Is there a way out?

As we come to episodes 4 and 5 it’s like someone finally decided to ask what the point of the small town was in which the cast are trapped.

We learn some interesting and intriguing points and there is, actually, some great character work but the single most important development is characters deciding that they need to solve the puzzle of the town they’re all trapped in.

The set up suffers from a peculiar problem in that there are quite a lot of people living in this horror show of a community but far too few of them are on screen trying to escape or fall apart or simply speak up. They’re passive like background characters in a large city which, for me, just doesn’t quite work. You can get away with it when you have the anonymity that a city provides but these people are trapped in a small town with definite borders where going out at night gets you messily eaten.

Exacerbating this is the fact that at the same time, it can feel like there are just too many people on screen with speaking parts. I would like more focus on the sheriff, the deputy, the medic and maybe on a couple of people up at the house. That’s before considering the broken family and the software genius who’ve just arrived.

Even with such a pared-down show that would still be a lot of people. Instead, we have many others all occupying a little bit of the story but without any sense of whether they’re significant to that story.

If this were a show with no central mystery the set up would be OK because we’d have time to explore these characters’ individual shapes. The problem is that they’re battling not only with one another but also with a mystery that’s struggling to find enough time on screen to be more than ‘something horrible happening’.

These two episodes make moves in the right direction. There’s even a scene in which one character, as baffled as me, calls out the townspeople for behaving like NPCs in a 1990s computer game. The writing throughout has been tight, it’s been let down by the narrative structure. Here we see some of the strength of the writing as the structure gets out of the way and starts to deliver us people who are driven by their experience to explore the world they find themselves in.

Most interesting to me is that, for no real reason, multiple characters all come to the same conclusion that they need to figure out what’s going on. It remains unclear just how long some of the major characters have been in town but the idea that they arrived from very different places is fascinating (although why this supernatural threat respects US Border Control is… probably best not thought about too hard). I also like the idea that the predators the town faces aren’t the only mystery to be solved.

We’re at the halfway stage and I’m interested in what happens. I am re-engaged with the mystery and there are three or four characters I want to see more of.

There’s a maxim in writing which goes along the lines of ‘start as close to the end of the story as possible.’ To wait until episode 5 before a show hits the point of being compelling is a challenge for viewers and personally I think this would have been much stronger if we’d arrived here much earlier.

You might compare this to the initial challenges faced by The Wheel of Time which also only really found its feet in episode 4 of the first season. There are enough differences to make that more forgivable for WoT than here, not least it’s a huge alternate world with unfamiliar history, magic and cultures. From does not have the defence of having to world build in such a way.

I feel like I’m being unnecessarily negative. I think it’s because the writing is great, the characters largely feel plausible even with their uneven screen time and the actors behind them are doing great things. It all deserves more from the vehicle and I can’t get away from the truth that it’s largely not landed.

Still, Episodes 4 and 5 are good, better than most of what else you could choose to watch, and I remain invested despite it all.

Rating? 7 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston