I liked the premise of this series and thought it chimed well with themes and concepts I'd enjoyed in other works before.
Unfortunately, a series which should have been aiming for a Guillermo Del Toro / Stephen King or perhaps a Herny James / Edgar Allen Poe gothic style of narrative tension slipped too easily into a sort of mash-up of the lesser parts of Buffy, Scooby Doo and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
As no-one at Netflix seems to have yet realised, dramatic, suspenseful stories involving teenagers rarely ever need the unconvincing and dull high school locker/corridor cliches so often employed to socially benchmark their leading characters. The audience-relatable outcomes are consistently poor and most likely you invert the sympathies of the viewer against your otherwise stoic heroes.
Also, another piece of dramatic shorthand used here - that should have been excised at script review - is the post-climactic family-gathers-for-breakfast-next-day scene. When your characters are hollow ciphers, lacking in drive and subtlety, the mundane chit chat of 'normality' only highlights the abundance of flimsy dialogue, clunky interplay and poor execution of both the set piece stunts and the expositional interludes elsewhere.
The flashbacks to previous periods seemed arrhythmic and often necessitated whole episodes of wool-gathering explainers to bring back a sense of coherence and volition. It felt like one of those MasterChef challenges where a 2nd competitor has to guess what their predecessor was trying to cook and aims to improve upon it before handing over to another competitor who tears their hair out before a final slapdash completion.
What should have been a sharp, snappy, solid bouncing ball of dynamic magic-realism and multi-foiled mystery was exposed as a weak, sagging helium balloon of humdrum novelty - albeit with a shiny, prepossessing surface.
Unfortunately, a series which should have been aiming for a Guillermo Del Toro / Stephen King or perhaps a Herny James / Edgar Allen Poe gothic style of narrative tension slipped too easily into a sort of mash-up of the lesser parts of Buffy, Scooby Doo and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
As no-one at Netflix seems to have yet realised, dramatic, suspenseful stories involving teenagers rarely ever need the unconvincing and dull high school locker/corridor cliches so often employed to socially benchmark their leading characters. The audience-relatable outcomes are consistently poor and most likely you invert the sympathies of the viewer against your otherwise stoic heroes.
Also, another piece of dramatic shorthand used here - that should have been excised at script review - is the post-climactic family-gathers-for-breakfast-next-day scene. When your characters are hollow ciphers, lacking in drive and subtlety, the mundane chit chat of 'normality' only highlights the abundance of flimsy dialogue, clunky interplay and poor execution of both the set piece stunts and the expositional interludes elsewhere.
The flashbacks to previous periods seemed arrhythmic and often necessitated whole episodes of wool-gathering explainers to bring back a sense of coherence and volition. It felt like one of those MasterChef challenges where a 2nd competitor has to guess what their predecessor was trying to cook and aims to improve upon it before handing over to another competitor who tears their hair out before a final slapdash completion.
What should have been a sharp, snappy, solid bouncing ball of dynamic magic-realism and multi-foiled mystery was exposed as a weak, sagging helium balloon of humdrum novelty - albeit with a shiny, prepossessing surface.