Teacup Episode 6 Ending Explained: What Harbinger and Assassin Want On Earth

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Teacup

The fifth and sixth episodes of Peacock's new Stephen King-approved horror series Teacup finally started to fill in some gaps in the overarching narrative as it hurtles towards what promises to be a thrilling conclusion. With just two episodes left in the limited series' short season, the questions that have slowly been piling up since the gruesome ending to episode 2 finally got some answers in the form of a long flashback sequence centered around the mysterious man in the mask, McNab, and the young man who trapped James in the Navarros' basement, Travis.

The flashback provided some much-needed clarification about the origins of the two conflicting entities that jump from person to person on the Chenoweth Farm. Harbinger is the name given to the seemingly good entity that is inhabiting Arlo's young mind, while his more murderous counterpart is referred to as Assassin. At the end of Teacup episode 4, Assassin jumps from Lieutenant Olsen to Ellen Chenoweth, James' mother and Meryl and Arlo's grandmother. Episodes 5 and 6 provided some confirmation about the nature of both Harbinger and Assassin, although there are plenty of questions still unanswered.

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What Harbinger And Assassin Are Doing On Earth

The Two Visitors Have Conflicting Purposes

A child (Arlo) looking scared in Teacup season 1, episode 2

Harbinger and Assassin are the names that the Chenoweths and their unintentional guests use for the two entities inhabiting people on the farm, but McNab referred to them by another name: Visitors. Harbinger and Assassin are technically aliens, and as McNab describes, they are invisible, able to jump from person to person like vapor or air. There was no spaceship to recover from a crash, as there was no spaceship at all; Harbinger came to Earth on a meteor, while Assassin followed him from wherever they both originated to hunt him down.

McNab's explanation to Travis is that there are always two Visitors, a good one and a bad one. Whenever a good Visitor lands on Earth via a meteor, a bad Visitor arrives shortly thereafter to hunt it down and eliminate it, usually eliminating the host in the process. Assassin has jumped into at least four people so far: Mary Alice Ducker, Travis, and Olsen, as seen in the flashback, and Ellen Chenoweth in the hayloft of the Chenoweths' barn. So far, it's shown jumping into anyone who will allow it to continue its pursuit of Harbinger.

Teacup Episode Release Schedule

Episode	Episode Title	Release Date
1	"Think About The Bubbles"	10/10/2024
2	"My Little Lighthouse"	10/10/2024
3	"Quite For No Reason"	10/17/2024
4	"In The Heart Of The Country"	10/17/2024
5	"I'm A Witness To The Sickness"	10/24/2024
6	"You Don't Know What It Means To Win"	10/24/2024
7	"This Is Nowhere: Part 1"	10/31/2024
8	"This Is Nowhere: Part 2"	10/31/2024

Harbinger, interestingly enough, has opted to stay in Arlo as opposed to jumping into Meryl, Nicholas or one of the other members of the Teacup cast, despite plenty of opportunities to do so. Episodes 5 and 6 provide his reasoning: if it stays in Arlo, it allows all the adults to have full capacity to protect them. Harbinger needs to stay safe, too, because the latest episodes also revealed that Assassin is not the only bad Visitor on Earth.

Arlo finally elaborates upon what brought Harbinger to Earth in the first place, albeit in a cryptic nature. He/Harbinger warns of a "machine" that they need to turn on, but they need to be quiet so as not to "wake" the other assassins. Harbinger appears to be the last line of defense against a full-scale invasion of Earth on behalf of the bad Visitors, and he needs Arlo to help him stop it.

How McNab Knows About The Visitors

McNab's Tragic Backstory Details How He Came To Know About Visitors

McNab discovers what he knows about the Visitors through terrible circumstances, although they help explain why he is so desperate to stop them. Ten years earlier, McNab's daughter got lost in the woods, and an EMT offered to help find her. McNab noted that he was acting strangely, and sure enough, the EMT wound up dragging his daughter away at gunpoint. McNab discovers his daughter with her throat cut the next day; that sets him down the rabbit hole on aliens and mysterious entities, which connected him with people like Olsen.

The show Teacup is inspired by, although not entirely based upon, the novel Stinger by Robert R. McCammon.

It's implied that his daughter was the host for a good Visitor like Harbinger, and that the EMT that approached McNab was a bad Visitor like Assassin. Therefore, McNab has seen the exact game of cat and mouse playing out on the Chenoweth Farm in the present day at least once before, and knows the symptoms and patterns. McNab's notebook is discovered by the Shanleys, which contains all of his notes on the entire Visitor experience.

Why The Adults Quarantine Themselves From The Kids

Paranoia Has Set In For Everyone

At the end of Teacup episode 6, everything has devolved into a modern iteration of the climax of John Carpenter's The Thing. Ellen Chenoweth was left alone as the parties separated to find McNab, mind Arlo, or go back to McNab's car, meaning there is nobody on the farm that can confirm if Assassin is still inside Ellen, or if it jumped to somebody else. Nobody can be trusted, and Ellen states that she doesn't believe Assassin is inside her, but calls out that she could very well be lying if it was.

That leads the group to settle on a sort of quarantine until they can find a way to determine who is the new host for Assassin. Fortunately, McNab's notebook yields a clue as to how they can determine (and subsequently free) who the person hosting Assassin is: you need to drown them. The cliffhanger ending points to the group testing this theory out in the final episodes of Teacup.

Teacup is a horror thriller series that follows a group of people thrust into the middle of rural Georgia who must face off with an unknown threat to stay alive.

Cast Yvonne Strahovski , Scott Speedman , Chaske Spencer , Kathy Baker , Boris McGiver , Caleb Dolden , Émilie Bierre , Luciano Leroux , Alice Kremelberg , Diany Rodriguez

Character(s) Maggie Chenoweth , James Chenoweth , Ruben Shanley , Ellen Chenoweth , Donald Kelly , Arlo Chenoweth , Meryl Chenoweth , Nicholas Shanley , Izzy , Valeria Shanley

Release Date October 10, 2024

Seasons 1

Directors E.L. Katz

Creator(s) Ian McCulloch

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