S01.E08: Mercy Alone

[Snazzy Daisy]

Synopsis:

Quote

The last opportunity for justice arrives as all the participants reckon with their true involvement in the events that transpired. A radical choice of forgiveness allows for closure.

Air Date: May 29, 2024

 

 

Edited May 24 by Snazzy Daisy

[Snazzy Daisy]

Sneak peek!

 

[Zaffy]

Well on the positive side I won't have  to see Rebecca again. And her cutie little sad face.. 🤮

The creator(s) of this show should be ashamed. 
I can't know what they had in their mind, but the result was an insult to the victim and her family.
They showed all of Reena's wrong choices and that was  it really. Nothing more than her obsession to belong with the cool kids. Or her family's need to belong. Like if Reena never existed before the months that led to her murder.

Not that they really bothered with the guilty ones either, except from Warren who they decided to humanize because.. I dunno... because WHY? because he was sweeter than Kelly and less sociopath? He killed a person he did not even know. But he is cute when he looks sad... They manage to made the killer cute and the victim unsympathetic. 

And then came Rebecca.. that poor tormented soul.. dragging her sad existence around with that constant depressed/stoned/constipated  expression in her face,  desperately needy for attention and forgiveness.  A fictional character that contributed nothing to the story. A story about the murder of a brown girl that hijacked by the sad story of an irrelevant white woman.

The worse scripted show I have ever watched. I felt insulted... I am not even sure how I would feel if I was a member of the Virk family.

Everyone who wrote this should apologize to Reena, her family and her friends.

Edited May 29 by Zaffy

[Madding crowd]

Rebecca was a real character and was involved with developing the show before she passed away. Her involvement with the kids was made up; she came on the scene to write a book after they were arrested. I’m still having an issue with defendants and witnesses being housed together while a trial is going on-that’s just asking for witness tampering and threats.

I didn’t have a problem with them showing how Reena became involved with Jo and Kelly and how she ended up in the group home. If the group home really allowed 14-15 year olds complete freedom to do anything they want I can understand some teens wanting to go there. I did think the show was repetitive and felt like we were seeing variations on the same scene over and over. 
 

 

[Snazzy Daisy]

The most powerful and heartbreaking scene in this finale is between Suman and Warren, talking about mercy and forgiveness. This is my favorite scene because Archie Panjabi is amazing in it. 😭

This scene is also important as it supports the real life narrative where Suman and Manjit had advocated for Warren’s parole, which was granted in 2010.

The subplot involving Cam finding out about her biological family and how she was adopted, it feels disjointed from the main narrative. It’s also less impactful than what the writers would’ve hoped for.

This series could’ve been better WITHOUT the Rebecca character. Why wasting time on telling a story about an author who wrote a book about this case? Reena Virk’s case is compelling and complex enough to stand on its own.

 

[tennisgurl]

I can get why they wanted to make Rebecca more of a major character here, but she seemed so disconnected from the main story, I was always just waiting to get back to Reena, her family, and the murder. At least, after the entire town called her out on making this case all about her own guilt, she admitted that she was projecting her own stuff onto Warren and tried to at least get a tiny bit more information about Reena, even if it was too little too late. I liked Cam as a character more than Rebecca, but she also didn't end up having much to do with anything and her finding out the truth about her biological family seemed sort of random. 

This show easily could have cut at least an episode and really should have focused on the actual case and the people surrounding it, but I was still really pulled in, especially by the acting. 

The best scenes for me in the finale were when Suman and Warren met and then when the Virk's were listening to Reena's Biggie CD, trying to appreciate something that she loved that they never tried to understand while she was alive. 

That judge really went out of her way to give Kelly the easiest little slap on the wrist that she could, I guess having good grades and nice parents mean that you can murderer another girl and still look forward to a "bright future". According to an article I read, after Kelly got out of jail and had kids, she ended up getting arrested again for lysing about domestic violence charges, almost like Kelly just sucks. 

[Zaffy]

I would appreciate more the scene between the mother and the murderer if it wasn't made up and forced. It took years for Warren to admit his crime and for the Virks to forgive him. It was another attempt of making Warren likeable, you know the cute boy who killed someone unknown in cold blood because he felt angry. And of course it was Rebecca who brought those two together. 
The Rebecca Story with little big of Cam into it. After all, those two are in the series poster. Not Reena, not her family, not even cute Warren.
 

[MicheleinPhilly]

I waited until 7 episodes were up before I started this and I'm glad I did. I don't know that I would have finished it had I watched it week to week. Like the book, I found it entirely too long. 

I completely disagree with the decision to center the narrative from Rebecca's perspective even though I do like Riley Keough. It was very jarring when I started the series because I thought, "Wait, what are they doing?" 

The "humanization" of Warren was completely gross and overdone. I can't even recall if she was such a Warren apologist in the book. But I didn't really care for the book so... 🤷‍♀️

I thought Lily Gladstone was really underutilized in this. Archie Panjabi was naturally fantastic, but I would expect nothing less from her. 

Teenagers, especially these teenagers, are vile twats. News at 11. 

[millennium]

1 hour ago, MicheleinPhilly said:

The "humanization" of Warren was completely gross and overdone. I can't even recall if she was such a Warren apologist in the book. But I didn't really care for the book so...

 

I haven't read the book but saw this in an Esquire article:

Quote

At the time, [Warren] was sixteen years old. In Godfrey's book, she describes him as “slight and short, with doe eyes, a pouf of dark curls” and “the androgynous good looks of a teenage heartthrob.”

Sounds like a crush.

Anyway, I thought the Rebecca character served an important purpose -- she voiced the viewpoint that Warren was a kid, an abused kid, and he made an awful choice under the influences of alcohol and neglect.

Warren could not go unpunished.   However, I have to concede that part of me agrees with Rebecca.   When I was fifteen, one of my best friends (and still to this day) was a kid who was beaten by his father and largely abandoned by his family.   He rarely stayed with them, preferring to live with a family in my neighborhood who let him stay there.   He had serious anger issues -- sometimes his temper exploded out of nowhere.   He often drank and sometimes did drugs.   I was there at least twice when he placed himself in mortal danger while under the influence, attempting stunt man-like feats (including clinging to the hood of a car as it sped down a two-lane highway after midnight).  As I watched the show, I saw him in Warren and considered that given the right circumstances, the right crowd, the right bad day, and the right amount of alcohol and drugs, my angry friend could have found himself caught up in something like the murder of Reena.

And he wasn't the only one.  There were plenty of disaffected kids in my town (and everywhere, I'm sure) who, but for the sake of certain planets not lining up, might have made a terrible, impulsive choice.

 

[BC4ME]

Does anybody have an opinion on whether, upon hearing Warren's truthful testimony of what he actually did, Rebecca decided she had been wrong about him and let go of her charitable feelings toward him?

Clearly she decided she wasn't like him after all and said as much. But she told him most of the book was about him. Did that change after she heard his testimony and had to face the truth?

I saw she tried to make the book more about Reena after his testimony at Kelly's trial. But did she rewrite her sections about Warren? 

[millennium]

I also wondered, if the circumstances were different might Reena herself have participated in a beating like the one she received if it were a condition of being accepted as a CMC member?   At least as portrayed, Reena was desperate to belong to that group, so desperate that she she looked the other way when the Seven Oaks girls robbed her own family, then she even falsely reported her own father for sexual molestation.   As further evidence of Reena's potential for mayhem, she retaliated against Josephine for rejecting her, spreading vicious rumors among their peers.   Is it a stretch to believe Reena might have succumbed to a combination of peer pressure, the glorification of gang life, and her own desire to belong, and joined in one of those beatings had the victim been somebody else?

It's a complicated story.

 

Edited May 31 by millennium

[BC4ME]

4 hours ago, millennium said:

I also wondered, if the circumstances were different might Reena herself have participated in a beating like the one she received if it were a condition of being accepted as a CMC member?   At least as portrayed, Reena was desperate to belong to that group, so desperate that she she looked the other way when the Seven Oaks girls robbed her own family, then she even falsely reported her own father for sexual molestation.   As further evidence of Reena's potential for mayhem, she retaliated against Josephine for rejecting her, spreading vicious rumors among their peers.   Is it a stretch to believe Reena might have succumbed to a combination of peer pressure, the glorification of gang life, and her own desire to belong, and joined in one of those beatings had the victim been somebody else?

It's a complicated story.

 

That's actually a really good point. We really never saw her do anything that would suggest otherwise. In contrast to Warren who was IMO portrayed in a way that made it hard for me to believe he was capable of doing what he did.

[MaggieG]

This was a frustrating show to watch. I understand for story purposes adding characters and events but there seems to be way more fiction in this show than fact. Was Kelly really that detached in real life? Were her parents really that ignorant?

Now I'm off to find a podcast on this case to get some better details. 

[marybennet]

The question about whether Reena might have participated in a beating is a good one. But let me say sorta the same thing in a different way. What’s good about the show, I think, was its showing almost all of the based-on-real-people people complexly and with context. What that meant to me was that almost any of those kids could have been, at different moments, a victim or a perpetrator. 
 

The one exception, maybe, is Kelly, whom I think the show portrayed without any of the sympathy it displayed toward everybody else. 
 

I listened to one of those podcasts (an episode of Murder in the Rain), and it said that Kelly has never expressed remorse. So that might be what makes her unforgivable in the eyes of the show. But she also sounded to me like she might be mentally unwell, diagnosable. And that’s a complexity the show neglected.

Edited June 1 by marybennet

[Enigma X]

I feel like this dramatization was trying to tell too many stories, and valid or not, the victim who lost her physical life got a lot less sympathy than those who killed her.  I also question the choices made about fictional characters and made-up events that were manipulating the viewer to feel a certain way. I get most things based on a true story does this but this left me feeling gross.

[TattleTeeny]

On 5/30/2024 at 4:43 PM, millennium said:

Quote

At the time, [Warren] was sixteen years old. In Godfrey's book, she describes him as “slight and short, with doe eyes, a pouf of dark curls” and “the androgynous good looks of a teenage heartthrob.”

Sounds like a crush

Just sounds like a description to me. I’m not saying there was no crush (though I personally don’t think so), just that this excerpt doesn’t reveal one.

[AstridM]

On 5/29/2024 at 8:06 PM, Zaffy said:

I would appreciate more the scene between the mother and the murderer if it wasn't made up and forced. It took years for Warren to admit his crime and for the Virks to forgive him. It was another attempt of making Warren likeable, you know the cute boy who killed someone unknown in cold blood because he felt angry. And of course it was Rebecca who brought those two together. 
The Rebecca Story with little big of Cam into it. After all, those two are in the series poster. Not Reena, not her family, not even cute Warren.
 

This is a fictional story BASED on real life, not a documentary 🤦‍♀️

[Zaffy]

16 hours ago, AstridM said:

This is a fictional story BASED on real life, not a documentary 🤦‍♀️

This True Crime story uses real names of real victims from a real case. So it has the responsibility to treat the victim and her family with respect. 
If they wanted to make a fictional different story inspired by real events, they should had changed the names of the victim, the town etc etc.
There are people in social media,  who do not care to read the facts of the real case and blame Reena because this is what the show does, it focuses on Reena and her family's  wrong actions (or whatever the show thinks they did wrong).

And to answer your previous replies to my posts, victims are victims and no matter how flawed they can be it doesn't change the fact that they are well.. victims. 
And no flaws can justify what happened to her.
But the worst is that Reena is not able to answer to whatever this show thinks about her, because she was murdered in the most brutal way. 
Not that the show cares about the victim, it seems to care and sympathize more with one of her murderers.
 

Edited June 22 by Zaffy