The Premise
A woman wakes up with a headache in what appears to be a strange house. She has no recollection of how she got here. The symbol below is shown on all the TV screens she encounters.
Things take a turn for the worse when she ventures outside and finds herself in the center of some kind of bizarre hunt. There's a nasty twist at the end when this turns out to be some kind of fucked up reality show.
The Characters
Lenora Crichlow is Victoria Skillane, and boy does she do some fine work here. Her pain, fear and distress are palpable at every turn, and even when I learned what she's done to deserve this cruel and unusual punishment, I didn't stop feeling sympathy.Tuppence Middleton plays Jem, the ally Victoria encounters during the hunt, who turns out to be messing with her. Middleton didn't do such a great job, really. There was just something really off about how she acted that made me suspect her right from the get-go. Or maybe that's just some really exceptional acting. I can't quite decide.
Michael Smiley is the showrunner Baxter and one of the hunters. He's somehow even more menacing and scary when he's trying to be affable to the audience, than when he's acting like a gun-toting maniac. The accent is pretty fun to listen to, though.
Ian Bonar as Damian, who gets "killed" early. Later on when we see him again, he's pretty matter-of-fact about the job he's doing.
Elisabeth Hopper and Nick Bartlett as the other hunters. They seem to be having a lot of fun in their roles, and really, who wouldn't?
Imani Jackson as Jemima Sykes, the little black girl who was murdered. She's only seen in footage, and she is adorable! Which has the effect of making the crime seem worse, I suppose.
The Mood
The paranoia has been ratcheted up to unreal levels during this entire episode. When Victoria is being hunted by masked killers, there's shades of The Purge coupled with the ridiculous sight of people recording all this footage on their cellphones. It's unknown who is actually on Victoria's side, until the final moment where it's revealed that nobody is.In fact, due to some crime she committed which, in turn due to brainwashing, she cannot recall, she's pretty much the center of a lot of hate at fever pitch.
After that, the scenes are more of the horror of being universally detested - there's no more mystery here.
What I liked
The setup is so chilling, OMG. These shots of victims being strung up on trees is so macabre.
It's great that little Jemima had a white mother and black father. That's pretty woke and inclusive without being too in-your-face about it.
Ouch. These guys have been repeating the scenario for how many days in a row now?! Victoria must totally stink after that many days of sweating with no time to take a bath!
Making this reality game show about Jemima's white teddy bear is just a devilishly neat touch.
The scenes that come on during the credits, showing everything that went on backstage, really nailed it for me.
What I didn't
That White Bear symbol looks like a Tetris block and really serves no purpose whatsoever. Ostensibly it was the same tattoo on Victoria's boyfriend's skin and used as the symbol for this hunt, but I wonder if the show would have been better without it.It just seems unrealistic that in a three-on-one scenario, with the first hunter tangled up with Damian and Jem having a fire extinguisher with her and Victoria pretty much free to do anything, that they would just leave them there and run. Sure, it was an act, but that's what killed any realism for me at that point.
Conclusion
This episode does so much with a small main cast and an hour's running time. Like the last episode, there's almost zero humor in this one, but fuck it, it doesn't need any. The story spun around this extremely nasty punishment is masterfully done. It also manages to poke fun at the Bystander Syndrome, that phenomenon where people tend to just take cellphone footage of people in trouble, without even trying to help.But the true horror is that the tragedy is being milked for profit. White Bear Monument Park is set up to ostensibly let the public take part in Victoria's punishment, but ultimately this feels like an excuse to cash in on little Jemima's grisly fate. What happens to Victoria, having to relive the terror of being hunted day after day, to finally be confronted by her crimes which she can no longer remember, is nothing short of horrific. Especially since her memory has been repeatedly erased and she's pretty much a clean slate with none of the murderous personality that led her to commit those crimes in the first place. The fact that Baxter and the audience are so self-righteous about it, really underlines the nastiness of Victoria's fate regardless of how horrible her original crime was. Trial by Social Media, anyone?
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