To open our discussion of the fourth and final episode in this summer’s opening salvo of Wednesday Season 2, I’m going to do something I’ve done more times in my life than I can count, and talk to you about the films Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Based on the work of “splatterpunk” author Clive Barker and directed by Barker and Tony Randel respectively, the two films taken together are a body-horror opus. Centered on two rival killers — Pinhead the Hell Priest (Doug Bradley), who claims the bodies and souls of the irredeemably perverse, and Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins), a repressed wife turned black widow killer who wishes to cheat him of his prize — they dig their chain-linked hooks into you and drag you screaming through unspeakable horror of the mind, body, and groin. 

I bring them up, well, mostly because they’re awesome. But I also bring them up because, coincidentally or not, they have a lot in common with this episode of Wednesday, which is probably my favorite so far. Written by Lauren Otero and directed by a returning Tim Burton, it’s as close to straight-up horror as the show has gotten — at times, anyway — and it gets there using techniques deployed by Barker and company back during Burton’s Beetlejuice/Batman era. 

For starters, there’s the setting. The Willow Hill mental hospital for Outcasts is a riff on Batman’s Arkham Asylum for sure, but it’s also reminiscent of the Channard Institute from Hellraiser II. It’s similarly run with a bright and cheery public face and a sinister underbelly, where lonely souls are imprisoned in windowless cells deep underground and subjected to terrible experiments, appearing at their little windows to stare and scream at anyone who opens them.

Then there’s the subplot involving the atrociously wigged Christina Ricci as Marilyn Thornhill and Hunter Doohan as Tyler, the troubled teen she turned into a hulking psychotic monster to get her revenge last season. Demanding to see the boy she groomed as a condition of helping the hospital’s nominal head, Dr. Fairburn, crack open the secret of healing him, she winds up dead at his hands, impaled on his claws. It’s reminiscent of the knifepoint “thank you” that Julia receives from the man she raised from Hell in the first Hellraiser film.

Before he kills Thornhill, though, Tyler gives her a head start, and chases her down a hospital corridor in his loping Hyde form. With his oversized fingers and claws and the hospital setting, it provides a similar gotta get away sensation to the chase scene in Hellraiser, in which our heroine, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), is pursued down an alleyway of Hell back into her hospital room by a grotesque, jagged-toothed creature referred to in the fandom as “the Engineer.”

And when Judi, the secret head of the hospital, daughter of its evil founder (who’s responsible for Slurp the Zombie too), and mastermind of its torturous experiments, is surrounded by inmates eager to tear her to pieces after Wednesday and Fester facilitate a jailbreak, she screams “GET OFF OF ME!” I’ll just say “if you know you know, Hellbound fans,” and leave it at that. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, trust me,)

Ultimately it’s unimportant whether any of these similarities are deliberate homage or just unintended resonances. What the overlap means is that Wednesday is doing some of its horror business quite well. The scene in which Wednesday and her Uncle Fester, who got himself locked up in Willow Hill to help Wednesday with her investigation, go from cell to cell in the asylum’s secret sub-basement prison is unnerving and upsetting. I adore how defiantly un-realistic the Hyde monster looks; would the Beetlejuice snake been half as cool if it had looked “realistic”? It’s a pleasure to see Burton go for broke.

There are quite a few pleasures in this episode, actually. Though we must say goodbye to Christina Ricci’s Marilyn Thornhill (tossed against a wall and killed by Tyler Hyde) and Thandiwe Newton’s Dr. Fairburn (brain eaten by zombie), we can welcome Joanna Lumley as Wednesday’s absolutely fabulous Grandmama, a mega-rich mortuary mogul. Though she tries to persuade Morticia to spare Wednesday’s ancestor Goody’s book by offering to finally chip into the Nevermore fundraiser, Morticia demonstrates her mettle by burning it anyway. 

However, Grandmama is able to determine that the dead Outcasts whose obituaries the late Sheriff Galpin was collecting had their deaths faked. These are the unfortunates who wound up in Willow Hill’s Long-term Outcast Integration Study, or LOIS for short — and I’ve got a feeling that the infamous Aunt Ofelia is among them, in the form of the traumatized woman played by Frances O’Connor.

Elsewhere, Bianca gets her mom out of jail by siren-singing the sheriff into submission. Enid guilts Wednesday, who does not respect the scrunchie-on-the-doorknob roommate code, into including her in her big “break Uncle Fester out of Willow Hill and collect all the intel we can” mission alongside Thing and Agnes, Wednesday’s new left-hand woman. There’s a funny flashback to Fester’s first stint in an asylum, in which he greeted his first straitjacket with a friendly “Love you, Mister Cuddlecoat.” He also has a false ID in which his name is “Fester Fiesta.”

And the finale is a doozy. Unwisely staring down Tyler in Hyde form, Wednesday is thrown in slow motion through a window to the ground two or three stories below, arcing through the air with grim beauty. Her flight shatters the placid appearance of the asylum at that moment: With its power out, it’s a slate of black windows, occasionally punctuated by windows glowing EXIT-sign red. 

In terms of sheer imagemaking, this is Tim Burton’s best work on the show. In terms of overall quality across the board, this is the show’s best episode. It’s scary, it’s actually funny, it’s relatable (knock before you enter the room when your roommate’s in there, god!), it’s got that awesome orc-troll-Gollum-Large Marge monster design for Tyler, it’s got goth Patsy from AbFab, and it ends with the possibility of Wednesday Addams journeying to the realm of the dead for real. It makes me want to tune in next time, even if that’s a month away. That’s exactly what you want a midseason finale to do.

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.