After months upon months of anticipation, Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie TV series has finally released, with all eight episodes of the long-gestating production having dropped simultaneously on Prime Video.
As a creative, Flanagan is neither a stranger to crafting long-form horror television (having made genuine high-water marks like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass over the years) nor to adapting Stephen King books to the screen (having made Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck prior to this). So there was plenty of reason to be excited about the idea of Flanagan tackling Stephen King’s famous debut novel, Carrie, but there was also some cause for concern.
The book is among the shortest novels King has ever written, which made it a strange choice for a full near-eight-hour adaptation. But I went into Flanagan’s take on the material with the most open of minds and hearts (you can read my reviews for each episode here) and was largely impressed with what the filmmaker and his collaborators assembled.
Flanagan’s Carrie sets up more seasons, but at what cost?
While it certainly ebbs and flows in quality over the course of its run, Flanagan’s Carrie is a predominantly interesting, occasionally great take on King’s novel. That is, until the ending absolutely flubs it, falling flatter than I would have ever thought possible.
When people think of Carrie, they think of the ending: the prom night massacre. The entire story in the novel builds to this crucial narrative juncture, and Brian De Palma’s immortal 1976 film adaptation followed this same trajectory. To that end, it makes perfect sense that Flanagan’s take would also build this inescapable sense of dread about the looming events of prom night over the course of its eight episode run.
What doesn’t make sense is what happens once things actually get to that final episode.
A character’s autonomy within a story is important. This isn’t something that I feel the need to spend to long on, especially because it’s something that Flanagan and co. explicitly underline in their take on Carrie. There’s an entire beat in the second-to-last episode where, after a school-wide riot and debate over whether or not the school should even have a prom, Carrie unexpectedly becomes the voice that turns the tides and ultimately convinces the school faculty that prom is necessary.
Here, Flanagan and co. are actively imbuing Carrie with autonomy, making prom the result of her own active decisions, which makes it that much more tragic.
However, this seemingly iron-clad understanding of autonomy gets chucked right out the window when the finale rolls around. Despite the whole series literally building to this moment, with Carrie on stage having been drenched in pig’s blood as part of a cruel prank, the finale has the created-for-the-show character of Emaline (who also has telekinetic powers of sorts) step in and “takes the wheel,” essentially possessing Carrie’s body.
Thus, the rest of the episode sees Carrie doing many of the things that she does at the end of the story, but excludes Carrie as a character from those proceedings, instead implying that it was all Emaline’s doing.
This is an absolutely bewildering development to chuck in at the last minute, and as it turns out, it’s apparently in an effort to set up further seasons for the show.
In King’s novel and De Palma’s film, Carrie pretty definitively dies at the end of prom night, but in Flanagan’s show, she escapes town, riding off into the sunset with Emaline who is taking her to a make-shfit X-Men-esque community for people with supernatural abilities.
So my best guess as to why any of this is here is to attempt to excuse the fact that Carrie massacred a whole town’s worth of people, so that audiences can then root for her to be a superhero-of-sorts in subsequent seasons?
But then what exactly was the point of the entire season building up all these different complex relationships between Carrie, her peers, her teachers, and her mother, if nearly all of that was just going to be eclipsed at the last second by a random third-party character “taking the wheel” of Carrie’s body and powers?
It’s an ending so bad that it retroactively taints the rest of the series, which is a genuine shame.
Even in the finale episode, there are great moments of incredible performances bolstered by inspired filmmaking craft; Flanagan is a great filmmaker. But the choice to sacrifice the ending of this story in favor of ham-fistedly attempting to plant seeds for potential future seasons is an awful one.
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