Carrie White Did Nothing Wrong

As I alluded to in my main review of the first season of Carrie, the show makes some pretty big changes along the way that substantially alter (and in my opinion, ruin) the season past a certain point. I didn’t want to get into specifics in my review, just so that those that hadn’t seen the season yet, and wanted to go in relatively fresh, could do so. But now we’re here, in the spoilers area, and I can dump all my thoughts and feelings on the matter, and they are many and varied, so let’s dig in:

Changes to the Carrie’s Origins

From the outset the series changes a lot about Carrie and the other characters around her. In many cases I think these changes are good, such as making Margaret White less of a cartoonish, religious zealot, and adding needed character depth to Chris Hargensen, all of which makes the world feel more interesting and grounded. But when it comes to Carrie herself, the show makes some changes that very quickly alter the trajectory of the series.

The first, big change is that Carrie isn’t just this weird girl at school that was raised by a religiously over-the-top mother who has controlled her all her life. Instead she’s a shut-in that was controlled by her mother (and father) all her life before her family is forced to send her to school. It sort of positions the character in the same place, insofar as she is a weird girl at school that was raised by zealots, but it also changes her drastically as well.

In previous versions of the story, Carrie was a known entity to those around her. She was sent to school, but she wasn’t allowed to be friends with the other kids. She was kept apart, made into this weird alien thing, an other that they couldn’t bond with because if she let people in her mother would freak out and abuse her. The other kids picked on her and laughed at her because they didn’t understand her, and this is something that was going on for years and years even before the period incident. That was just the inciting moment that put Carrie directly in Chris’s crosshairs.

But here, Carrie was never allowed to go to school. When she’s finally allowed out into the real world (after living functionally as a prisoner in her house all her life) she has to learn how to fit it. It still makes her an other, but now she’s an unknown entity. People haven’t spent their whole lives picking her, so they don’t think of her as that weird girl, Carrie White. It also means that people can bond with her easier, and find ways to forgive her. She’s allowed to grow and change even before she truly comes into her powers, which is great for her arc, but it’s the first step towards the show having to shift the story around to fit this new version of the character.

Of course, I understand why the series had to do this. In a world with the internet, where computers are everywhere (even at school) and anyone can have access to all knowledge, there was no way to make Carrie as innocent and naive as the period incident requires without her being a total shut-in that never experienced the world at all before. To facilitate that key moment of the store, Carrie’s whole backstory had to change for a modern setting. But that still is something core that the series alters, and it has consequences down the road.

The Incident at Prom

Naturally, the series builds to the prom incident. But it does so in a different way from previous versions. This begins with the Instagram account that Chris makes, carriered, which she uses to bully Carrie along with many, many other people. This broadens Chris’s scope, making her hated by more than just Carrie, and it allows the student body to, eventually, unify behind Carrie against Chris, leading to Chris getting expelled. This never happens in the other versions, with the students eventually coming to like and accept Carrie over Chris, so that shifts everything around here.

Additionally, a new character is inserted into the story, Emaline West (Thalia Dudek), who we eventually learn is another girl with powers. She can psychically project herself (the series calls it “Astral Projection”, although it never delves into the “astral” part of that at all) across distances, which is how she finds and talks with Carrie. Emaline pushes Carrie, and helps her develop her powers, but she also acts almost like a malicious influence, trying to get Carrie to do bad things (and even nudging Carrie to break Chris’s nose with her mind). Emaline is like a devil on her shoulder, even as she says she’s Carrie’s one, true friend.

And that leads us to prom. It largely plays out as in other versions, with Carrie getting taken to the dance by Sue’s (ex)boyfriend, Thomas "Tommy" Ross (Joel Oulette), and the duo having a good time dancing together. She gets voted in as Prom Queen, thanks to Chris’s machinations (although you are left wondering if Carrie might have won anyway). And, of course, Chris then pours pig blood all over Carrie as a way to get her revenge (since, in her head, Carrie is the reason she was expelled and not, you know, her own actions).

This is where the major divergence then takes place. In other versions, Carrie snaps and kills everyone. But here, she goes into a fugue state and, when Emaline asks, she lets Emaline take control of her body. So, functionally, Carrie doesn’t actually go on a rampage killing everyone at prom before leaving a trail of destruction behind her across town. That’s Emaline’s doing, instead, and it absolves Carrie of all the bad things that happened. Which is bad.

From a story perspective, Carrie builds to a kind of release. From the moment of the period incident onwards, we have this inevitable sense of dread that something is coming. Her little moments, the times where she gets angry and things shift or break around her, all show you that she has trouble with control. She’ll snap and cause bad things to happen. She breaks Chris’s nose because Chris pisses her off. Carrie has it within her to cause the destruction at prom. She should be the one to do it because, even in this version, that’s what the story is building towards.

Letting her off the hook ruins that. Instead it says that Carrie is too pure to go that evil. She has to remain our heroine so we can get two more seasons of her story (as per series creator Mike Flanagan) and if she commits this act of violence then there’s no way we can have her be the protagonist going forward. Of course, you could argue that because the school does come to embrace Carrie she, in turn, shouldn’t commit the act of violence that has to happen… but then we wouldn’t be watching Carrie at all, in that version. Again, everything spirals from the decision to make Carrie a shut-in who has never been to school, and the more the series tries to write around that, the more it changes everything building to the biggest, most famous incident in this whole story. Carrie has to become the villain, but the show doesn’t know how to pull that off.

Plans for the Future

And, as I nodded towards above, the series is intended to extend onwards for two more seasons, which changes everything that happens at the end of the season. Emaline takes over Carrie’s body and she kills just about everyone at prom. She then guides Carrie out into the town, and she’s the one that actively pushed Chris’s car off the road and killed Chris and her boyfriend. Carrie seemingly comes to, but Emaline takes back over and leads Carrie, singing and dancing, down the street as destruction rains behind them. It’s only when Emaline vanishes (as we learn later, she was shot and puffed back into her own body) that Carrie fully realizes what’s been happening and flees home.

Things shift here as well as her mother tries to kill her (for her own good), and Carrie lashes out in response, but she doesn’t kill her mother, or herself, which naturally absolved Carrie of any further sin, still keeping her in a place where she could be the unvarnished heroine of her own story. She’s then picked up by the real Emaline (not a projection), who packs her into a car and drives off as Emaline has a “safe place” they can hide out in for a while.

And all of this is set up while another group of psychics are tracking Carrie. They try to intervene at prom, but they don’t stop the destruction that happens. They then clean up the mess left in Carrie’s wake, wiping out minds of details and preventing anyone from knowing that Carrie is still alive. We don’t know what this organization wants, beyond, for some reason, wanting Carrie, but they are willing to get their hands dirty (they are the ones that actually kill Margaret White) so it’s hard to trust they’re the good guys.

My problem here is that along with removing the tarnish from Carrie’s character, all of these extra characters and developments drag out the climax of the story. In the novel, and other adaptations, the prom carnage is the big moment, it comes, everyone dies, and then for the next chapter (or five to ten minutes in a movie) Carrie unleashes all the hurt and anger and distrust she’s been feeling this whole time on the whole town. She goes full murder hobo, and it’s great. But here we don’t get that. Carrie doesn’t cause most of the carnage, and the series takes up most of the episode showing it to us, very slowly. It doesn’t play out with that sense of angry catharsis we need or the story demands, all because it has to set up what comes next instead of focusing on what’s happening now.

This is why I feel like the season really drops the ball: instead of giving us the story we need, the one that is promised by doing an adaptation of Carrie, we instead get this story that seems afraid of making Carrie White into the bad guy, all so it can tell some kind of superhero story about her instead. It’s very confusing and it ruins not only the good character work the series had done up to that point, but it also kills the pace of the last, climactic part of the season. I don’t just don’t know why the writers thought this was a good idea.

So yeah, like I said in my main review, I liked Carrie up to the last episode-and-a-half. But right at the end the season biffs it, and it ruins everything it had going up to that point. It’s a major misstep from what could have been a very interesting, and very good, take on Carrie. I really wish it had gone differently.