How about we kick this one off with a 1955 film about telekinesis, deriving “from the ancient Greek for far-off motion”? Our narrator (Kate Siegel, this episode of Carrie’s director) steps in to chronologically run down the stories of five women across two centuries who gained attention for their psychic abilities. France’s Angélique Cottin, Italy’s Eusapia Palladino, Poland’s Stanisława Janina Tomczyk, Germany’s Annemarie Schaberl, Soviet Russia’s Nina Kulagina — all accused of fraud and/or occultism, “often by a man,” and ultimately “ridiculed, disgraced, or — sometimes — far worse.”

Carrie is actively, worriedly investigating this stuff in the school library, specifically witch trials and the murder and torture of magical women. (Also visible: the article about the mom who lifted the car in the last episode.) Emaline pops up again to ask if Carrie believes any of it’s real. “Well, the consequences were certainly real,” Carrie points out.

Chris’s Carrie Red account on Instagram is slowly attracting follow requests — it’s on private for now. At Sue’s prodding, Chris admits to Carrie that she was “a total monster bitch” in the locker room and says she’s truly sorry. As alleged penance, she invites Carrie to a party in “an empty McMansion” that night, a “rite of passage.” Chris writes the address and a heart on the phoneless Carrie’s palm.

Margaret unboxes some tiny security cameras and seeks her late husband’s opinion. “You always think I overreact,” she eerily tells the empty chair draped with his shirt. “No, you’re right. You’re right.” The funeral home is struggling to get her to pick up Ralph’s ashes, noting they’ll soon be “respectfully disposed of.”

Mr. Morton confers with Chris about the unlikelihood of getting financial aid to attend Duke this late in the game. He recommends starting at community college, which she’s predictably disgusted by. It’s an even lower blow than her dad saying she’ll need to go to a state school. (If this version of Chamberlain is in Maine, I can personally attest the University of Maine is great!) With characteristic tenderness, Morton tells Chris “who you are at this school, who your family is to this town, none of that means anything the second you cross that county line.” He tells her to start appraising “who you’re going to be.” Her entitlement’s taking her down the wrong path.

Sue’s in a much better place, riding around with Tommy while he delivers food. (His father’s unwell and Tommy’s picking up the slack.) She gets him to ditch his work for the evening by telling him she wants to take things to the next level at the house party. 

Carrie gets ready for the shindig, using her sewing machine to modify the shirt she got from the lost and found. Margaret’s working a night shift, bumped from cashier to custodian, where she’ll contend with piss, shit, crackpipes, and condoms in the S-Mart bathrooms. Carrie gets a ride from Stella, the neighbor who’s stoked to see the little pilgrim child survived to become a partygoing teenager. Carrie apologizes the moment she’s through the door, for…needing someone to move six inches so she can get in. Tommy greets her with a beaming smile and a fist bump, says she looks great, and offers to get her a brewski. Chris steals her for a tour and a selfie. “The goal’s to get fucked-up, but not so fucked-up you do anything stupid,” Chris advises. She raises a toast to Carrie, gallingly says she’s “under my protection tonight, so none of y’all be dicks,” then partners with her for beer pong. Soon enough Carrie will be dancing the night away, sipping from Solo cups, and being surreptitiously filmed by Tina. (Whose lost shirt Carrie is wearing, though Chris shuts down the line of inquiry by calling Tina “so fucking dramatic.”)

Expelled cattle prod–boy Billy Nolan shows up to sell weed and pills. Tina kinda shoots her shot and fails; Chris flashes her ID to prove she’s a legal adult and secures Billy’s attention. He calls her a prom queen (heh) and little princess. He’s a farm worker, on the other hand. “You ever hear a pig squeal when it realizes you’re gonna string it up? It’s really cute.” Naturally this leads to a makeout sesh. Tina will end up spoiling Chris’s evening by calling her maybe-soon-to-be stepsister Brooklyn a replacement, “a Chris 2.0.” Chris tries to kick Brooklyn out, saying “just you breathing near me is enough” to drive her nuts. Her power play goes south when Brooklyn reveals Chris’s mom has filed for divorce from John Fuckface Hargensen. (The fear of being replaced runs deep, as we’ll see in a vulnerable moment with Sue at the end of the night.)

A euphoric, tipsy Carrie reconnects with Emaline one-on-one outside, saying, “I used to dream about this — going to parties, having friends. It’s like I’m a character in a book.” Carrie’s coming to understand how small and lonely her life has been. “I never had anybody like me.” Emaline can relate, and says she eventually found her own people — “the other headcases and weirdos.” Carrie looks the happiest we’ve ever seen her when she says, “I think…I think I found my people tonight.”

Sue and Tommy finally go all the way. Afterward they’re painfully quiet, getting dressed on opposite ends of the bed. They’re both saying it went okay, but their faces sadly hint otherwise. Tommy’s next move is to “make sure your new bestie gets home safe,” gently waking a couched-and-blanketed Carrie. En route to the car she simply must lay back on the grass and stargaze; Tommy joins in. Mike Flanagan’s work is known as a high-quality monologue-factory, and Tommy’s musings about the stars, The Martian Chronicles, and space exploration arguably mark the first real speech of the series. “Earth men have a talent for ruining big and beautiful things,” he quotes. “Leave it alone, I say.” It’s unexpected and lovely.

On the road home, Carrie, smiling woozily and feeling the air cascade over her hand, causes the car to slowly lift a few inches off the ground. Tommy barely notices the slight bump as they return to earth. It’s a big leap from Carrie idly making a raindrop reverse its course earlier.

Schwasted in bed, Chris opens her Carrie Red IG and starts sharing party pics she’s been DMed, adding venomous captions like, “pregnant or fat?” and “sophomore slut vs desperate douchebag.” She takes the account off private, unleashing her symphony of toxicity on everyone, passing 350 followers by morning. 

A random kid shows Carrie the page at school. Her disbelief sends the lockers rattling, Emaline clocks it, and the credits roll. Here’s one of the more pointed of this show’s (many, many) needle-drops, PEGGY’s “Villains Aren’t Born (They’re Made),” which hit in 2022 with some very Carrie-ish cover art:

Odds & Ends

• This episode, “Social Studies,” is Kate Siegel’s first time directing for television and third credit behind the camera. Justina Ireland wrote it; her alternate-history zombie novel Dread Nation is a must-read.
• Mike Flanagan directed four episodes — the first two and last two — and turned to women for the rest. “I was painfully aware from the beginning that middle-aged men have been telling Carrie White’s story for far too long,” he told Collider. “And so making sure that we had strong women around, shaping the show — in every aspect, in the writers’ room and on set — was critical.”
• Ever since Summer H. Howell was cast to star — and even before that — there’s been a lot of valid conversation about how Hollywood refuses to cast a physically book-accurate Carrie, who King wrote as “a chunky girl with pimples.” (Between Sissy Spacek and Howell, we got Angela Bettis in 2002 and Chloë Grace Moretz in 2013.) In Kate Siegel’s latest of many appearances on The Kingcast, she hashed it out:

“In the writing of novels, you don’t write a physical description because you need the physicality. You write the physical description because the way that makes people feel about her. So it’s not about her actual weight, it is the way that people perceive people of a certain weight. It is not about the texture of her skin, it is the way that makes people feel about like, it’s all the downloads of what we all have about people with zits, greasy hair, and being overweight. But it is a disservice to the character as a whole to merely take the physical description. … We do that with people all the time. We say don’t judge a book by its cover. This Carrie is going to make you feel the things you need to feel about Carrie. It’s so derivative to think it has to be looking a certain way, and it also discounts what King is doing with that character, which is making her an outsider—a fully-outsider from the people who are fully enmeshed in high school. That’s the whole point. It isn’t about the zits or the weight. It’s about the fact that she doesn’t fit in. And that’s the way King decided to describe that to the reader. And Mike, as the filmmaker, takes a whole other path to get to the same point, which is: Carrie doesn’t fit, and people are rejecting her. I think it’s such a funny thing because I’m like, you guys are missing the point of why King made her look that way back in that time. Right? In a time where there was no social media, in a time where there wasn’t—where it was a very different thing to be overweight, zits, and greasy hair. It wouldn’t work, it doesn’t mean the same thing 30 years later. I think it is a derivative argument and people should think deeper. … These people are doing the exact thing that the characters in Carrie are doing to Summer, which is judging her by her appearance. They think she’s not good enough because she’s not X, Y and Z.”

Listen to the clip here. For further reading, I recommend:

Stephen King Trivia

• About the episode intros, Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly, “Something that the De Palma adaptation ignored was Carrie’s place in the larger universe, that she’s part of a sorority of very gifted women and just doesn’t know it. The book absolutely points at that, but that was something we could pick up and run with. … Carrie’s specific place among that group of women is part of the real joy that we get to discover over the course of the season.”
• Book-Sue’s take on her first sexual experiences with Tommy? “It seemed like an awful lot of rubbing for a little warmth.”
• Carrie talking to Emaline about loneliness recalls this passage from the book, a poem she penned in seventh grade:

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