Shining Girls - General Discussion

[BetterButter]

 

[BellyLaughter]

I'm a bit shocked that no one has posted here yet.  Surely this show is ripe for the picking even if it is to just critique Elizabeth Moss doing what she always does...spacey, intense flickering eye acting.

I'm a few episodes in and you could colour me intrigued.  

[TipseyGirl]

Just watched the first couple episodes and I am also intrigued... and confused. Has Jamie Bell's character not aged since 1964 or what?

[HollyG]

I confess I read a synopsis somewhere, so I sorta get the premise of the story (but not everything as I didn't want to completely spoil it). So far I'm hooked. And I don't mind EM's staring gazes as much in this series. I'm also surprised more people haven't found it yet, but I've only seen it advertised on Twitter.

Edited May 7, 2022 by HollyG

[raeb23]

Four eps in and I'm also confused. I'm not at all familiar with the source material; just thought the description seemed interesting. 

On 5/7/2022 at 11:40 AM, TipseyGirl said:

Has Jamie Bell's character not aged since 1964 or what?

I think he's able to travel through time somehow? And maybe this causes the disruptions in Kirby's realities. Or maybe her shifting realities is a side effect of something he did to her? 

[Anela]

I bought the book years ago, started it, but didn't get very far. I want to read the book, before I watch this.

[BingeyKohan]

So, Kirby is going to have to go into 'the house', right? I can't imagine that will mean good things for her, metaphysically.

And I'm guessing the woman in the tape that Kirby got from Leo is the woman whose shimmering outline was on the bed in that one scene with Harper? (I'm guessing the tape was filmed there.)

[TexasGal]

Just starting episode 4 - serial killer never checked to make sure they were all actually dead?  I mean, we’ve seen him read his own press.

[Nicmar]

On 5/7/2022 at 10:40 AM, TipseyGirl said:

Just watched the first couple episodes and I am also intrigued... and confused. Has Jamie Bell's character not aged since 1964 or what?

That's what I wanted to know.

[TipseyGirl]

Not sure if I am going to hang in there with this one. I am so confused. 

[BellyLaughter]

Is the onion starting to be peeled??  This has been the slowest of slow burns ever...

[go4luca]

I want to know how they plan to wrap this up in just two more episodes.

[Maximona]

Loved the novel, The Shining Girls.

And the show—Shining Girls—isn't bad.

But The Shining Girls was a novel about a haunted house. A haunted house possessed by a most malevolent and unique black magick.

And the show is about Elisabeth Moss fluttering her eyelashes and scrinching up her face a lot.

Shining Girls doesn’t reference the house much at all, at least in the first four episodes (which is as far as I've watched) so I’d have to say it’s a bad adaptation because serial killers are a dime a dozen in TV-land but truly malevolent haunted houses are something rare and wonderful.

The showrunner apparently wanted to make a show about the way that severe post-traumatic stress disorder can turn you into an unreliable narrator. 

Lauren Beukes (the novelist) was after something much more subtle and profound.

Beukes wasn’t particularly interested in the serial killer—who in the novel is a rather personality-less drifter caught up in the predestine malevolence of the House.

Beukes was interested in his victims, young women who shined with potential (hence the novel’s title.)

Each victim in The Shining Girls has a storyline.

In contrast, the victims in Shining Girls are hastily shuffled through in a sped-up sequence of lifeless human bodies—presumably to give the viewer more time to look for nonexistent nuances in Elisabeth Moss’s overactive eyelashes.

I’ll keep watching Shining Girls: It’s a serviceable serial killer drama.

But it’s not The Shining Girls—which really made me wonder: Why would you pay to option a novel for television and then not use the best parts of the novel?

 

Edited May 20, 2022 by Maximona

[enchantingmonkey]

8 hours ago, Maximona said:

But The Shining Girls was a novel about a haunted house. A haunted house possessed by a most malevolent and unique black magick.

What did you think of Episode 6, where much of the episode was spent dealing with The House?  I thought it might offer some insight regarding The House but it didn't give much in the way of clarity.  Perhaps there were details there that went over my head?  

If you'd want to share some details (maybe Spoiler Hide them?) from the novel about the House, I'd love to read them.  I haven't been able to find much on a Google search.  

[Maximona]

23 hours ago, enchantingmonkey said:

If you'd want to share some details (maybe Spoiler Hide them?) from the novel about the House

Kinda hard to describe the House in the novel except to note that it's a kind of time loop (emphasis on loop.)  Harper does the things he does because in the House, he's already done them. It's a kind of time-as-Möbius-strip deal, horror overlaying science fiction.

[legaleagle53]

8 hours ago, Maximona said:

Kinda hard to describe the House in the novel except to note that it's a kind of time loop (emphasis on loop.)  Harper does the things he does because in the House, he's already done them. It's a kind of time-as-Möbius-strip deal, horror overlaying science fiction.

I thought Episode 6 made that pretty clear when it gave us Harper's backstory. The house is a time portal that can take Harper from his own time (1920) up to about 70 years into the future from his point of view, but it's also a temporal loop in that he relives the same events over and over again. That's why he can predict everything his victims will do before they do it and how he was able to implant a key from 1992 into a victim he had murdered 20 years earlier. The astronomer in 1992 wasn't his most recent victim -- she was simply one link in a neverending circular chain.

Edited May 22, 2022 by legaleagle53

[Maximona]

11 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

The house is a time portal

But the house in the novel isn't a "time portal" in the sense that trope is commonly used (which is the sense that the show is using it.)

It's a place where everything has already happened.  Like I said, very difficult to articulate if you haven't read the novel.

Harper in the show has a very distinct personality and is essentially using the House to commit the murders.  

Harper in the book has practically no personality and no volition.  Nothing is actually driving the murders; they happen because they have always happened. It's a subtle distinction but immensely disturbing in a way that the show just isn't.

[legaleagle53]

I'll be interested to see how the rest of the season plays out. Kirby seems to be the key to breaking the neverending temporal chain, since (a) she survived when she apparently wasn't supposed to -- Harper seemed genuinely shocked to learn that she was still alive years after the first attack -- and (b) she experiences random time/reality shifts that completely threw Harper for a loop the first time he experienced one with her. She is the paradox that is also the weakest link in the chain, and she's bound to set foot in the house (and thus in Harper's native era) eventually. That should be fascinating to see.

[h2ogirl]

So i need to rewatch episode 1, but were the steps Kirby was playing on as a child the steps of THE house? 

[Lebanna]

Well, for once I actually enjoyed this series far more than the book, it was easier to connect to the characters in this series and they were much more damaged by more relatable somehow. Plus the shifting universes were more fun and made it significantly more mysterious. Plus Kirby and Dan being so much closer in age and having less of a romantic connection was definitely an improvement.

It was a relatively emotionally satisfying conclusion, everyone got everything they should have had back, except Kirby, who like Harper, in owning the house seemed to have disappeared from her own life and everyone else’s.

Unless Kirby should have been working at another paper entirely, because she definitely didn’t get her original successful career  path back from the moment she lost it, as everyone else did, or Dan would have recognised her.

I do feel like this series could have been a couple of episodes longer and explained more clearly how Harper’s time travelling sprees and killing women right before they achieved their potential was changing the path of everyone’s lives. It felt like there was a clever unravelling of that mystery where they find all the ways that time was caused to spiral that should have been the episode before this last one. 

And was it Kirby who was hanging from the banister at the beginning of the episode for the botanical collector to find?

[legaleagle53]

I knew that having Kirby discover the house and its power would be the key to stopping Harper and breaking the temporal loop chain. And it was so satisfying to see Harper getting a taste of his own medicine once Kirby figured out how to use the power of the house against him to so radically alter his existence that it completely undid everything that he had done.

So I'm guessing that after Kirby had had her fill of using the house's power to set her own timeline as she wanted it, she used the house's power one last time to send it and herself back to 1848, and then killed herself to close her own temporal loop. Perhaps if there were to be a second season, it could be used to show the origin of the house and its power and how its different owners would use it over the course of time.

Edited June 4, 2022 by legaleagle53

[Norma Desmond]

On 6/3/2022 at 1:11 PM, Lebanna said:

And was it Kirby who was hanging from the banister at the beginning of the episode for the botanical collector to find?

It never crossed my mind, when I watched the episode, that it could be Kirby. I thought the person hanging was just the previous owner who got fed up with the curse. But I guess it could be Kirby, as, upon rewatching, there was a rather slow zooming into the blue sneakers. Was she wearing those?

On 6/4/2022 at 12:10 AM, legaleagle53 said:

So I'm guessing that after Kirby had had her fill of using the house's power to set her own timeline as she wanted it, she used the house's power one last time to send it and herself back to 1848, and then killed herself to close her own temporal loop.

Why would she send herself back to 1848, though? There was nothing significant to her life or timeline that would suggest it. It makes no sense.

Anyway, it's sad that everyone's lives got back on track, except Kirby's. And if she was the suicide victim at the beginning, what a freakin depressing conclusion to an otherwise intriguing story.

Edited to add: I read a few recaps/reviews on the finale, and none of them peg Kirby as the person hanging from the banister in 1848.

https://www.avclub.com/shining-girls-finale-explained-interview-elisabeth-moss-1848997852

https://aiptcomics.com/2022/06/03/shining-girls-ending-explained/

And here: https://www.hellomagazine.com/film/20220603139841/shining-girls-apple-tv-drama-ending-explained/?fbclid=IwAR0utdPvq9W_jnEreRlV0pwd0M0ypNG3POcQk211UL-6258crQvUr7_itUU

"In the opening moments of the episode, in a flashback, it is revealed the house comes into the ownership of whoever is first to step into it following the death of its current occupant, with a man from the 1800s discovering it after its original owner kills himself. This is why Harper is the only one who can control the time travel element - as he killed the current occupant after breaking in"

Anyway, the guy from 1848 is the same guy Harper killed in the 1920s when he first broke into the house.

Edited June 5, 2022 by Norma Desmond

[Lebanna]

Yes, it’s just a plot point that seems quite mysterious and wasn’t tied up. I would say that the house had clearly travelled back, as the street didn’t even exist yet. Or maybe it always just sits there as it is, back to the beginning of time. Mostly just unnoticed, like the TARDIS.
 

If Apple do something like Netflix did with Russian Doll and come back to these characters with a new season in a few years, I hope the body doesn’t turn out to be Kirby. 
 

In the book the previous owner had been a Polish guy, if I remember correctly. Sometimes he would be dead, sometimes Harper would have got rid of him and sometimes he’d be alive again when Harper got back.  Also, the book seemed to imply a Quantum Leap type of rule where Harper could only go as far as 1993 because that would have been/was where he was always destined to die in his 90s (or not). Of course, Quantum Leap didn’t even stick to that rule, so there’s no reason why this show would. But yes, 1848 seems quite mysterious and it would be great if they have more story planned and we get some answers about what the house actually is (because it’s obviously not really a house).

And of course the book has a very different ending than the show for them all. So there’s no connection with the book. The fact that the house still exists, Harper isn’t dead in this new reality, Kirby’s role as powerful ruler of the house has not been defined - outside of obviously telling Klara and the older woman (and possibly his other future victims for the next 70 years of his natural life) what to say or do to get rid of Harper from their lives back in his original timeline - Kirby and Dan don’t really know each other yet in this reality and there are mysteries like the hanging person, who/what built the house, why the realities shift in the exact ways that they do or the cause of the quantum entanglement of people killed by the owner of the house, all left on the table, which suggests the possibility of continuing the show in some form.

I’d happily watch a series about the next 70 years of Harper’s life while he keeps trying to kill people who turn out to be completely ready to fight him and quite angry about him trying to murder them, while Kirby keeps destroying his reality every time as punishment.

But even if there isn’t any more, it was a nice ending.

Edited June 5, 2022 by Lebanna

[Rickster]

Really enjoyed this series, but unlike a lot of streaming series in which the plot is dragged out to fill the number of episodes required, I definitely thought this could have used another to elaborate on some of the mysteries and show how Kirby came to understand the secret of the house.

I found the flashback to a late 19th century row house standing alone in the woods really jarring and took me out of the story a bit.

I guess despite all the changes to Kirby’s life, it still revolved around the Sun Times, at least until the very end, unlike, for example what happened to the astronomer. Probably a necessity, plotwise, since the paper’s resources were central to the investigation.

Seemed from the interviews that they may be angling for a second season.

[30 Helens]

I really enjoyed this show. It was twisty, confusing (but not overly so), and most importantly, never boring. That’s very rare these days, where shows tend to bog down in the middle third (Severance, I’m looking at you).

I don’t think the hanging body was ever implied to be Kirby’s. The bright blue sneakers were just generally anachronistic, showing us that the wearer had been to a time period that was not his/her own.

I’m not sure how to feel about the ending. I guess it’s goood? that Kirby took control of the house and returned life to the other victims while sentencing Harper to his own special purgatory, but it certainly looks like she, too, is trapped in her own private hell. And if the time loops are still in play, does anyone really survive? Don’t they all still get murdered somewhere along the way? 

I don’t know why Kirby didn’t just burn the damn place down, and end it all. Because as it stands, someone will have to replace her eventually. And that person could be worse than Harper.

[Lebanna]

2 hours ago, 30 Helens said:

I don’t know why Kirby didn’t just burn the damn place down, and end it all.

Well… this is exactly why I feel like there might be a vague hope from the show runners for a season 2.

Book spoilers:

Spoiler

This is exactly what she does at the end of the book.

[tennisgurl]

I guess Elizabeth Moss has been typecast as "woman dealing with traumatic assault via scrunching her face a lot", which is a weirdly specific thing to be typecast as. 

I really liked the book but haven't seen the show because I haven't shelled out for Apple+ yet, but I thought about finally taking the plunge for this one, but given the meh response here, I'm not so sure. 

[TimetoShine]

I personally really enjoyed the show and thought Moss and Moura did a great job. 

[BetyBee]

Watching this series spurred me to read the book. It's really good. I couldn't put it down and finished in 2 days!