In this review of Neighborhood Watch #5, the truth about everything is revealed.
Neighborhood Watch #5
Writer: Sarah Gailey
Art and Main Cover: Haining
Variant Covers: Kody Okamoto, Haining
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: 9/9/2026
This review contains spoilers
As Neighborhood Watch #5 begins, Jill has woken up, and she has a full explanation of how her husband had shot her. And speaking of her husband, Erik soon shows up with Bianca, a gun, and a demand that Jill tell everyone why she came to Open Arms in the first place.
Erik had been feeding Jill a story about how their son had needed to be saved from this evil cult. But as Jill checked the place out, she came to find that it was actually a wonderful community where their daughter was thriving. But Erik still insists that it’s a full-on Devil’s Workshop.
He demands to see the weapons in Shed Four, and reveals that he knows about Jill and Bianca’s relationship. When they get to Shed Four, it turns out to be a stockpile of seeds. Erik and Val get into an argument, as Aurora picks up a rocket launcher from Shed Five.
Erik tries to get her to drop the rocket launcher through the ever-winning combination of dead-naming and guilt-slinging, before Bianca gets her hands on a shovel and brains him. Val shoots him just in case.
As it turns out, Erik was the one to kill Bianca’s husband: he knew about his wife having an affair, and thought it was Lucien, and had covered it up as a mugging. And he was prepared to do that to Bianca, as well, but with the cover-up of a Satanic ritual.
They need to get rid of the body, and want to get rid of the weapons stockpile…which leads to them loading all of that into the tunnel/constructed hill between the two communities and blowing it up. And thanks to the wonders of mutual concern, it may bring the people together.
The fact that Jill’s husband had made an attempt on her life was definitely not a surprise. He always felt suspicious. Plus, in a lot of such cases, the spouse is the first suspect, and this is one of those cases where that holds up. And Jill’s account of the attempt points out that he was utterly calm. Which shows that this wasn’t a crime of passion so much as pure premeditation.
But in Neighborhood Watch #5, Erik drops all pretenses of being a good person. He’s clinging to that bigotry right up to the end. Seriously, at no point does he even attempt to call his daughter by her name. He accuses her of ruining their family just by living a life where she’s happy and feels like herself. If she’d fired the rocket launcher at him, it probably would have traumatized her, though. Not because she took this man down, but more because she’s a decent human being, and getting coated in someone’s blood and whatnot can, in fact, be quite traumatic to someone with a soul.
Bianca’s been a favorite character of mine in this story since the start, and this just solidifies it. I definitely cheered a bit when she grabbed the shovel, because after killing her husband and covering it up, attempting to kill his own wife, and intending to kill her and use that to bring down a good community, he had it coming.
There’s something kind of neat about the group’s solution to the weapons stockpile, the body that would definitely get them in trouble if it were discovered, and even the constructed hill that divides their communities that was brought up a couple issues back. In one fell swoop, it’s all dealt with. It gets everyone’s attention, and rather than anyone immediately suspecting foul play, everyone nearby only latches onto one thing. That one thing: “Holy crap, I hope these people aren’t hurt!”.
There are few things that can bring everyone together: sometimes it’s giving them a mutual enemy, and sometimes it’s the sort of mutual concern that brings out people’s humanity, and that’s what we see at the end, here. Yes, the people of Willow Haven can be a bit judge-y at times, and they’re way more regimented in their rules, but at the end of the day, they’re just people doing their best to get through the day, just like the denizens of Open Arms.
Final Thoughts
In Neighborhood Watch #5, we finally get all of the answers. It wraps the whole saga nicely, and gives us some hope for everyone (except Erik, but the hell with him, anyway), and is quite the finale.
