Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Chambers episode 5
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Netflix's new supernatural horror series Chambers is full of strange goings-on, but perhaps few are stranger than the sudden appearance of a baby in Nancy LeFevre's (Uma Thurman) bathroom - and if you missed an earlier bit of dialogue explaining it, you were probably very confused. The scene takes place in episode 5, "Murder on My Mind," shortly before Nancy sits down for an uncomfortable dinner with Ben (Tony Goldwyn), Sasha (Sivan Alyra Rose) and The Annex leaders Ruth (Lili Taylor) and Evan (Matthew Rauch).
In Chambers, Nancy is the mother of Becky LeFevre (Lilliya Scarlett Reid), a high schooler who was electrocuted in the bathtub on the same night that Navajo teen Sasha suffered a sudden heart attack. After Sasha gets a heart transplant from Becky, the LeFevres try to get to know the girl who has their daughter's heart - setting up a scholarship so she can go to Becky's old school, and even giving her Becky's old car. As Sasha gets closer to the family she begins to experience unsettling visions, and Nancy starts going through something strange as well.
In episode 4 of Chambers, "2 For 1," Nancy goes to a doctor to talk about pregnancy-like symptoms she's been experience. Nancy insists that there's no way she could be pregnant, since she and Ben haven't had sex for months, and the doctor suggests that she's experiencing a phantom pregnancy. Frustrated by this diagnosis, Nancy turns to Ruth, who has an idea for how she can deal with her symptoms. "Have you ever heard of a reborn doll?" Ruth asks. "It temporarily offers an emotional replacement after the sudden loss of a child. It's not the real thing, but it helps."
The next time we see Nancy, she's in the bathroom looking down at her reborn doll, which is in a suitcase and wrapped in a baby blanket (presumably because Ruth brought it over with her). Reborn dolls are designed to be hyper-realistic, and are sometimes used by grieving parents to help them deal with their emotional trauma. However, the doll is somewhat abruptly introduced in Chambers, and if you weren't fully paying attention to the previous dialogue exchange you could be forgiven for wondering where Nancy got a baby from, and why she so callously throws it in the trash.
It may not have helped her get over Becky's death, but the reborn doll does at least seem to move Nancy's phantom pregnancy forward. After throwing the doll away, she is horrified by the sudden appearance of a C-section scar on her stomach, and frantically tries to scrub it away until her skin is bloody. This could be an extreme psychosomatic symptom of her phantom pregnancy, a hallucination, or the workings of the sinister spirit lurking inside Sasha, who is sitting nearby when the C-section scar manifests.