"The Changeling."

Sometimes thrilling, sometimes dubiously maddening, the series is asking viewers to make a deal. The question is whether you take it.

This post contains light spoilers for “The Changeling” through Ep. 5, although if you’ve figured out enough from the name of the show and the fact that it centers on a baby, you can probably handle whatever is revealed below without ruining your viewing experience at all.

It’s been a little bit of a rollercoaster watching Apple TV+’s “The Changeling,” which dropped the first three episodes all at once on Sept. 8, then started releasing subsequent episodes every Friday. Which means the sixth episode — out of eight — is today/tonight.

How will we ever make it to tomorrow, a song or two has asked, and I wondered that same thing recently having loved the first two episodes, being slightly more suspicious (but enthralled) of the third while just going with it and — tone change — wondering out loud what the fuck is going on with the fourth and fifth.

I mean, I know what’s going on — “The Changeling” essentially became the show it wanted to be (or always was, since it’s based on a book by Victor LaValle, who narrates the series), by the third episode. That’s the episode where I was a little more suspicious/dubious about what I was seeing. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. Or a wrong thing. “The Changeling” was always going to get where it is now — a story about witches and the supernatural and horrifying fairy tales and desperate forces among us in the ether — eventually. It’s just that wow, those first two episodes before turning the corner and breaking out into itself, well those were something. That third episode was a full-on gear shift into horror/the macabre. And the fourth and fifth episodes have been….another thing.