S01.E08: Newark, New Jersey

[AnimeMania]

A grieving couple struggles to say goodbye.

[tennisgurl]

Toni appears again! She really has a knack for being on the periphery of weird supernatural situations doesn't she? The show really loves Kaitlyn Dever, and its understandable, she is very compelling and having her here as a kind of sequel to her episode bookends the season quite well, especially comparing her to the couple that tragically lost their child and are falling apart over it, while she gave up her child, and while she feels like a monster for it, she doesn't exactly regret it. 

I think it took me a bit to warm up to this series, mainly because I think I went into it thinking it would be a different kind of show. I thought it would focus on a different monster or bit of folklore native to each location they visited, but for the most part the locations were not very relevant to the stories, beyond the basics (the one with the CEO needed to be in a city, the one with the mermaid needed to be by the ocean, etc) that they needed for the premise, or some some aesthetics (mainly the New Orleans one) nor was it really a story overly concerned with supernatural creatures. When I realized more about what the show actually was, I started to like it a lot more. 

The general theme of the show seems to be about what people are capable of when they are trapped in a desperate seemingly hopeless situation, with the monsters and supernatural stuff really more allegorical than the focus of the story, at least for the most part. When someone's life just seems terrible and falling to pieces with no hope of escape, they might, say, abandon their troubled daughter in a parking lot, or join an internet conspiracy group, or turn a blind eye to your husbands abuse towards your child, take over your dead friends life and leave her in the woods, let your suicidal wife die but keep her zombie self around, etc. Its probably why they ended with the angel story, because as desperate and broken as the couple was, they never really crossed that line, so they got something close to a happy ending together. 

While I did end up liking the show, especially as a Halloween watch, I do think that the episodes could do to be a bit shorter, I feel like most of them could have cut at least five or ten minutes and they would have flowed a bit better. 

Edited October 21, 2020 by tennisgurl