[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Search Party, Episodes 1 through 6.]

For three seasons, Search Party has maintained a perfect marriage between theme and genre. We've followed Millennial New Yorker Dory (Alia Shawkat) and her three friends — Drew (John Reynolds), Portia (Meredith Hagner), and Elliott (John Early) — through multiple episodes' worth of incredible drama cast through an absurdly amusing light. Seen one way, four friends covering up a murder as twenty-somethings figuring out their place in the world with minimal street smarts might not be very funny. (In fact, there's a pervading sense of darkness and dread that lurks underneath.) But series creators Sarah-Violet BlissCharles Rogers, and Michael Showalter have opted to make Search Party a comedy-forward series, with the show masking its more sinister aspects through the art of satire.

As time has gone on, though, that façade has begun to splinter. The lies Dory, Drew, Portia, and Elliott have spun about their great crime in Season 1 have become something of a tell-tale heart threatening to derail everyone's lives. As the stakes have gotten higher and higher for Dory and her friends, the comedy which once fueled the show and told viewers how to feel has lessened. In its place, Search Party Season 4 has completely descended into horror in an effort to expose Dory's psychology and better express this show's themes to us. Because Search Party has always been a show interested in exploring what it means to find your identity in your 20s — a formative decade in one's life that sets the stage for who we will be for the rest of our lives — using horror exposes new truths about Dory's search for self that could not be found were this still a comedy. Things can only be funny for so long and sometimes when a dark truth is revealed about yourself, you cannot escape its confrontational consequences.

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Image via HBO Max

Search Party Season 4 goes full-tilt into horror through Dory's arc. At the beginning of the season, we find out what has become of her after she was knocked unconscious in her apartment at the end of Season 3. Dory has been kidnapped by Chip (Cole Escola), the young man who obsessively stalked Dory throughout the last season. Search Party didn't hide the fact that Chip is thoroughly unhinged at the time. Moments in Season 3 like Chip getting Dory's name tattooed on his fingers or his initial (failed) kidnap attempt showed us how far he was willing to go to be with the object of his obsession. Now that Chip has actually succeeded in doing something completely unthinkable — kidnapping Dory and imprisoning her in a recreation of her apartment that looks like something out of a Rankin/Bass holiday special — Search Party has made the decision that it can no longer choose comedy. Shit has gotten real.

Dory and Chip's time together feels reminiscent of psychologically-driven, horror-tinged thrillers like Misery or Single White Female. Dory is trapped and now forced to be Chip's plaything as Chip tries to convince Dory they're meant to be best friends — a notion encouraged by his delusions. The first three episodes of Search Party Season 4 showcase Dory's fear and determination at her imprisonment. She plots and plans with the same dead-eyed resolve as when she was winging her evasion of the law following Keith's (Ron Livingston) murder in past seasons. She runs different plays with Chip, trying to butter him up or, when that doesn't work, going completely feral in hopes that showing him she is not a good person will result in being freed. And while Dory fights for freedom, Chip's suffocating focus on her begins to wear her down. Soon, imprisoned and idle, Dory struggles to maintain a focus on who she is and what she wants. Sometimes, she knows the events of her past, how she got here, and what her past behavior tells her about who she is. But as time goes on and she stays trapped longer and longer in this snowglobe hell, the lines blur. The concept of who she is becomes stranger and stranger as her sense of self begins to meld with her captor's, leading the pair down a dark path.

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Image via HBO Max

Season 4 cements itself as a horror-driven season in Episode 5, "Doctor Mindbender." Not only is it the mid-point of the season but it is also the point where Dory proves to be the most malleable as her sense of what's true begins to slip away. Throughout the episode, Chip tries to re-program Dory into believing that Drew, Portia, and Elliott were the ones responsible for killing Keith and Dory is merely another victim here. Waves of surreal brainwashing scenes play out through the episode, showing us how fragile Dory's mental state is.

Even before this episode (like Episode 3, "Escape to Nowhere," and Episode 4, "Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig"), Search Party uses profoundly unsettling framing and editing to build fear while investigating Dory's identity transformation. For example, the Paul Jo (Ann Dowd) murder sequence is unlike anything we've seen in Search Party before. Paula Jo is an older neighbor of Chip's who threatens to turn him in and thus becomes another prisoner of his. Unlike Dory, she is not ready to succumb because she is unplagued by the existential concerns Dory is currently wading through. When a food allergy of Paula Jo's turns deadly, Dory seizes upon the opportunity to scare Chip in a final bid to maintain a grip on herself. Murder has always been treated as a grave matter on Search Party but Paula Jo's death is slow, protracted, and gruesome. We recoil at that moment because we see this is the point of no return. Search Party tilts into a full genre-driven spiral into horror. It's the kind of quiet, subconscious horror that can only be experienced in real, everyday scenarios.

Search Party uses horror to bring out this idea because, as this genre is capable of telling us, through extreme circumstances comes extreme truth. Confrontation giving way to transformation occurs when everything has been stripped back to expose the heart of the matter. The horrors Dory experiences at the hands of Chip are violent, scary, and confusing. This is an unthinkable situation. It is an atypical situation. Dory is a proven chameleon whose Season 3 trial revealed she will do whatever it takes to save her skin. For a long time, she has been forced to question whether she is actually the person society has told her she is or if she is a cold-blooded predator. Is she just a regular kind of morally ambiguous twenty-something flailing and careening through life in search of stability like her friends? Or, is she a villainous kind of morally ambiguous twenty-something Chip is forcing her to be, one that can only be achieved through self-actualization springing from horrific circumstances?

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Image via HBO Max

Dory's situation in Season 4 is an extreme form of the kind of identity transformation (or crisis, depending on who you ask) one might face as they exit their teens and plunge headfirst into their 20s. The first brushes with adulthood will test anyone. It's a time where we get to write the rules of our lives, form the foundations and parameters of who we truly are. Search Party's title has long had two meanings: The first is the literal search for Chantal Witherbottom (Clare McNulty) that began in Season 1 and spiraled into the murder of Keith (and beyond). The second meaning refers to the search each of our four main characters has been on as a variety of extraordinary circumstances have forced them to examine who they actually are.

Given how the story has progressed thus far in Season 4 and with all of this in mind, I believe Search Party was always meant to be a horror show. Comedy, and specifically satire, works when it comes to introducing the idea that the search for who you are is daunting and scary. Plus, when it comes to scrutinizing the contemporary mores cultivated by the current generation of twenty-somethings, satire feels like a natural approach. It walks the line between funny and mean in a way that makes Search Party of its time. But there has always been a cold, brutalist streak running through this show simply because of its twists and turns.  Comedy temporarily took the edge off, but like Dory trying to run from the truth, this show could not outrun the true darkness of its story. The search for yourself can sometimes lead to unsettling places, something Dory is learning in a major way in Season 4.

Search Party Season 4, Episodes 1 through 6 are now available to stream on HBO Max. The final four episodes of Search Party Season 4 will be released on January 28.