Warning: There are spoilers from The Society ahead.
There are a lot of different moving and mysterious set pieces laid out in Season 1 of The Society, but there’s only one who’s cute, furry, and probably a really good boy.
During the third episode of The Society, a dog appears, and we see this unnamed dog a few more times before the season ends, both in New Ham and West Ham. Which begs a few questions, but namely: What is this dog? Is it someone who has survived the supernatural incident that’s pulled the kids away from the world they once knew? Is the dog some sort of interdimensional traveler? What is going on with this furry friend?
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Firstly, the dog doesn’t have a name, but Elle adopts the dog and calls him Charlie, so let’s call the dog Charlie.
We first meet Charlie moments before Cassandra is killed by Dewey (...or someone else). Cassandra bends down to pet the dog, say hello to the dog, and then the dog is scared off by whoever comes to kill her. Charlie the dog then reappears outside Elle’s house one day, and she takes him inside, essentially adopting him much to Campbell’s displeasure. When Charlie suddenly disappears, it’s assumed that Campbell killed the dog, though it’s not 100% confirmed by anything or anyone on the show.
You think that’d be the last of the dog, but it actually shows up during the closing moments of the season. As Allie and Cassandra’s mom heads into the library to do a reading from Peter Pan, she stops to pet the dog before she does. How is the dog in both places, when the kids are only in one? There are some options:
The dog is a link between the locations
Far fetched? Sure! But a lot of things on The Society don’t make sense yet, and this dog is clearly important. Maybe there’s a way this dog is actually traveling between the two locations — West Ham and New Ham — and he’s going to somehow reappear in season 2 and lead the kids there. It’s a stretch, but it’s completely possible. They haven’t explored their entire area yet.
The dog suggests that when you die in New Ham, you come back in West Ham
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This idea actually comes from Alex Fitzalan, who plays Harry. Talking to ET, Fitzalan theorized that “in episode six there's a dog and everyone thinks that the dog was killed, but in episode 10, the dog appears again in the real world, or whatever this real world is, so maybe there is a way back?"
That’s certainly something to think about — if you’re killed in New Ham you come back in West Ham. That could explain why we haven’t seen the dog again in New Ham, but suddenly he’s back home with Allie’s mom. However, the big hole in this idea is that it certainly appears Cassandra is still MIA. We see her name on the wall of kids behind Allie’s mom while she’s reading Peter Pan, which strongly suggests she hasn’t reappeared in West Ham.
The dog is a red herring
Maybe the dog means nothing. Maybe the dog is just a dog here to mess with all our fan theories and crazy hypotheses. Maybe there are two identical but separate dogs, one in West Ham and one in New Ham to completely throw us off.
The dog’s owner holds a big key to everything
Something we’re not talking about is who does the dog actually belong to? This dog definitely has a human somewhere in New Ham who hasn’t come over to West Ham... or have they? It’s possible there is one adult in New Ham and the group hasn't found, or that back in West Ham the dog’s owner knows what’s going on in the alternate universe.
What we're trying to say is no, the dog is probably not just a dog.