Greetings, Constant Readers, Flanafans, people who use Amazon Prime to buy paper towels and therefore have access to the new Carrie show. Today we begin our long and winding road to the Ewen High School senior prom.

The fourth take on Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel comes from writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan and his team—the reigning champions of King adaptations, also the purveyors of five excellent Netflix miniseries including The Haunting of Hill House. We start at the end, with 911 calls and footage of fiery destruction. “All downtown is on fucking fire,”a shellshocked woman tells the dispatcher. “The goddamn street caved in, there’s dead bodies on the street!”

We cut to an interview setup, seemingly for a documentary or investigation, where a tired Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) insists nobody actually understands what led to “200 deaths, the destruction of the entire town.” An off-camera interviewer who sounds suspiciously like Kate Siegel (Flanagan’s many-time collaborator and spouse) asks what the missing context is. “We were kids,” Sue says, “just trying to do our best.” (Extremely book-accurate dialogue.) Other survivors will soon tell the camera Carrie was a victim, a monster, a bully, “genuinely kind,” and a “troublemaker” who “had her own army by the end.” 

We jump back once more, title card reading Chamberlain, USA, “before the fires.” Is this Maine, where local legend King set his novel? With no snow on the ground in winter? Unlikely. But creative choices are the name of the game here. Case in point: we see Ralph White, father of Carrietta, who predeceased his daughter in the book — which was set in the late ’70s, whereas we’re now in the 2020s. Ralph (Tahmoh Penikett) listens to a radio conspiracist on his way to work. “It turns out the meek don’t inherit the earth, the meek are grist for the mill,” goes the spiel (voiced by Flanagan). “Nowhere is safe — not the office, not your school, not your church, not even your phone.”

And this day’s as unsafe as possible for old Ralph, who perishes under several pallets of unsteady cinderblocks. One coworker, who knew him only as an unknowable man, calls Ralph “a bit of a doomsday prepper; he’d be pissed it was gravity that got him, not the government.” Police enter the home of who they presume to be a loner, where they find bubble-wrapped windows and a closet with a modest cross on the door. Hunched in the darkness inside, presumably afraid the deep state et al. have come for them, are Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) and Carrie White (Summer H. Howell). This look of joy hits Carrie’s face at the mere fact someone from the human world is asking her name and calling her sweetheart. Everything’s about to change in the life of this teenager.

A social worker (Crystal Balint) recalls that Carrie was “born in the upstairs bedroom and she essentially never left that house.” There was no birth certificate, nor any phones, TV, or internet for anyone except Ralph. They were “a cult of three.” (Single-family cults are a real thing.) A judge declares Margaret has to get a job (she’ll earn $14 an hour and deem her manager “a child”) and send Carrie to school. Margaret says they’ll have to endure one or two semesters, tops, before she can demonstrate some savings, appeal the ruling, and withdraw Carrie from the world again.

We’re introduced to Christine Hargensen (Alison Thornton), who, like Sue, is checking her still-pending status as a Duke University applicant. Chris’s house is sumptuous and her lawyer dad (Michael Trucco) is a smarmy dickhole, bitter that his wife’s moved in with another man, channeling that poison toward his daughter with barbs like, “You can eat cereal for one day, for fuck’s sake, Christine.” Soon we’ll see her and Sue accepted to Duke, but John Hargensen will bear bad news: he’s in a financial pickle. He dissuaded Chris from filing for student loans and barks that she “can handle one fucking semester at a state school.”

Before joining the ranks of Ewen High, Carrie surreptitiously visits a birdhouse in her yard and finds a copy of The Catcher in the Rye awaiting her with a note calling it required reading. At dropoff, Margaret tells Carrie to “have pity” on her new peers and teachers, as “most of them aren’t awake.” Carrie’s first steps take her through a beeping metal detector, yielding a perplexing request from a security guard to “show me what’s on your chest.” (A tiny cross, of course.) Chris sees the open wound that is Carrie’s naivete and immediately pours salt on it. Walking the halls in her homemade dress and her dad’s camo backpack, the neophyte takes in kids with crop tops and piercings and phones, plus two girls making out. Guidance counselor Peter Morton (Tim Bagley) cheerfully points her toward the homeroom of Rita Desjardin (Amber Midthunder), where Sue, Chris, and Tina Blake (Josie Totah) will regard her as an alien.

The ensuing montage of Carrie learning to exist among the “fascinating” people of Earth is achingly sweet: she’s the only kid in science wearing goggles, marveling at billowing liquid nitrogen; she’s on a computer for the first time, typing, “carrie white is the BEST!!!!!!!!! and out of the house!! i love school. so much. COMPUTERS ARE THE COOLEST.” (For those counting needle drops, that’s five in under 15 minutes, leaning toward breathy pop songs from the likes of Wolf Alice, Haute & Freddy, and Katie Garfield.)

Finding herself auditing a conversation about which boys are the hottest, Carrie confidently shares a quote with the popular girls: “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?” The way it lands — total befuddlement — is painful. The book is J.M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird, which features the first appearance of Peter Pan. “You guys…ever read that one?” she says, asking what books they like. I’ve watched this scene many times and am weirdly…proud of Carrie? To just bust out a century-old line like it’s from a movie everyone knows and loves. In the lead-up to the show, much was made about how this is a very different Carrietta than any we’ve seen before — a girl who’s open, eager, undamaged by the outside world. It’s already loud and clear.

Then it’s time for one of the most depressing aspects of American life: a school shooting drill. Sue and her boyfriend Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette) try to fill Carrie in while Chris takes pleasure in her confusion, worsening it, then filming her panic. When the tactical-geared faux shooter bursts in with an assault rifle, Carrie dives onto Sue, the lights and desks shudder, and a television plummets off its wall-mount onto the “shooter’s” foot. Mr. Peist (Rahul Kohli) is positive there was an earthquake, and Principal Henry Grayle (Matthew Lillard) gets acquainted with just how sheltered Carrie has been.

“So people know? About the tragedies?” a crushed Carrie asks when she’s caught up to speed on our country’s mass shooting scourge. “How many people know about them?” Grayle is mystified, honest, and gentle. “Well…yeah, Carrie, everyone knows. Well, I mean, I suppose I should say, I thought everyone knew until I met you.” Carrie mumbles another century-old quote, “Tomorrow is a day with no mistakes…yet.” Grayle recognizes the Anne of Green Gables line and she’s mildly consoled that “finally someone got one.” But mostly she’s crestfallen at her wrong assumption that “everybody would know the books.” 

She walks home and a narrator tells us how the prom fire spread from the school to Ewen Avenue, giving us great match-cuts from Carrie’s first day to the fateful night. “A shower of objects — debris, maybe even some rocks and boulders — destroyed just about every structure on the street,” says the voice. Like the off-camera interviewer, it sounds like Kate Siegel. The destruction cut “a clear path from the gymnasium to Carrie White’s house.”

On the documentary set, the Whites’ neighbor Stella remembers meeting Carrie as a little girl looking like she stepped straight out of the 1800s and through the hedges. Mini-Carrietta was unaware books beside the Bible existed. “It’s just a book that isn’t a Bible,” Stella sweetly explained. “Which is most books. All books, really, except the Bible.” Carrie’s awkwardness was intense, but so was her happiness at getting to interact with someone besides her parents. An irate Margaret caught Carrie, coerced her to call the alarmed Stella a whore, and dragged her, screaming, to spend an hour in the prayer closet. And here, from the first page of the novel, came the rain of stones. (This phenomenon happens in The Haunting of Hill House, a favorite of Stephen King’s and, obviously, Mike Flanagan’s.) Dozens of rocks, then hundreds, pummeled the Whites’ roof and property. Stella’s house was unscathed and the news never reported it. Stella started leaving books for Carrie in the birdhouse.

Presently, Margaret returns from her day “in a nylon vest serving morons.” She’s stunned about the shooting drill and bereft to inform Carrie how “our country has fallen so far from God,” snatched away good Christians’ weapons, Bibles, and prayers, and left them “defenseless — mind, body, and spirit.” The agenda of the powers that be is to “get you cowering, get you used to the idea that you’re powerless.” Powerlessness may not be an issue for Carrie in the near future.

The Whites hit the closet to “pray for America.” Carrie sews new clothes for her second day of school, turning her bedsheets into a cool fit. Her nightmares show her not only the shooting drill but the lethal prom, then the shadowy figure of her father standing over her bed. Her fear cracks the glass in her window and causes the dining room light fixture to sway, which Margaret silently clocks. The next morning, she crashes the principal’s office to fume about the shooting drill. She says she and a “legion” of concerned parents “will rain down on you like God’s wrath if you mistreat our babies.”

While Carrie struggles to play volleyball, Chris tells her to “get your shit together, fuckwit,” and painfully rails a spike straight into Carrie’s back. (Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie opens with volleyball.) This segues into the locker room, where it’s been decades since kids took showers after gym. Tina Blake’s eyes are a little too gleeful when she notices Carrie’s gotten her period while wearing the white pants she made. 

“Why am I bleeding? What’s going on? What do I do?” she stammers. Chris drags her to the shower, where Carrie repeatedly slips and rejects Sue’s assurance that she’s alright. “I’m dying, how is this okay?!” Chris: “Fuck, plug it up before we drown in it. … Everyone pitch in — tampons, pads, got an extra bucket?” (Chekhov’s bucket-mention.) 

The inciting incident from King’s novel arrives: the infamous “plug it up” chant, now being recorded by at least half a dozen phones. Sue seems sympathetic but does absolutely nothing to stop the attack. Miss Desjardin shows up, Carrie gives a shriek you could definitely classify as blood-curdling, and the lights flicker and burst. 

Cut to a massive adaptive change: some young women kicking back in a fancy mansion, where one has sensed Carrie’s anguish from afar and envisioned the blood on her own hands. This mystery figure (played by Delainey Hayles) walks through the glitzy halls to breathlessly tell a woman at a desk, “I just got hit hard, I mean hard. It was like a starburst. I can’t say for sure it’s the same girl from yesterday, this was a little different, but I think it is. And whoever she is: wow.” The woman — whose face we don’t see, but who once again sounds like Kate Siegel — asks only, “Where?”

Sue plants the final hook for the prom mayhem, telling the interviewer there were strange people there she’d never seen before. “Nobody is asking the right questions, because it wasn’t just Carrie.”

Odds & Ends

• The premiere and second episode are directed by Mike Flanagan, who also wrote this one and helmed the final two. The titles follow a high school academic schedule, meaning our entry point is, yes, “First Period.”
• Ralph White’s death — was something weird afoot there? Did normal construction rumblings send those blocks tipping over, or something more…telekinetic? In the book, he died “when a steel girder fell out of a carrying sling on a housing project job.”
• Flanagan teased voice cameos from past collaborators, and IMDb seems to indicate the opening 911 calls feature Carla Gugino, David Dastmalchian, Sauriyan Sapkota, Matt Biedl, and Annalise Basso.
• Sue’s “we were kids” lines aren’t just true to the book, they’re the ones that “mattered the most” to Flanagan. He told CBR, “It was so important that he had her say it three times. … And that, to me, kind of gave it an engine and a real heart, and made it something new.”

Stephen King Trivia Corner

• Sue’s “200 deaths” line here is less than half the book’s final toll: 440 deceased, 18 missing.
• Framing this series as “you don’t really understand Carrie” already shows a deep understanding of the book, where she’s treated less like a human and more of a scientific anomaly to be studied and debated.
• Flanagan’s got a troupe of actors (and behind-the-scenes creatives) he works with over and over. Last year’s The Life of Chuck — the Flan Man’s third King adaptation — featured Carrie’s Rahul Kohli and Matthew Lillard in small roles. Samantha Sloyan walked the halls of another school as an amiable gym teacher/dance coach. Her casting as Margaret White is perfect after a career-defining role as a downright evil Christian in Flanagan’s Midnight Mass — which is lovingly indebted to ‘Salem’s Lot and Storm of the Century.
• Though school shooting drills were decades away in 1974, Book-Carrie does recall air-raid drills where “you were supposed to crawl under your desk and put your hands over your head and wait, either for the all-clear or for enemy missiles to blow you to powder.” In 2000’s On Writing, King called Carrie a “female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,” the Columbine shooters.
• Flanagan is attempting to adapt King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower. He’s referenced the lore multiple times in each of his SK projects. Carrie’s first Tower wink comes right away, with the construction site being headed by LaMerk Industries, one of the saga’s evil corporations. Minutes later, we meet Sue wearing a No. 19 jersey, the most magical of King numbers. (And specifically used in jersey form in Flanagan’s Sleep.) In the novel, she lives at 19 Back Chamberlain Road. Here, Tommy’s letterman jacket is also No. 19.
• Sue now has a little sister named Tabby, the nickname of King’s beloved wife of 55 years. Tabitha famously saved the career-kickstarting Carrie by fishing Stephen’s crumpled first pages out of the trash and imploring him to stick with it. As he wrote in 2000:

Zach Dionne writes Decider’s Streamin’ King column and makes King things on Patreon.