This Carrie intro’s one to make the skin crawl. We’ve seen monstrous high schoolers and impressively, dauntingly powered girls. Now we get to see an ability through the lens of a horror movie. A crying little girl rouses her sleeping mother Amanda (Katee Sackhoff) with a plaintive “I can’t wake up.” The mom keeps going to offer comfort and the girl — creepier and more Hereditaryish with every glimpse — keeps vanishing. Once Amanda’s finally embraced her kiddo, the girl still appears, a double, still crying “I can’t wake up.” 

Kate Siegel narrates, “As long as there have been women with powers, there’s also been the question of how to deal with them. A question that always starts at home, with the people that are supposed to love them the most. … How can you love someone when you fear them so much? And how far would you go to protect them from themselves?”

News reports inform us weeks have passed since Chris’s expulsion and the resulting riot. John Hargensen has been — can I get a hell yeah? — jailed for embezzlement. While Chris visits him in lockup, he calls it “a political prosecution” and pathetically asks her to funnel him a “few hundred bucks” from her mom — or on her own. Anyone with a deranged narcissist parent knows that specific ick, the person who created you insisting their wellbeing is at stake unless you just run to the bank real quick.

The media also notes the Maggie Red Instagram has gone quiet. At home, we see Carrie’s got Margaret on a tight leash. Momma utters all of two words while the social worker stops by for a nice little visit. (Great to see Crystal Balint again, wish she had a bigger role.) When Carrie telekinetically grabs her jacket and backpack, Margaret’s eyes tell us everything we need to know. She’ll shortly be referring to herself as “a prisoner in my own home.”

Tommy sits with Carrie at lunch, reminding her he’s an actual ally and wants to know how she’s doing. She’s able to breathe again, finally. “The world is a lot brighter place post–Carrie Red,” he says. “Really glad you got some peace.” She’s been spending time with Sue; he wants to know if she’s alright. Tina shows up to embarrass herself with a literal song and dance presumptuously asking Tommy to prom (p-o-r-m, rather) in hopes of becoming king and queen. It’s a no from him, dawg. Let’s take a sec to give Josie Totah a bunch of flowers for her performance in this show. 

Margaret connects with Amanda — from that decade-ago-in-Iowa cold open — online, and they meet for some coffee and hushed discussion about magical daughters. Margaret reveals she’s always known about Carrie’s power deep down. Amanda’s “seen 200 cases” but still counts herself as “a tiny player in all of this.” She says these girls — and they’ve all been girls — were isolated until the internet. But now? “They seek each other out, they form groups, cults, terror cells — covens, really.” Amanda takes solace in the fact that concerned family members “started finding each other, too.” 

Amanda’s dark intentions reveal themselves when Margaret asks, “How do I fix it? How do I take care of her?” Oh, you know, just poison, a bullet in the head, something “fast enough that she can’t react.” Amanda “wasn’t fast enough” with her own daughter. Hesitation always botches the hit. “Which is why we step in,” she tells Margaret. “We take that off the table for you.” When it dawns on Margaret that she’s conspiring with an avowed child-killer — who, again, wanted but failed to kill her kid — she apologizes and goes.

Peter has unfortunately and undeservedly resigned, since “somebody’s gotta take the fall” and the riot-spurring mediation was his idea. Rita tells the lovely guidance counselor she doesn’t think she can keep teaching, or chaperone prom. Grayle wishes Morton would stay but he gets it, just like he understands Rita is probably on her way out. A good, fine, ineffective, and — to use Amanda’s word — flaccid principal. Matthew Lillard’s casting continues to pay off.

Tommy gives Carrie a ride home and the notion of them going to prom comes up naturally. This is an immense, load-bearing change from the text and every adaptation thus far, where Tommy only asks her because Sue — whom he never broke up with — wants him to. “After the year you’ve had, you should have something good,” he says, thinking out loud. Carrie glows at dinner when she shares the unbelievable news with Margaret. She’s irate, calling it a trick, “just another setup.” 

She tries getting out that timeless soundbite, “they are all gonna laugh at you,” and Carrie telekinetically silences her before she can finish. “And what if I say no?” Momma presses. Carrie makes one of her scariest moves yet, simply cracking the prayer closet open without blinking. And that’s that.

A puffy eyed Chris faces the reality that her mother has chosen Kent and Brooklyn, that Billy’s the only person she has left. Tears fall on both sides as Madison says they could “maybe” find a path forward with therapy, accountability, time. The same kind of multi-step recovery that was suggested in mediation, an unfathomable bargain for an 18-year-old nongraduating senior who’s hit rock bottom with an anvil still chained to her ankle. Mother and daughter have reached the end of the road, in front of a house she’s implicitly unwelcome in. And the tragedy of Chris Hargensen isn’t over.

Another assembly goes down in the gym, this time to determine the fate of prom. Grayle asks the parents and students to foster kindness. “Respectful and professional and civil — all these words get their due. But I don’t think enough people think about kind.” We get a montage of parents mostly speaking against prom, followed by Tina pretzeling a Maya Angelou quote into a declaration of her right to attend the dance.

Margaret takes the floor and brazenly monologues to and about Carrietta, saying stuff about parents creating monsters, “rewarding bad behavior instead of correcting it,” and her little girl being “capable of things that I could not imagine.” When she questions Tommy’s “intentions,” he speaks out: “My intentions were just to take her to a dance. That’s all.” And that’s how Sue, Tina, Chris watching from home, and everyone else discover Tommy’s taking Carrie to the dance.

Margaret gets an applause after begging for prom to get scrapped, but Carrie’s the final boss. “I don’t wanna see anybody get hurt — after the riot, that’s all I can think about. But that’s why this stupid dance is so important. It’s just…it’s a chance for us to be better.” She speaks beautifully about how the school deserves one simple night of fun, to “look past things as they are and just see how they could be.” 

She wants it to be a prom to remember. But not in, like, a fiery electric doom kinda way. And she pulls the votes. The ayes have it.

Chris melts down in Billy’s trailer “full of fucking vermin.” The girl who so feared being replaced screams that Carrie “stole my fucking life.” She can’t believe this “gross, stupid, fucking pig” has become the school’s heroine. She wants hogblood.

I’ve wondered all season if the many Billie Eilish Lite needle drops were building to an actual track by the Grammy-winning young legend. No such luck, but we do get a marquee artist here with Lana Del Rey’s “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.” A montage takes us through Carrie designing her prom look and sewing her dress while LDR croons, “When’s it gonna be my turn?” Sue’s still sprinting from her problems, Tina’s voting for herself to become prom queen while Chris and Billy use a VPN to rig the results, then head to the hogs. (Small mercy from the Carrie team: not having to see the pig get killed. ‘Precciate ya.) Rita drinks alone at the bar; Sue volunteers for prom prep; Carrie practices her dance steps. 

And then it’s the night of what King and his novel’s journalists, survivors, etc. call “the black prom.” Dashing Tommy shows up with an infectious smile. If Carrie’s nervous in this iteration, we don’t see it much. She’s gonna dance, she’s gonna teach Tommy to waltz. It’s a night of joy, an exhalation, a communal victory. The gym looks magical, all blue lights and stars. Tina hesitantly compliments Carrie, who’s pulling for Tina to become prom queen. Tina’s summoned to let Chris and Billy in the back door. Chris shows her appreciation by distractedly telling Tina she was never going to win but “this is gonna be a lot better.” Sue spots Billy’s car in the background of an Instagram photo, sees Chris has posted “Carrie White for Prom Queen,” and books it to school, the only person besides Tina who knows something wicked bad’s gonna happen.

Guess who else has shown up? Amanda, hunter of telekinetics and affiliates, a filicide-attempter so extreme she even freaked out Margaret White. She’s not the only stranger; Sue’s tease in the first episode, “it wasn’t just Carrie,” is bearing fruit. A pair of stone-faced ladies stroll in, one of whom we saw in that mansion at the end of the premiere. Grayle and Rita clock the fishy Amanda, who’s busy exchanging glares with the mystery duo. Are they there to stop Amanda, to get Carrie themselves, to protect her? Do they already know a bucket of blood’s about to rain down?

Put a pin in all that, because it’s time to crown our royal court. Yes, Chris and Billy rigged it, but this is the first Carrie where they might not have even needed to. Carrietta’s a folk hero this time. She’s not the community-wide pariah, just the biggest target among many.

Chris dares Billy, up on the catwalk with her, to dump the bucket. He doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter. 

No dare, not a single second of slo-mo, not a note of ominous score. Just blood, waterfalling down on Carrie, pounding her on the head. 

It’s over in seconds. She’s drenched. Something you’ll never be able to see when this plays out: in the book it “smelled like something sick and rotted.” This pigblood’s been sitting in a bucket at room temp for longer than is preferable when being bathed in it. 

All sound is cut except the last droplets pattering down…until the laughs start. They were always gonna laugh at you, Carrie. No matter how many creative twists and turns any past or future filmmakers take, the kids will always laugh.

The look on Carrie’s face — there are words, things like disbelief, anger, resignation, disappointment, murder, but none of them will do. Hell is about to crack open.

Carrie closes her eyes. The screen goes black. The screams and stampede-sounds erupt. The credits roll. The doom-cacophony goes on and on.

Odds & Ends

• These final two episodes are directed by Mike Flanagan. This one’s penned by sibling Jamie Flanagan and titled “Romantic Literature.”
• Katee Sackhoff and the FlanMan have worked together precisely once, way back on his second horror feature, Oculus, in 2013. Great to see Ruth Codd’s return too — she’s awesome in The Fall of the House of Usher and the underrated Midnight Club.
• That brilliant throw to all the screaming ruckus under the credits recalls Midnight Mass five years ago. In one of Flanagan’s hardest-ever hammerblows, Kate Siegel’s Erin sees something incomprehensibly awful and gives a career-defining meltdown that lasts for more than a minute over the credits. Just her shrieking, roaring, unraveling, and a portentous fire crackling underneath. I resubscribed to Netflix to clock this scream; it was worth all $759 and it did make me cry again.
• Siegel narrating about the comorbid fear and love of a superpowered daughter brings to mind her memorable Kingcast episode on Firestarter, where she expressed feeling something similar (not comparing her to nutballs-cuckoo-era Amanda!) in 2021:

“What you don’t remember is that during that time [writing his first few books], he had young kids. And so this is Stephen King dealing with the fact of parenthood, which is that you think your kids are terrifying and wonderful and dangerous, and you would protect them with every inch of your body—but they’re also completely unpredictable. And [Firestarter] is, in my opinion, the greatest metaphor for being a first time parent I have ever read. … When you have—I guess, because I’m still, I’m in it, I have two toddlers, they’re not even Charlie’s age—but when you have children, all of a sudden you have taken your heart, your actual human heart, and put it in a creature outside of your body. And it just wanders around, and it will grab knives, it will just throw itself down the stairs, it will run into traffic if you don’t stop it, it could slip and fall in the bathtub. You literally wake up in the middle of the night just to make sure it’s breathing. It is all-consuming and all-powerful; you can’t control it. And in the way that King describes Charlie’s power, and the way that this father, the way Andy has to take care of her, is a complete…to me, it’s a one-to-one. You can see Stephen King going, There is this thing in my life that could just burn everything down. Because as a parent, your biggest fear, like the day I became a parent, my fear was no longer I’m afraid of snakes or I’m afraid of the dark. My fear is that my children will die before me. That’s it. That’s the only fear. And I can’t—it could happen at any second and my entire world would be negated. My entire world would be burnt down. There would be nothing left if one of my children died. And so I completely understand looking at a child and going, ‘Well, you’re full of the capability to burn it all down. How can I protect you? How do I keep you safe from the world that is chasing you and trying to eat you and take you and change you from this little girl into this monster? How do I do this?’ And as someone who makes a living transforming human experiences into genre films, this is, to me, the perfect metaphor. Because it is using genre to express a very human and almost mundane feeling, which is that I love and I’m scared of my children.”

Stephen King Trivia Corner

• “They are sniffing around her already.” Amanda’s talking about “cults, terror cells, covens,” but previous iterations of Margaret White more sinisterly use this exact line to talk about rabid boys and men now that Carrie has started menstruating.
• Amanda warns Margaret against drowning and stabbing — the two methods she uses against Carrie in the previous three adaptations.
• Bryan Fuller — writer of 2002’s Carrie TV movie, creator of Hannibal, huge SK fan, all-star Kingcast guest — is one of the prom chaperones. Dapper guy with the glasses, you see him a few times:

• Sombra (which has its name on the hog farm) is an evil corporate entity in The Dark Tower, aligned with LaMerk Industries, which appeared in the first episode. Once you’ve finished the whole season — AND ONLY THEN — you can read me go deep about all the Tower-y ties and implications in Carrie. Giant spoilers lie that way!
• We don’t see Margaret and Carrie’s fight before prom, or Carrie’s “can we just stay in the car a second?” nervousness upon arrival. Big choices to skip, but it’s eminently clear by now that this show wouldn’t exist if the mission was to hew strictly to what came before. Those beats were already filmed in all three prior adaptations. We’re good.
• This isn’t the first time Carrie at the prom has been modernized in 2026. On the fourth episode of Widow’s Bay — Apple’s incredibly Stephen Kingy, 14-time Emmy-winning horror-comedy — Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia Moyer has a real Carrietta moment. “When I read the script, I was like, ‘OK, so there’s Carrie in there, totally,’” O’Flynn told Decider’s Nicole Gallucci.

“And I remember that feeling of watching Carrie, and the pain of that, and the pig’s blood, and the social anxiety. And when I read the reveal of [Patricia’s] tiara, I thought it was the funniest thing. I was crying laughing because I didn’t see it coming. And then watching it back it’s sort of heartbreaking in a way.” (O’Flynn nabbed the Best Supporting Actress Emmy.)

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