinating pieces of a larger puzzle, but as Servant goes on it looks like Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) is an increasingly important person in all of this. Dorothy’s attachment to Jericho and her detachment from reality have only gotten more worrisome as the series goes on. Dorothy becomes an increasingly hostile presence because it’s unclear what exactly she’s done to Jericho and if she’s about to snap at any given moment when reality catches up with her.
Dorothy Isn’t A News Anchor Any Longer And It’s Part Of Her Delusion
“Boba,” Servant’s latest episode, sees Dorothy and Sean attend a journalism awards dinner, but she’s irate over how they’re seated at a guest table, rather than with her former colleagues. Additionally, when Julian turns on the TV, there’s footage of another reporter doing coverage on an abduction. In an earlier episode, Dorothy complains about this same reporter and how she’s rising through the ranks. Now, it seems like she may replaced Dorothy entirely. It makes a lot of sense that, after the loss of Jericho and Dorothy’s break, she would be let go from her job, yet her mind won’t accept it. Dorothy being considered a “guest” at the awards dinner is one of the first times that she needs to confront the truth.
It’s also significant that all of the news reports that have been shown of Dorothy on television have been old tapes. These are all glimpses of the past rather than current news broadcasts that are airing. The only exception to this is when Leanne visits Dorothy once while she’s shooting a story, but there’s no confirmation that it aired. With the extensive resources and wealth that Julian and his father exhibit, it also wouldn’t be out of the question that they’d hire a fake camera crew to follow Dorothy around in order to feed her delusions. The repeated evidence in “Boba” suggests that Dorothy’s days as a news anchor are behind her and just another layer of her fractured mind, but with two episodes left in Servant’s first season, there will hopefully be some answers that come to light.
