“The Moroi” takes place against the backdrop of one of the most seismic moments in modern history: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Eastern Europe is fracturing. Communist regimes are crumbling. And in Bucharest, Romania, the tremors of revolution are being felt in the most ordinary and desperate corners of daily life — including the food lines outside a local church.
It is here, in this charged and volatile world, that we meet Nikolai.
Nikolai and the Piano
Before the episode establishes who Nikolai is as a person with extraordinary abilities, it establishes who he is emotionally. And that identity is tied, almost entirely, to the sound of a piano.
Nikolai’s younger brother Milos played the piano before his death. The instrument carries grief in its keys for Nikolai — every note a reminder of something irretrievably lost. This connection is deepened by the fact that Elaine, the younger sister of Nikolai’s deceased friend Wesley, also plays the piano. For Nikolai, the piano is not simply music. It is the sound of people he has loved and lost. It is the sound of a world that no longer exists for him.
This detail becomes important later. When Nikolai wakes in a cold sweat to the sound of a single piano key, he sees Milos standing before him — small, young, alive — before the image dissolves and reveals it to be Wesley. The trauma does not announce itself. It slips in quietly, through beauty, the way grief often does.
The Church, the Rations, and a Betrayal
Nikolai’s family, like most families in Bucharest at this time, are struggling to survive under a system of food rationing. Determined not to be cheated, they arrive at the church early to collect their share. It doesn’t matter. The church officials cheat them anyway.
The episode draws a deliberate and pointed parallel here: this is not unlike the moment in the Gospels when Jesus enters the Temple in Jerusalem and finds merchants selling sacrificial animals in what is meant to be a sacred space. Enraged at the desecration — that holy ground is being used to exploit the faithful — Jesus overturns the money-changers’ tables. In “The Moroi,” the church is similarly corrupted. The very institution entrusted with the community’s welfare is the one stealing from it. The sacred has been made transactional.
And then something far worse happens.
The Bombing — and the Birth of a Power
While people are still inside collecting what little food they’ve been given, the church is bombed. Shells tear through the walls. The blast is devastating and indiscriminate.
In the chaos and terror of the explosion, something happens to Nikolai that he cannot explain and does not fully understand: he teleports. Raw, uncontrolled fear rips him out of the church in an instant — and when the smoke clears, Milos is gone. Burned. Destroyed. His family, obliterated.
Now get this… London calling, yes, I was there too. And you know what they said? Well, some of it was true! London calling at the top of the dial. And after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
Nikolai survives the unsurvivable. And he will spend years wishing he hadn’t.
This episode is, in large part, the story of how Nikolai learns to control what the bombing unlocked in him. The technique is simple, almost painfully human: squeeze your fist, slowly, repeatedly. Breathe. Slow your breath down. It is a grounding mechanism — the kind therapists teach to trauma survivors to anchor themselves in the present moment. For Nikolai, it also happens to anchor him in physical space. Without it, fear is the trigger. With it, he holds the wheel.
He has to use it just to return to the ruins of the church and leave flowers for the dead.
“Are You Crazy?”
The episode contains one of its most visually arresting scenes when Nikolai, being chased across rooftops, is cornered at the edge of a building. His pursuer yells down at him: “Are you crazy?!”
Nikolai pauses. He looks down at the street far below. And he says, simply and honestly: “I don’t know.”
Then he steps off the ledge.
He teleports on the way down.
It’s a moment that says everything about where Nikolai is psychologically. He isn’t fearless. He isn’t performing bravado. He genuinely does not know anymore where the line is between courage and madness — or whether, given everything that has happened to him, that line even applies to him.
The Uncle and the Moroi
Nikolai’s uncle occupies a fascinating role in the episode. He has convinced himself — perhaps as a matter of grief, perhaps as a matter of faith — that Nikolai is dead. When Nikolai appears to him and asks, somewhat desperately, “Am I dead?”, his uncle’s response is darkly funny and strangely logical: “That is exactly what a dead person would say.”
But the uncle goes further. He offers a theological and folkloric framework for what Nikolai has become. In Romanian tradition, a moroi is a kind of spirit — not quite a ghost, not quite a demon, but something caught in between. The moroi are the restless dead, hovering between heaven and earth, invisible to most, belonging to neither world.
His uncle’s reasoning is almost airtight within its own logic: Nikolai was in the church when it was destroyed. He should have died. He didn’t. Therefore, he is no longer entirely alive. He is something else. Something the living can’t quite see or understand. A moroi.
The episode quietly leaves open the question of what Nikolai actually is. To church-goers who witness him vanish and reappear, he might be an angel — a messenger, a miracle. To scientists, the episode notes, the teleportation of small objects has already been demonstrated in laboratory conditions. To them, Nikolai might simply be an extreme and unexplained physical phenomenon — extraordinary, but not supernatural. The episode is not interested in resolving this tension. It wants you to sit in it.
Wesley’s Challenge: Get Out of the Fishbowl
Wesley serves as Nikolai’s intellectual foil and, ultimately, his lifeline. Where Nikolai is defined by what has been taken from him, Wesley is defined by curiosity about what is possible.
Wesley pushes back on the moroi mythology directly. He argues that stories like the moroi are what people invent when they encounter something they can’t explain. Human beings, confronted with the incomprehensible, reach for narrative. Wesley uses a simple and memorable image: a goldfish in a bowl. The bowl is the only world the goldfish knows. It cannot conceive of what lies outside the glass. Its entire understanding of reality is bounded by that small, curved horizon.
And then Wesley turns it around on Nikolai: you are the goldfish.
To drive the point home, Wesley asks Nikolai to imagine what his power could actually mean. Not as a curse. Not as a symptom of trauma. But as freedom. You could teleport to a Ramones concert in Toronto. You could teleport to The Clash concert in Tokyo. You could do it all in the same afternoon. Wesley is describing, in 1989 terms, something we now take for granted — the ability to be anywhere, instantly, through live-streamed events and real-time connection. Nikolai has the physical version of something the modern world has achieved digitally.
But here is the key insight Wesley lands on: Nikolai can only teleport home. Fear snaps him back to his anchor point, to the familiar. He is powerful, but he is not yet free. The trick to true teleportation, Wesley suggests, is getting over your fear. Let go of the need to return, and you can go anywhere.
Trauma, Guilt, and the Weight of Survival
The episode is careful to portray Nikolai not just as a man with powers, but as a man devastated by survival guilt. He blames himself for the deaths of his family — a logic that is wholly irrational and wholly human. He was there. He lived. They didn’t. Therefore, in some broken calculus of grief, it must be his fault.
The episode draws a quiet analogy: this is like a sibling who cannot forgive themselves for not being there to protect a brother or sister in their final moments — for not doing the one impossible thing that might have saved them.
Nikolai’s trauma is not dormant. It ambushes him. Walking through the street carrying stolen guns, he stops dead in his tracks — because he sees his mother and little Milos standing there, just as they were. The vision doesn’t last. But it doesn’t have to. The episode understands that for some people, the past is never past. It is always right there, just at the edge of the present.
Wesley’s advice for these moments is the same technique Nikolai uses to control his teleportation: make a fist. Squeeze. Breathe slowly. Repeat. The method that controls his power is the same method that helps him survive his grief. His ability and his trauma are not separate things.
What Nikolai Has — and Why It Matters
Wesley eventually tells Nikolai something that reframes the entire episode. He points out that his uncle is the reason Wesley is still alive — but that Nikolai has something Wesley’s father wants. Something that makes Nikolai valuable in ways he doesn’t yet understand.
This becomes significant when we learn more about the darker currents running through the story. Wesley’s father has been involved with violent human traffickers who smuggled undocumented Romanian refugees into the United States. Romania at this time is a prison: citizens cannot leave without risking being shot. The parallel to the Hebrew people held in Egypt for generations is made explicit — a people trapped, waiting for something or someone to break them free.
We also learn that Nikolai began his journey as a protector. He saved Wesley’s life in Romania. But something has since shifted. For reasons the episode doesn’t fully explain yet, Nikolai has begun taking lives — specifically, the lives of other teleporters, including the father of a character named Henry. What turned a savior into something more dangerous is a question the series is clearly building toward.
The Uncle’s Death, the Broken Bowl, and the Candle
The episode builds to a devastating climax. When Nikolai’s uncle shoots Wesley, Nikolai kills him in response.
The imagery that follows is precise and deliberate. We see a fishbowl — shattered. The fish, outside it.
Nikolai is finally free of the anchor that has kept him in place. But freedom here does not feel triumphant. It feels like loss piled on top of loss.
In the most quietly powerful scene of the episode, Nikolai enters the bombed-out church for the first time since the night his family died. It is only after killing his uncle — the last tether to his old life — that he can physically bring himself to cross the threshold.
Inside, he lights a candle. He lights one for his mother. For Milos. For Wesley’s friend. And he lights one for his uncle — the man he just killed.
Then he breaks down.
The episode resists the easy judgment that killing his uncle was justice, or that his uncle was irredeemably evil. Nikolai’s tears suggest something more complicated: that even those who do terrible things exist within a web of forces larger than themselves. The episode gestures toward the humbling idea that only God — or whatever name you give to the fullness of understanding — can truly know what drives a person to do what they do.
The Decision: Canada
The episode ends not with a bang but with a choice. Nikolai could go anywhere. That is, by now, entirely clear. He is not bound anymore.
He chooses to go to Canada. To Wesley’s father. To the sister, Elaine — who plays the piano.
He is not going to be a hero. He is not going to chase down the traffickers or use his power for some grand purpose. He is going, first and foremost, because he needs help. He wants to understand what he is. He wants to learn, if not how to rid himself of this power, then at least how to live inside it without being destroyed by it.
The fishbowl is broken. The fish is in the open water now.
What it does next is the question.