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The Rain Episode 1 Recap: Stay Inside

By Cynthia Vinney

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The Rain starts with a drip and quickly escalates into a stormy dystopian thriller.

The Rain, the first Netflix original series to hail from Denmark, has all the moodiness and atmosphere often associated with Scandinavian crime dramas.

It also meshes perfectly with both the post-apocalyptic and YA trends popular with audiences these days, and an entertaining take on the apocalyptic survivors’ tale.

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The series’ first episode “Stay Inside” starts before the rain, which we soon learn carries a deadly virus, has started to fall. Simone is having a normal day at high school: greeting friends, arriving late for a group exam, and getting asked out by a classmate.

Then her father shows up and whisks her away, cautioning the other students that they need to go home and stay inside.

When Simone asks her father what’s happening, he tells her the rain is coming. Needless to say, Simone is skeptical. For one thing, it’s a nice, sunny day outside. For another, who’s afraid of a rain shower?

Apparently, both Simone’s parents are. Her father drives full throttle down the highway. He must get the family to safety…somewhere.

Simone’s younger brother, Rasmus, causes a commotion by refusing to put on his seatbelt. This distracts her father and he almost causes an accident, creating a terrible traffic jam on the highway. Blocked in, the family abandons their car and run through the woods.

Just as the rain starts to fall, the family makes it to a bunker that is owned by Apollon, the company Simone’s father works for.

As soon as they arrive, Simone’s father puts on a hazmat suit and leaves again. He claims he is the only one who can prevent millions of deaths.

Before he leaves, he makes Simone promise to take care of her brother no matter what. He may be the key to undoing the disaster.

As the kids get settled into the bunker and their mother attempts to reassure Rasmus with hot cocoa, someone bangs at the bunker door.

Their mother refuses to let them in. After all, if it were their father, he would know how to get in on his own. But Simone and Rasmus can’t leave someone outside, so they open the door.

A sick man is there. He starts to pull Rasmus outside just as their mother races to the rescue and pushes the man away.

As she lurches outside, both Mom and the stranger convulse and scream in agony. Whatever virus the rain carries, it’s fast-acting. Mom is dead within a matter of seconds and the kids close the bunker door in horror and grief.

Having learned their lesson, the kids now heed the advice to stay inside. They try desperately to reach their father, but can’t.

They grow plants, they have dance parties, they draw on the walls. Five years pass. And they have started to run out of food.

Simone dons a hazmat suit while Rasmus, who is now older and taller than his sister, is sleeping and ventures outside to see what’s happened during the years they’ve been cut off from the outside world.

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The rain has stopped, but the streets are deserted. All she finds are abandoned cars and, at a nearby hospital, desiccated corpses.

She returns to the bunker and tells Rasmus that they’ll leave tomorrow. There’s nothing left outside, so their best option is to head for another better-stocked Apollon bunker.

Rasmus is excited to see the sky again. Simone is less sure.

That night, Rasmus awakes to an alarm signaling the oxygen in the bunker is about to run out. He drags a barely conscious Simone outside, only to run into a group of gun-wielding strangers. It seems these people stopped the air flow in the bunker to force the siblings to come out.

As the episode ends, the strangers force the siblings back into the bunker as they follow them inside.

Throughout the episode, we see brief, fragmented flashbacks of Simon’s memories. She remembers her brother being so sick he was dying; her father deciding to use an unusual treatment on him—a virus of some kind. She remembers her father telling her mother that if the treatment works on Rasmus, the virus could help millions of people.

Does this mean that Simone’s father is somehow responsible for the virus carried in the rain? And why is Rasmus the key to everything?

The series is off to an intriguing start. It features some familiar beats from other post-apocalyptic dramas, but it executes them well enough that it’s worth tuning in to the next episode to see what happens.

Next: 6 must-watch Netflix originals coming in May

The eight episodes of The Rain‘s first season are now available on Netflix. They’re available in Danish with English subtitles or dubbed in Danish-accented English.

Check back here to see our recap of Episode 2: “Stay Together.”

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