The Baby Episodes 6 & 7 Review: Locate Origins of Vicious Cycle

HBO’s The Baby truly heightens the story in the six and seventh episodes, producing a painful yet exquisite reminder of how deep vicious cycles can dig into generations, one after the other. Warning, a few spoilers for these episodes will be mentioned below. To avoid this, feel free to watch them and return later once you’re ready.

First off, the music for episode six was fantastic, particularly the song that plays while Natasha grabs the child and says goodbye to Barbara and Bobbi. The episode has waves of shock and laughter, truly working well with the urgency of the present (kids going crazy) as well as the broken promises from society in terms of Bobbi’s future as an adoptive parent. The choices made in how Natasha interacts with Barbara, her mother, make me think of the variety in which they connect to one another and don’t at the same time.

When something arises and the moment becomes urgent, the connection between mother and daughter ignores the past and embraces the skeleton of it, Natasha and Barbara become solely concerned for one another. It isn’t a moment that lasts long, but it does make the episode really interesting during all the horror aspects of the story. There’s some brutal truth in this episode that will hit home for a lot and that’s that having a baby doesn’t fix what is presently broken. Bobbi facing this harsh but important reality was the most impactful part of the episode.

Mrs. Eaves starts the seventh episode of The Baby with some funny physical comedy and denial of having a heart attack after we witness an old Jack (the baby’s father) in the hospital. An important part of this episode comes from the power of emotions and curses. Bobbi dives into how she goes towards people-pleasing in order to ignore any issues or fix any potential signs of future loneliness. In the previous episode and this one, Bobbi has truly developed and her character has shown signs of struggle against her previous nature.

A lot is discussed and opened up in episode seven, a lot of it coming from Mrs. Eaves having moments where she monologues. The pacing of the limited series felt oddly slow in the beginning and now it feels slightly rushed as if things needed to be pushed back an episode and some earlier content possibly removed. Out of the two episodes (six and seven), this one rises above and beyond for me and it’s mainly because of the second half when we witness Mrs. Eaves traveling to the hospital and we see Natasha struggling to understand if there’s a curse or a cycle. A big lesson in this episode before the final eighth episode is that violence and hate will return again and again in many ways because of how it continues and surrounds people from infancy. Hateful men breed hateful men and they often discard or leave women to die.

The Baby Episode 6 “The Rage” & Episode 7 “The Curse”

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Review by Brittney Bender

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8.5/10

HBO’s The Baby Episodes 6 & 7 bring together many loose ends with the latter episode carrying extra weight for the previous one. While Episode 7 brings as much energy and power to the screen, Episode 6 feels almost as good but falls short in connecting dots that don’t seem worth 20 minutes of screen time.

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