There is perhaps no other show like HBO's anthology series "Room 104," the third season of which premiered on September 13, 2019.
Similar to "Black Mirror," each episode has a different plot and set of characters, all of which happen in a motel room just off an unnamed parkway. Although every episode is different in regard to plot, each episode falls into either a thriller category, a comedy, or just downright horror.
One instance of horror is the episode "The Woman in the Wall," in which a woman with a variety of mental illnesses befriends a woman apparently trapped in the wall of the room. In regard to thriller, there is the pilot episode "Ralphie," where a babysitter is baffled when the child she's watching warns of his imaginary friend coming to murder him. Where there is comedy is in the episode "Hungry," whose plot is probably so gross that you're actually going to cringe (seriously, you're better off googling it).
The new third season opens with the first episode that somewhat contextualizes how the room was built. But like the rest of the show, this episode isn't what you think. Although it doesn't tell the exact origins of the motel, it does give us an idea of how the motel came to exist.
Perhaps that's what makes "Room 104" so bingeable and makes you tune in every week: the show is so unpredictable and unorganized. With every episode you think you know the connection between all of these radically different scenes, but at the end of each episode you're just as dumbfounded as you were when you first started the series.
And that may be the entire point of this show in the end. After all, the show's production is extremely unorthodox. Writers come up with ideas and then commission them to directors who film them in an extremely fast manner, almost in an experimental fashion. Maybe that's the source of "Room 104"'s inconsistency.
But the fact of the matter is that "Room 104" cannot keep this inconsistency for long. It's going to have to make a plot out of its three-season-long crypticness. For those reasons make it an interesting watch, especially as we enter the spooky Halloween season.
New episodes of "Room 104" premiere Fridays at 11/10c on HBO.