Spoilers ahead.
After Haunting of Hill House, this one has been a pretty big disappointment. I'm not finished with it yet, but last night I watched episode 5, and I'm beginning to lose my patience with it. At first, the story was doing a very good job of the "show, don't tell" aspect, and attempting to be subtle about what's been going on with the characters, albeit a bit too focused on the non horror, drama side of things for a bit too long. I was willing to be patient, even if I felt that the build up was a bit too slow. But the 5th episode, man...
It was a full hour of one of the characters basically being whisked through space and time explaining things we already knew. It was the same effect they used in Haunting of Hill House to explain the Broken Neck Lady, which was done in an extremely compelling way. But when they did it here, I just felt like we sat through the same 3 scenes 5 times in a row with a couple of other expository scenes sprinkled in. It's like if a comedian did an hour of pretty okay comedy, and then spent a second hour explaining all the jokes he did in the first hour. We fucking get it, dude. To paint a specific example, one of the children, Miles, was thought to have been possessed by the ghost of Peter Quinn. It's been laid on a bit too thick that the kid has multiple personalities, and he's been taking on pretty much every aspect of Peter's personality and physical quirks except for the accent. And then they spent like a full 25 minutes explaining it in episode 5 like it was somehow this big twist. We spent another 25 minutes watching the show explain that Hannah is some sort of ghost figure, and that she's basically been dead the whole time... another thing we already goddamn knew, considering the fact that the show has been doing its best to zoom in the fact that she doesn't really eat, drink, or leave the grounds, and makes weak excuses every time she has to do that.
Don't get me wrong, I get why they had to spell these things out, but to be honest, I didn't need a full hour of explaining it. I'm much more interested in Dani's ex fiance who keeps showing up, and when she finally accepted it and addressed him in front of the campfire, they whisked us away to spend an hour re-telling a story that's already been explained through the previous four episodes in (slightly) subtle clues.
I'm going to watch the rest of it, but I already know the payoff isn't going to be as good as the previous Haunting show, considering how annoyed I am with the pacing thus far. |
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