The Mist just premiered on the Spike channel, and if the June 22nd pilot episode is anything to go on, we are in for a long, painfully dull, self-righteous, and gory season. After all, what else can we expect from a television show based on a story by Stephen King?
Some of King's works have not been particularly kind to religious people. (Though others, such as The Stand, and Desperation have portrayed religion positively.) So this approach doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is how they somehow manage to take works by King and make them even more left-leaning to the point of parody. It’s almost astonishing.
To start off, The Mist is based off a 1980 novella about a group of small-town citizens trapped in a grocery store when a mysterious mist engulfs the area. Anyone outside the store is attacked and viciously killed by otherworldly monsters, but tension begins to bubble in the store as paranoia takes over the crowds. To fill a less than 200-page story into a 10-season episode, the plot has been expanded to include a variety of characters throughout the town.
In just this first episode alone, we have Eve Copeland (Alyssa Sutherland) being fired from a high school for teaching a sex-ed class with condoms, black soldier Bryan Hunt (Okezie Morro) being manhandled and thrown in jail by white police officers, a pansexual student who isn’t attracted to “gender” but “personality” and is shunned by his dad for wearing makeup, and an entire town that doesn’t believe a girl’s been raped since, after all, the accused is a high school quarterback who also happens to be the police chief’s son.
I’m sorry, but a person can only handle so many liberal clichés before having to call them out on it. It’s only the pilot, and this show is beginning to sound like the writers took whatever headline showed up on Salon and wrote a character around it. Not even using the article, just the headline, because reading any more of it would have readers realize what’s wrong with every blanket scenario I just referenced. Unfortunately, even in this extended pilot, there’s no room for explanation except small-town people don’t understand sex (except they do), white officers ALWAYS mistreat suspicious black people (except they don’t), and people NEVER believe a rape victim even when there is evidence (do I even have to say it?). The entire situation could just be replaced with the blanket statement “small towns are racist, sexist, homophobic, backwards and just plain awful” and that would have saved us 50+ minutes before the mist actually comes to Bridgeville.
And that’s nothing compared to the graphic material the series offers from its horror element. Within the first few minutes, we see the matted corpse and organs of a dog which seems child’s play compared to the woman whose jaw is removed. Or the man who has his eye plucked out. Since this episode gave less than ten minutes of the mist engulfing the town, I’m just going to brace myself next week.
Sadly, it’s not just the gore I have to prepare for anymore. It’s the agenda. Showrunner Christian Torpe has even gone on at length describing the show’s “timely” quality saying, “[W]e look around at what’s going on in the world, and everyone is constantly looking for someone to blame, or someone to lead them to the promised land. They find people to hate, either because of their gender or race or faith. Those are elements we tap into — how fear drives things like misogyny and homophobia.”
Yes, and I’m sure this lengthy liberal lecture of a horror show peppered with such mainstream-approved caricatures is going to change the hearts and minds of millions. Consider me not captivated.
