You know, I've always been kind of a sucker for, like, Lord of the Flies esque shows or movies.
I mean we got Lost, The Maze Runner series,
The 100, even, like, The Walking Dead to a certain extent
and now, Netflix's is new show, The Society.
When I first heard about The Society, I was like:
Kids stuck in a Twilight Zone version of their hometown?
Check.
Lord of the Flies in a modern-day real world setting?
Check.
A bunch of 23 year olds LARPing as angsty high school teenagers?
Sign me up, I'm ready for it!
But after watching the whole season, I got a couple thoughts.
So let's take a walk.
The show starts out by giving us a little introduction to some of our main characters.
We have Cassandra, the student body president.
We also have Will, the poor kid with a heart of gold.
Harry, the rich pretty boy who always gets what he wants
Kelly, a girl with... not much personality at all
Allie, Cassandra sister who's just kind of a brat.
And there's a few others, but we'll talk about them later.
So one little piece of the puzzle we get right at the beginning of the show
is that there's some kind of weird smell around the town
that's supposed to have been gotten rid of, but now it's back.
"...is that?"
"Yeah" "...yeah"
But you know,
I feel like if there was ever a place where you'd expect a bunch of weird smells
the back of a high school is probably somewhere near the top of the list.
A couple days after this,
every high school kid, 16 and up, is supposed to go on some kind of, like, school camping trip or whatever.
But, wouldn't you know?
There's a big storm that night and the buses have to turn around and take everyone back home.
And that's when we find out that something isn't right.
Bus Driver: "Change of plans. Rock slide, the road is closed, you're back home."
*bus door squeakes open*
"My mom's phone, it just keeps ringing."
*outgoing call ringing*
Now what we come to discover is everyone else in the entire town is gone and on top of THAT
the internet doesn't work,
their Phones don't work except to text and call each other,
AND when they try to escape it turns out that all the roads are completely covered up
with trees and bushes and that kind of stuff.
So basically, they're stuck in their hometown with no adults, no other people, and no way out
So far so good, right?
Well,
Here's my first big gripe with the show.
First episode, everyone in town disappears except for a group of teenagers
who have to find a way to survive and figure out what happened.
Kind of like Lost but, like, with teens.
Now, I don't know about you, but so far this sounds like a pretty awesome show, right?
A Y/A version of Lost? I mean, it basically sells itself.
In the first episode or two,
we start getting a few puzzle pieces about what might have happened.
Someone finds some documents about how the mayor offered to pay someone to get rid of the smell
But then decided not to pay that person.
So maybe this is all some kind of like revenge plot or something, right?
And then, over the next nine episodes,
Nothing fricken' happens! *echoey voice*
I mean, okay a lot of things happen.
Like Cassandra makes a bunch of rules and tries to be in charge of the town.
But then she gets shot and killed by someone.
*ghost noise*
And her sister Allie has to take her place, and it's, like, a whole thing.
But the entire premise of the show,
the whole point that we were sold on,
just disappears.
Like, no one cares about figuring out the mystery or anything.
And the show does this to a comical degree.
Much later in the show, all the kids decide to have a big Thanksgiving dinner together.
And right before that, just out of nowhere, we get this little piece of information:
Gordie: "There have been two hypotheses on the table;"
"This is Earth and everything else is gone,"
"or... we're someplace else."
"If you look closer, you'll notice that there are no, moving objects between us and the moon,"
"Which means somehow all of our satellites have disappeared."
"I think it means that this Earth isn't our own."
"It's like a parallel universe."
Oh boy, you couldn't have picked any other time to tell us, huh?
"Uh, hey guys, so it turns out"
"We were all transported to an alternate dimension"
"where we might be the only people in the entire world"
"and we have no idea how he got here or how to get back."
"All right guys, who's ready for some turkey?"
The vast majority of the show is focused on how teenagers form a society.
Haha, get it?
With all the rich kids on the same level as everyone else.
And the show goes into these socio-economic differences that are always present in any school.
But now, you know, they're magnified by like a thousand times
Harry: "Maybe, in the beginning, we needed to give up..."
"...all of our freedom..."
"...our possessions..."
"...our identities..."
"...All for the greater good. I say it's time to give back"
"what's rightfully yours."
*cheering*
"Control over your property, control over your own lives."
And that, in it of itself, is great!
But, like, if that's all the show is going to be about
Then they didn't need to have this alternate-dimension plot thing in the first place.
Like, for example, right?
They could have just had the kids be sent to a summer camp for a month or two.
But it's in the middle of some huge forest somewhere
and there's no adults for some reason, their phones don't work.
So they have to come together and share everything and find food and work together.
You know, I really just could have been, like, Lord of the Flies.
But when you sell the show to us, like:
"WoOoOoh, mystery dimensions"
You gotta follow up on that promise.
I mean, there's only so much teen angst we can all take it one time, you know what I mean?
"What?"
"I know what you want."
"So what? That's what I want, since the day I moved here."
"What's so special about me?"
*barf noise*
Oh boy, here we go.
"Don't hate me, I-"
"Don't want to wear something that we couldn't have afforded in the real world."
"That's why..."
"This isn't your ring."
"Yours..."
"Is the one near my heart."
*more barf noises*
Make it stop, make it stop.
This brings me to another thing about the show that I thought was kind of weird.
The characters are supposed to be teenagers, right?
And at the beginning, they are different levels of believability,
with some kids being more mature than others.
But, like, besides all the cheesy, angsty, romance stuff or whatever, like,
no one acts like a teenager.
It's like almost no one has any hobbies or interests or life outside of saying their lines on screen.
No one has a sense of humor. Like, really? Not one funny kid in the whole school?
Somehow there are no cliques or groups, and everyone's just friends.
and most of the relationships just feel so artificial and, like, unearned.
This is something we're copying Lost, for example, could have helped the show I think.
Like, if every episode we just got a short little flashback of certain characters
and what their relationship was before, and then we compare and contrast that to how they are now,
I feel like it could have added a lot of extra depth to the characters,
and a lot more weight to what happens between them.
Instead, we just get little pieces like this:
"I guess it's weird that we never really knew each other in high school."
"Yeah, not really."
"The only thing that I do remember is in the hallway of junior year"
"I heard you call me a thot."
To me almost everyone feels, like, very one-dimensional.
Like what you see is what you get for pretty much the entire show
Take Campbell for example, Allie and Cassandra's cousin.
Now, he looks kind of like the school dirtbag or whatever, right?
Now we get this scene with his brother Sam, who's Deaf and gay, just FYI.
And he tells us something about Campbell.
Becca interpreting: "Campbell is not a normal version of anything."
"They had him tested."
"He's a psychopath"
Now, this is pretty early in the show.
So I was thinking like, 'okay, so maybe Campbell was a real piece of garbage back in the old world...'
'But now with all the social rules and pressures and all that stuff gone away...'
'He's gonna have some kind of, like, redemption arc or something, right?'
Nope *echoey voice*
We're told Campbell is a psychopath, and throughout the show, he is a psychopath.
So, like, right at the beginning they tell us that he's gonna be, like, the bad guy.
And then he turns out to be exactly that.
"There's not gonna be an election."
"Yeah, right."
"I'm serious, we're not gonna ask for power."
"We're gonna take it."
"What do you mean, like by force?"
Huh, well gee whiz. Who could have seen that coming?
But it's not just Campbell, okay.
In this show every guy is just the worst.
We have Campbell, the literal psychopath.
Harry, the entitled douchebag whose entire motivation is, "I don't want to share my toys."
The football players, who never really say much more than, "Uhahaha."
or Will, who just kind of cries all the time.
The Society is about a lot of things but the real message of the show is,
Don't have a boyfriend *echoey voice*
But really though, there are a lot of good ideas and a lot of potential with The Society.
But I was kind of baffled by some of the choices they made.
Like at the very end we get this little stinger where Allie's mom is back in their old dimension I guess
reading Peter Pan to some very young kids.
"When Mrs. Darling went back to the night nursery..."
"All the beds were occupied, but she did not believe they were there..."
"You see, she saw them in their beds so often in her dreams..."
"That she thought this was just the dream."
Now I guess this is supposed to be some kind of like "BWAAAH" moment or something.
And they want us to wonder if the teenagers are really in a different dimension, or maybe they're all dead.
But like if the big reveal is that they were all dead the whole time,
then what's the point of anything in the show?
But yeah, so the season ends and we get no answers or hints or anything about what's really going on.
There's just a whole bunch of political infighting and then the show's over.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely gonna watch season two whenever it comes out.
Because, like I said, I think there's a lot of good ideas here, but we'll see how it goes.
You know going back to Campbell for a second,
the thing that really bothered me about him as a character...
Or maybe not him as a character, but the way that he was portrayed in the show
Is like, so at the very beginning of the show in the church, he's talking to his brother Sam, right?
And we get this kind of look at who he is, right?
He says "Don't come home tonight. Ever since you were born..."
"I never got a day to myself, but that's all different now."
So immediately we kind of get this little bit of information about who he is and his upbringing, right?
Like, he feels that he was neglected.
He feels that it was unfair to him because his brother has a disability,
So his family had to focus on the little brother instead of Campbell.
Like I get it, you know.
It's a little bit cliche, but, like, I get it. That's something you can sympathize with and be like:
Okay.
Obviously, you know, his actions are not good, but you understand why he chooses to do them.
But then, a couple episodes after that, right?
They just tell you like, 'Oh, no, he's literally crazy.'
So it's like all the sympathy and the understanding of why he does what he does, like, all that's just gone.
Because it's like,
Okay, so the whole neglected as a child thing like all this has nothing to do with anything
He was just born with an illness, therefore he is the bad guy.
It's such a weird choice, especially for a show like this,
That's very, like, socially aware and has a lot of like social issue...
Commentary type thing.
And then to have like the bad guy be bad because of...
You know what I mean? I don't know. I just-
I felt like it didn't really match with the show they were trying to make in the first place.
I felt so weird just to be like: "Oh, he's the bad guy cuz he was born that way, the end."
I don't know, it seemed weird to me, it was a weird choice
The show has a lot of weird choices that don't seem to make a whole lot of sense, but I don't know.
It's not my show.
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