Spoiler:
I'm glad they took big swings, but this one isn't sitting quite right with me. It wanted to be both a ghost story, and a sincere tale of institutional power, and marginalized women being discarded. I'm here for that tightrope, and maybe I'll feel differently later, but I don't think the show got there.
The good: the vibes and the characters were great. Reddit can cram it - Kali Reis was excellent, and I just believed in this weird, sad place. Foster can clearly still bring it as well.
Here's my main issue. The show smartly swerved away from the mental health or spooky ghosts question, but then it gave a clear answer to the supernatural question with Annie's ghost in the parking garage where only the audience could see it. If you're going to outright give the answer, you need to commit to the bit. If you want to be an overt ghost story, do that.
On the other side of it, we got most of the story of the native women through expository flashback montages in the last 30 minutes. They felt very "oh by the way." I ended up feeling like it would have been much better served either committing to the horror story, or pushing the ghosts to the edges and really getting into the stories of the women.
The show played with the visual language and sound-design of a very mid 2000s ghost story, but tried to also maintain the ambiguity of S1s more cosmic horror trappings, and more grounded conclusions, and it ended up not coalescing for me.
Stray thoughts: Pretty much every direct S1 reference was a mistake (the time is a flat circle line was excruciating), and the atmosphere was regularly undermined by some truly awful needle drops.
The good: the vibes and the characters were great. Reddit can cram it - Kali Reis was excellent, and I just believed in this weird, sad place. Foster can clearly still bring it as well.
Here's my main issue. The show smartly swerved away from the mental health or spooky ghosts question, but then it gave a clear answer to the supernatural question with Annie's ghost in the parking garage where only the audience could see it. If you're going to outright give the answer, you need to commit to the bit. If you want to be an overt ghost story, do that.
On the other side of it, we got most of the story of the native women through expository flashback montages in the last 30 minutes. They felt very "oh by the way." I ended up feeling like it would have been much better served either committing to the horror story, or pushing the ghosts to the edges and really getting into the stories of the women.
The show played with the visual language and sound-design of a very mid 2000s ghost story, but tried to also maintain the ambiguity of S1s more cosmic horror trappings, and more grounded conclusions, and it ended up not coalescing for me.
Stray thoughts: Pretty much every direct S1 reference was a mistake (the time is a flat circle line was excruciating), and the atmosphere was regularly undermined by some truly awful needle drops.