‘It is pretty.’

‘Not if you look closely.’

It’s a small exchange, a jokey moment of sparring between Kevin (Morgan Spector) and his neighbour Mrs Raven (Frances Conroy). It’s also akin to that infamous tracking shot down into the dark chthonic mass of insects in the lawn in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Because when you look at this town, and this show, closely it’s not pretty at all.

Kevin, his wife Eve (Alyssa Sutherland) and daughter Alex (Gus Birney) are the focus. Kevin’s a former copywriter, Eve is a high school teacher who’s been all but fired for teaching sex-ed and Alex is a shy, funny teenage girl who really wants to be normal.

That normality is the key to not just the show’s horror, but the problems I have with it.

The initial plot revolves around Alex wanting to go to a party held by the local football team. Eve says no. Kevin says yes. And the next morning they find their daughter on the swing set outside, in tears having been raped.

‘If in doubt, add sexual assault’ is like the corn syrup of TV drama. It’s got no business being everywhere. It frequently is. Worse still, as the episode unfolds we also find out Eve was apparently ‘the town slut’ when she grew up and the entire rape plot is basically set up for the end of the episode. There, various characters are trapped in different locations. Eve and Alex are, of course, trapped in the mall with a group including the possible rapist.

The more you think about this plot the worse it becomes and the angrier you get. It appears to be being set up as the central mystery of the show, given that we get very little of Alex at the party. If that’s the case then we’re looking at a whodunnit approach to the single most overused plot beat in genre TV history and, through that, the objectification of not just Alex but Eve.

The obvious defence here is that it gives the female characters agency. The retort to that is simple: find better agency. Especially in a genre infamous for pushing the Rape button any time it gets bored, this is lowest common denominator storytelling that plays as unnecessarily mean rather than horrific. Plus it’s just flat out DULL. There’s an entire character whose sole purpose is to scowl disapprovingly at Eve and Alex and then die. Because God forbid female characters in genre fiction should have anything to do besides be raped, accused of being raped, be promiscuous, accused of being promiscuous, or be uptight buttoned up conservative soccer moms straight from central casting who get their jaws ripped off when the show realizes there’s ten minutes left and some gore might be a good idea.

If it sounds like I’m angry? I AM. This is toxic, lazy storytelling. It’s 2017 for God’s sake. EVERYONE should know better.

What’s really annoying is, on the rare occasions the show can bring itself to step away from this misshapen vortex of bad choices and lazy writing, there’s some really interesting stuff here. Its exploration of small town life, and the clawing dread of having to stand near people you grew up with until you die or they do is really smartly handled. The good-humoured, teeth gritted tolerance everyone has for one another is very convincing and the most horrific moments come from that. Nothing in the episode made me shiver more than, after taking the local quarterback away to be questioned, a police officer complimenting his friends on how good the game was.  That level of mundane, banal corruption is the smartest element of the show and there isn’t anywhere near as much as they should be.

The other plots fare a little better. Frances Conroy is great as Mrs Raven and is being portrayed far more sympathetically, so far, than Mrs Carmody ever was. She, and Alex, both fall victim to the Mist’s unerring ability to generate instantly terrified, sometimes violent bystanders but she’s at least heading in an interesting direction.

She’s not alone either. Okezie Morro is the first cast member we meet as amnesiac soldier Bryan Hunt. The show doesn’t get better than his scenes and there’s a crawling sense of unease to them that the rest of the episode almost completely fails to achieve. His cellmate, Mia Lambert (Danica Curcic) is also kind of fun. An apparent drug addict who we meet in the middle of a very different story, she’s driven, complicated, violent and competent. The fight scene she has is laughably coy but she sells what’s there and makes it work. While I shudder to think how much of the season to come is going to be a darker, more cack-handed remake of 13 Reasons Why, I am looking forward to finding out what her deal is.

Elsewhere too, the show impresses. Adrian Garf, Alex’s best friend, played by Russell Posner, is introduced in one of the show’s rare moments of subtlety. A family dinner, ending with by far the saddest line in the episode, tells us everything we need to know about him and, right now, he’s the most interesting character. Smart, eccentric, definitely bisexual and possibly gender fluid, he’s genuinely interesting. He’s also one of the other suspects in the rape, and God help us all if the show decides it was actually him all along.

The Mist seems to be aiming for ambiguity as its compass star. Kevin and Eve’s struggles over parenthood, Mrs Raven’s attempts to understand the Mist, Byran’s lost memory and Mia’s mysterious past are out there to be explored. Were the show focused there, it’d be on much stronger ground. But right now it looks like Alex’s rape is going to be one of the principal dramatic engines of the show and I just don’t see how that can possibly end well, or worthwhile, or in any way we haven’t been subjected to a dozen times before.

Verdict: There’s a lot of great stuff to explore here and later episodes may well focus on elements like Bryan’s past, Mrs Raven’s faith, the possibility this has happened before or any one of the other interesting plots. I hope so. Because if it doesn’t, then this will be a series long check list of the most obvious, toxic plot beats in modern TV. And there’s no hiding that however thick the mist gets. 4/10

Alasdair Stuart