Review: "Wednesday" Season 1; It's Woetime - Jared Goring: Author, Etcetera

Hello, all. You may have enjoyed my live-posting on Bluesky of watching the first season of Wednesday (and if not and you want to, scroll down to just the top of the spoiler section below to see all the threads linked there) – or, you may have been screaming at me via your phone screen.

Regardless, I’m here for more of the same!

To be clear? None of this should be read as if I am shouting angrily – it should, at most, be read in a tone of exasperation, vexation, annoyance; gripping at the hair and groaning perhaps, but certainly not throwing things and yelling.

This will be a spoiler-free review, up front, with later spoiler-filled deep dives. These will be clearly warned about in advance. This will be a review with some humour! A degree of rambling perhaps, at times, and some sarcasm. I’d apologize for it but I respect you too much to lie to you.

I’m doing this to dive into analysis: to pull apart what worked, and what didn’t, so that we can all collectively work toward things that work a little more. Admittedly, most of that work is done in the latter, spoiler-y half, but I always want to start with some spoiler-free if I can!

Absolutely No Spoilers Short Review:

Netflix “Wednesday”, Season One: It’s fine. Gets some things very right. Gets more things than that very wrong.

Spoiler-free Review:

I’m going to start by saying that I’m a huge fan of the Addams Family, and if you are too? You might like this thing I wrote! Will you like Wednesday? Mm… depends.

First and foremost to get it out of the way: this is a review of the Netflix show “Wednesday”, available on Netflix (surprise, surprise), that the title sequence assures us Tim Burton had something to do with. What, precisely? I don’t know, I was never on set. He may or may not have been.

To make things clear up front: I liked Wednesday well enough. It was fine. Fine to good, maybe, with aspects which were great. One or two things were genuinely fantastic, even! Overall, though, I can’t say that it quite lived up to the hype for me – but, let’s go through it from the beginning…

The beginning which, I will say, was in my opinion nearly perfect.

I don’t consider anything within the first five minutes of a show beginning to be spoilers, but I still won’t say what happens beyond that the first scenes are shot in a school and they got me very excited for the rest. Big fan of the Addams Family, as I’d said!

Boy, do I wish they’d been in this show…

The characters of the Addams Family – or at least, people who share their names – are, or at least some of them, but… the Addams Family, they’re not. Not really, but that’s only Wednesday’s first disappointment of many.

Admittedly, nowhere on the show does this claim to be anything to do with the Addams Family, and perhaps that’s telling – an on-the-nose self-disclosure which proves that the lack of words is perhaps much more tellingly accurate than the inclusion of Tim Burton’s mere name as if that’s meant to impress me.

It doesn’t. Even if he had been involved, I wouldn’t be impressed – and maybe he was, but if so it only proves the common refrain that what most people love about “Tim Burton” movies has shockingly little to do with the man whose name is associated with them. I digress, though; this isn’t a place to rag on Tim.

…it’s a place to rag on Wednesday.

A little.

…but also Tim a little too.

The first scenes had me very very hopeful, both in the characterizations of Wednesday and Pugsley, as well as the overall setup and world. Almost immediately, we depart all of that, leaving it behind for unfamiliar territory.

Well. Not quite.

Unfamiliar as anything to do with the Addams Family, but not unfamiliar, because if you’ve seen, read, or heard about probably anything that was written, shot, or in any way aimed at anyone between about ten and twenty years of age in the past twenty or so years? You’ll feel very at home in this production.

Specifics – and thus, spoilers – will wait until later, of course, but suffice to say that the amount of YA set dressing which has been stuffed into this production is substantial. Substantial and bewildering, not just in the sense that some of it makes no sense but also in the fact that its mere inclusion doesn’t.

Again, this is not an Addams Family story.

Maybe – perhaps, in a sense – we could consider this a prequel to the Addams Family we know and love, which at one point I compared to Wolverine: Origins. Is it a good Wolverine movie? Ehh… maybe. Is it a good movie? It’s pretty fun, yeah. Is it a good X-Men movie? Oh hell no.

In a similar way, Wednesday is Addams Family adjacent, with their usual support of one another’s strangeness instead replaced with cold shoulders and icy countenances, upsetting arm-twisting and refusal to listen at times; these people do not feel familiar to me, and this is a sadness, because the core of Addams Family to me has always been that juxtaposition.

The colour palette is cold, but they aren’t. They’re odd, they’re strange (or kooky as one might say) but they love each other, and love each other so wholly and unconditionally and vehemently that they are able to make up for any shortcomings of the world to do so appropriately.

They are strange. Their world isn’t.

In Wednesday? This is not the case. The world is strange – yet, the show continues to insist to us that Wednesday is an oddity, an outcast, ostracized, or seems like it’s trying to without actually saying anything so much as gesturing vaguely in that direction as it marches us through yet one more cadre of “types of people with wanly witty-ish names that we categorize everyone into”: an event that occurs no fewer than three times, and honestly maybe more. It’s possible I’ve suppressed some.

It’s noteworthy that I couldn’t remember nearly anyone’s name until the final I think two episodes, and I still sit here at maybe 75% names recalled, and that’s because the show doesn’t care that much. It has too much in it – how can we spend time sorting out one broody teenager boy with an X in his name from the other broody teenager boy with an X in his name (they’re both skinny, but one wears a toque. No, not a beanie, I’m Canadian.) when we have more important things to do, like give cutesy group nicknames to the cliques?

Herein I state: I think some things that could be called spoilers here would spoil nothing. However, out of an abundance of caution and personal ethic, I refrain; they will come.

Wednesday gets several things right.

It gets some things excellently right, and I will say that Ortega is consistently one of those things – she deserves every bit of praise and laud that has been levelled at her for this, and yes she clearly stands on the shoulders of giants, taking tips from those Wednesdays who have come before her, but that’s okay. That’s good, in fact, and she is clear to make it homage rather than aping.

It is difficult to say what was her, and what was script, but there are aspects which I feel were unlikely to have ever been on page. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say that things that feel cludgy or awkward were primarily things given her to do with the best that she could, but honestly a lot of the actors do quite well here. Especially a lot of the tertiary cast, in my opinion: the mayor’s son, a small but recurring role, doesn’t have a lot of screen time to develop much but the actor does a solid job in the role.

Mister Barista Boy (c’mon that can’t possibly count as a spoiler) does a very good job even if some of the character aspects he’s portraying aren’t the most dynamic – I’m reminded a little of someone lampooning Keanu Reeves for his portrayal of Neo, as if Neo wasn’t intended to be fairly low-affect, and as if Reeves’ prior portrayal in, for instance, Bill and Ted, didn’t prove that he was more than capable of doing something other than stoically staring off-screen. (If it’s not clear, I’m a fan of both Reeves generally and also of the Matrix movies – but I digress).

Thing? Thing was nearly perfect. Rather, Thing was probably perfect entirely, with only one scene around Thing that was… again, avoiding spoilers, I’ll say – this show gets caught sometimes between showing how the sausage is made, and telling you to sit back and enjoy the ride. I made several references to “Midichlorianning” in my Bluesky posts and I stand by them, but that clashes against the occasional “rule of cool” stuff.

It’s probably impossible to clarify what exactly I mean without spoilers, but it’s probably the show’s biggest issue: half the time, it wants to lay out the plot like a puzzle for you to solve, with clues intricately splayed (or at least, it hopes). The other half, it just wants to make a joke or show a thing, and doesn’t care if that lines up with the clues and rules and everything else.

They’ve gone and invented a new world for this, and I am unconvinced that it is a world which does or even could make sense, because it’s not consistent. It’s certainly inconsistent with what we would think of the world – but, more on that will need to wait for spoilers…

The literal set dressing is… fine. Sometimes it’s pretty good, but in it I start to see slight issues, because… does anybody else feel like this was shot on the sets of “Pushing Daisies”, which have been left to sit unattended for the years since that show’s closure? Everything about the set dressing or costuming I liked – the kinds of things Ol’ Timmy Boy’s supposed to be so great at or at least so strong about, whether you love or hate the TB Aesthetic… it’s just not really here?

The scenes, the sets, the wardrobe, the camera work; they’re not what’s expected from a Tim Burton piece, and that’s okay, but it is a little confusing. If he’s not doing those things and trying to make everything look like his team did in Edward Scissorhands or Nightmare Before Christmas, then what was he doing the whole time?

Am I still a little miffed about the Alice in Wonderland movie? Yeah, maybe, but at least it looked like it had been dipped in a vat of Industrial-strength Tim Burton. This just seems like it keeps trying to kind of be something he made, whilst also being… so many other things.

So much of Wednesday feels like that, and perhaps that’s its greatest failing: so much of it feels not just taken from somewhere else, but photocopied and perhaps scribbled overtop of. When it comes to much of the set dressing, the world building, the costuming, the writing – so much of it feels like somebody saw Wicked, somebody saw Pushing Daisies, somebody read Divergent, somebody read Percy Jackson, somebody saw Animal House, and they all sat down in a room with a cardboard cutout of Tim Burton and made a show.

There are moments.

There are fantastic moments which I can’t go into depth on without spoilers, but some of the cinematography is excellent. Some of it is stellar and there is one scene in particular which is bringing up goosebumps just at me remembering it. Two, actually: one single shot, and one longer scene, and there are several that are really quite good.

That’s almost part of the issue, though… Ortega is great because she’s always great. Thing is great because Thing is always great.

The cinematography? It’s… fine overall. It has as many bad moments as good ones, and one that was straight-up embarrassingly sloppy and I know (or at least strongly suspect I know) why but that doesn’t make it okay that it made it into the production, nor does it make up for the incredible shots, and if anything the incredible shots only underline how much the rest of it should have stood up to that bar.

This is a show that had no reason to get stuff wrong, and for some reason stood on its own head to do so anyways in several ways. Things they didn’t need to do, like inventing this world – choosing names for things as hollow references that relate to nothing to do with what they’re referring to (more on that in the spoily bit); it isn’t good, annd more than that, it’s unnecessary. They teed up and had a clear line to the hole, but turned and picked up their ball to throw it onto the freeway nearby instead.

There are logical issues throughout, things that simply do not make sense or would not work that way, and these are overlaid on not knowing what would work because some things are simply inadequately explained. If a character has a gun, we know what that means; if a character picks up a smonglorf, we must be told what that means or else it holds no import. Wednesday has characters pick up what we think are guns, and use them to water the flowers; then it has characters pick up a smonglorf and bulldoze a wall.

These are not spoilers, they’re demonstrative examples, to be clear.

Wednesday is a show that often underlines its own inadequacies, in pretty much every way except for the titular character: moments of family closeness only drive home the oddity of their distance at times, incredible shots only steepen the confusion of bad ones, little detail pin-drops get lost amidst a whirling maelstrom of “whatever, rule of cool” when they really should be shining. It’s a show I want to like more than I can really say I do. More than it really deserves.

This is a show that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, what it was meant to be. An appeal to the outsiders of society? A family-friendly entertainment product? A grimdark delve into peculiarity? A referential metacollage?

It strives to be all of these, and thus fails at all, and it thinks it’s so damn clever while it’s doing it, too, from things like every episode riffing off of the word “woe” (which yes, I have done in this review, and already know what I’ll title the reviews for seasons two and three as well, similarly: “One for the Money, Two for the Woe,” and “The Woe Must Go On”) on to some of the worst “riddles” I have seen committed to record, and it has the guts to then point at it and say “Look! Look at this riddle! Ahh so riddly, is it not?”

No, as it happens. It is not.

The show thinks it’s so clever, but like anyone who’s ever been in a class or an extended conversation with someone who thinks they’re that clever but isn’t, it just becomes more and more noticeable as time goes on. It’s not that it’s entirely un-clever, just that it’s less than it thinks it is.

It’s not a bad show. It’s definitely not an awful show, but it was in some ways an awful disappointment, because it should have been an excellent show.

It had the capacity, and, with a clear vision that was informed by creatives rather than checkboxing executives, it could’ve been – and again, I don’t know the creative process here. I don’t know how much influence Netflix had, and how much Tim had, but also don’t I? Don’t we? Can’t we look at this and see quite clearly why they did so many of these things?

Can’t we see the board room meeting saying “we need something for the teens. But also the parents – and the kids too! Make it sassy and dramatic. But colourful, and silly. But broody. And tense! Get some of that Stranger Things tension in there. And big reveals! But keep it light. Cut to a joke every now and then for God’s sake. But serious. Relevant! But not preachy. Make sure we use all the words those kids use on Twitblr or whatever my grandkids call it. Pinstagram? Yeah, that’s it.”?

Wednesday is entertaining enough. It’s good enough – watch it, and focus when it catches your attention, and when it doesn’t? It doesn’t really matter if you pay that much attention. Honestly it doesn’t matter if you pay that much attention anywhere, because the show doesn’t pay that much attention to itself.

Don’t expect too much out of it, and it’s probably even a pretty good show!

My genuine, heartfelt suggestion? Watch Wednesday if anything about it sounds or looks interesting to you, absolutely do go and watch it – and then, after you have? Go watch Pushing Daisies.

Alright, after this things get probably a lot more sarcastic, and they most certainly get spoilery.

SPOILERS! AVAST! THAR THEY BLOW, BELOW!

After the break below, I will dive into specifics and really rip things apart – for good and for ill. Things the show did right and things it didn’t, things which I personally liked or didn’t and things which were more technically (or some might say “objectively”) good or bad. Literary analysis shit, and in my opinion it’ll get a lot funnier, because jokes – in my opinion, though I’m not the first to say it – are in the details. In the specifics.

If you have seen the show, read on! If you haven’t, but don’t mind spoilers – or don’t intend to watch it, but want kind of an idea of some of it – then please read on! If you’re going to yell at me about spoiling things, don’t read on. Readn’t.

Or do whatever you want honestly. I can’t stop you! <3

Spoiler-filled Review, and Deep Dive Analysis:

I had such high hopes for this. Complicated hopes, from a love for the source material of the Addams Family, to a love for the thematic source of gothic media generally, to a general distaste for Tim Burton and especially for things that try to hard to convince me that they’re “his”. Whatever even that’s meant to mean.

Here? I don’t know that it means anything at all. I genuinely don’t know how involved he was, because usually he likes to try to shoehorn in a few things that weren’t really here, despite both the fact that I was making foot jokes on Bluesky and that that’s really more Tarantino’s place anyway.

Have you read the Bluesky posts, by the way? I think they were decently entertaining and I’ll pull a few things from them, but I’m going to link them all here just in case you want to read them – each thread, starting at its first post.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5:

Episode 6:

Episode 7:

Episode 8:

Okay, now you can read those if you want. Or, if you want to read much – much, much, much – more, you can read down.

Or, if you want to read the most, you can read both.

I’d say Wednesday started strong, and I think it did, depending on what you mean by “start”. Excepting the fact that piranhas don’t work that way, the first couple of scenes are pretty great; including the fact that piranhas don’t work that way (they are not the vicious, frantically carnivorous meat-tornadoes that media has portrayed them to be), the first scene is still quite great. Pugsley getting beaten up, and Wednesday interjecting with a classic “nobody beats up my brother but me”? That’s excellent.

I’m even fine with the piranhas. That’s a classic Addams-y thing, really, and their world’s always been a bit vague. A bit media-influenced over reality-influenced. A bit disbelief-suspending.

…well, has been.

This isn’t an Addams Family matter. Not really. I stand by my words that they’re not really in Wednesday; Gomez and Morticia, from the start, don’t feel… quite… right. They don’t seem lustful for each other in that same deep and holistic way that they have in other media – in the back of the car in that first scene they just seem like oblivious horny teenagers. It’s a strongly different vibe, and goes along with Morticia’s distaste for Wednesday and Gomez’ shrinking hesitation to immediately skew what we expected.

Unmet expectations – differences of definition – are to be a common theme here.

As far as the Family goes, I did like more of them further along in the plot. I’ve mentioned that this could serve as a bit of an “Addams Family Origin Story” and I think that’s true, and genuinely I don’t hold that against the production. It never claimed to be an Addams Family story – it’s not in the title, it doesn’t use the theme song, none of that. I’m okay with that, or at least I’ve made my peace with it, but it was still unexpected and unpleasant.

I stand by the character differences being a poor choice, but largely because of how they fit in with other differences in definition – gorgons, vampires, all the fantastical creatures – but I’ll get there in a minute.

Hoo boy will I get there in a minute.

…or maybe right now, because that’s about the next thing that happens. Wednesday has to go to a new school, an “Outsider school”, and- did that guy just say werewolves? Did that random hiker just talk about werewolves like they were an everyday thing?

Oh. I guess they are an everyday thing. Okay. What?

This is where we start to get into things Wednesday did wrong with worldbuilding. Some are my personal preference, but some of these are technical things. Personally, for instance, why the hell do we need to have YA categories for everything? Fangs, Furs, Stoners, Sirens? Seriously?

Technically, on the same point – most of the characters who matter don’t fit into any of those categories, some of those categories do not have any noteworthy representation in the story, and some of them (or all of them) differ so wildly from the expectation as to be false advertising. Narratively, that’s just poor structure. Ask Chekhov why.

I’ll hit those all one at a time in short order here.

I’m tired of categories. I just am. I’m tired of slapping a cutesy label on something, and also, none of these are even clever by the way. Firstly, both werewolves and vampires famously have fangs, so while I can deduce which is which from “fangs and furs” you can’t pretend that’s actually useful or that calling vampires fangs is in any way better than vamps or anything else- I understand that some writer who thought theirself very clever was trying to use alliteration, F F S S, but that doesn’t make it okay any more than that “riddle” is a riddle and-

…I’m getting ahead of myself.

Most of the characters who matter are neither Fur, Fang, Stoner, nor Siren. Bianca is a Siren, and counts as a character. Edith (worth noting, I’m choosing not to use Google to double-check people’s names as a demonstrative on how poorly the script treats its characters at times) is a Fur, technically, I guess, but also she kind of isn’t as far as the narrative treats her? Ajax is a stoner but calling him an important character feels like a stretch. Wednesday is none of the above, Xavier (the artist? Right? Xavier? Xander?) is none of the above, the… guy who tries to kill Wednesday… uh, fuck forgot his name, but he’s none of the above. Eugene is none of the above. Weems is none of the above. Why the fuck do we have these categories if we’re not using them in the story? That’s a bunch of guns sitting on Chekhov’s wall for no purpose, and Chekhov famously has one feeling about that. It’s also a bunch of guns just going off that were never on the wall, and uh, again, Chekhov has thoughts.

Oh, I guess his name is Rowan, right.

Moving on.

Some of these categories don’t have any noteworthy representation. Is there a Fang in this story? A vampire? There are a few off to the sides – and sure, that’s fine, I like having a bit of worldbuilding sprinkled off on the side, but this FFSS scene is the structural intro and it’s a bit like showing somebody around your house for the first time and saying “here at my house, we have four types of rooms – Shitters, Sitters, Eaters, and Bleeders. Shitters are bathrooms, where you shit. Sitters are rooms meant for entertaining and sitting. Eaters are where you eat food. Bleeders are surgical suites.”

…what about bedrooms? Oh you do have bedrooms, you just didn’t list them. Rooms to eat in, but no rooms to cook i- oh no you have those too? Okay, cool. Also how many surgical suites does your house have? None? Well why the actual fuck did you list it then?

The false advertising aspect… this is where I get a literary hackle up. This is where I really started twigging on Wednesday, because if you point at someone sitting in the sun and say “that’s a vampire” I am going to point back at you and say “fuck off”.

Look. I’m all for redefining, I genuinely am.

I love the idea of finding new ways of exploring things, new aspects or slants on things which have previously graced our minds and our zeitgeist – yes, please, tell me how the Wicked Witch of the West was actually good. Show me a zombie or a vampire or what-have-you with different facets, different aspects, different mechanisms, but… there’s a limit.

Wednesday goes over that limit.

It’s a vague limit, fuzzy and hazy like a hill’s gentle summit, but it’s not the fucking horizon – it doesn’t depart as you march toward it, leaving limitless space to explore.

Vampires have a few facets in common lore – in descending order of universality, I’d say they are as follows (and I’m happy to have discourse, discussion, or debate here): they drink blood, they burn in the sun, they die to a stake through the heart, have a strong aversion to holy symbology, have powers both mental and physical, and depending on how far you want to go, can’t cross running water and must count everything dropped in front of them.

The last two – especially the last one – are often discarded.

If you want to have your own take on vampires, please do. Maybe they’re only substantially weakened in sunlight, or maybe it removes their other powers, like Superman and Kryptonite. Maybe they have other things they can drink than blood, or can feed alternately from humans in some fashion like the White Court Vampires from the Dresden Files books (sometime I have nothing to do for weeks I may spend ten thousand words ragging on DF but not here).

If you tell me “that’s a vampire,” I expect that certain things will be true. We as the audience expect certain things to be true, so, let’s put those things to the test then, shall we?

Cool, Wednesday has vampires. Do they get burned by the sun? Nope. Weakened? Well, they have to wear sunglasses, so… maybe kinda. Do they feed on blood? Literally couldn’t tell you, doesn’t matter. Are they averse to holy symbology? Almost certainly not given the amount that’s scattered loosely around Nevermore. Can they turn into bats or wolves or cross running water? Who cares? They’re only here to be vampires – and, thus, to be cool.

This is a running theme, which only gets worse as it goes on. The vampires- meh, those have been pretty battered already, frankly, and again they hardly matter. They’re not in the story and their abilities don’t come up, so who really cares what those abilities are? Some of the others, though…

I have a larger bone to pick with the Stoners – the gorgons – and a larger one still, probably, with the- the Hydes. I don’t even like that I have to call them that, but first, the Stoners.

…have these showrunners read anything? Have they? Did they read any of the classical stories about Gorgons, about Medusa and her two sisters? I’ll tell you, if they did, they sure didn’t pay much attention, because not only are mirrors pretty famously a way to avoid their power, but that is in fact the lynchpin of the story.

Still not as bad as the Hydes, but I’ll get there in a second.

Medusa was defeated with a polished, mirrored shield, because her ability to turn men to stone did not work in a reflection. Period. Ajax should not have turned himself to stone. Medusa – and her sisters, the trio of whom were referred to as the Gorgons – turned people to stone at a glance, permanently, but okay, we can let that slide. They want it to be temporary, sure. The Gorgon sisters did not turn each other to stone, so I really don’t think Stoner powers should work on themselves either, but whatever let’s let that slide too, but in a mirror?

Stab a blade of pure sunlight through that vampire’s heart, it’ll be fine, who gives a shit.

See, and this is the thing – Perseus was not victorious because he was stronger, or faster, or because he was just magically immune to her powers; he wasn’t Beowulf challenging Medusa to the world’s most violent arm-wrestling contest, wasn’t the Green Knight tucking his sash in as he shrugged off stonification – he was tactical, and clever, and he used his knowledge of how Medusa and her powers worked, to defeat her.

You can change the powers, sure. You can have a being that can go in the sun and doesn’t drink blood and will happily hold a garlic-soaked crucifix while it drinks eco-friendly cruelty-free vegan yogurt smoothies or whatever instead of blood, you really can do all of that, and I guess if you are dedicated to the concept you can call it a vampire, but you cannot call it a vampire and expect that I – or anyone else – would know all of those things about it, and you cannot be surprised when I think it’s going to drink blood and be destroyed by a stake through the heart.

Rather, I suppose you can, but like… don’t. It’s nonsensical.

Having these creatures is nonsensical – they don’t seem clever or integrative, weaving bits of lore from other things together into a complex tapestry, they’re just hollow and pointless hat-tips for brownie points. “Look look,” the show seems to say, “we mentioned vampires! Love us!”

…kind of like it does whenever it mentions Poe.

The worst, though – worse than the Gorgons – is the Hydes, because while the actuality of the in-universe Gorgons flies in the face of the lynchpin of the story which gives them their name, the reality of the Hydes flies in the face of LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE STORY.

Okay. Okay. Okay. We’re breathing. It’s fine.

Have you read the story in question? The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde? If not, a brief overview: written by Robert Louis Stevenson and beginning its life as a “penny dreadful” or “shilling shocker” – a sort of pulpy horror publication deigned to titillate on the cheap – Jekyll and Hyde has become viewed as a literary classic, and a cornerstone of gothic and horror literature (for which purpose alone, presumably, it is referred to in this show).

Wednesday – the character, not the show – would definitely have read Jekyll and Hyde. The showrunners just as definitely have not.

In short, the story of Jekyll and Hyde is one of a respectable man – Doctor Jekyll – who has developed a serum, a potion, a concoction, which allows him to transform into a different man – Mister Hyde – which allows him to give in to his basal urges whilst avoiding social and legal backlash. Of course, it goes flawlessly (no, it doesn’t).

Hyde – the real Hyde, Mister Hyde – is not a massive, slavering, beastly creature. He is not thoughtless slave to a master, listening to nobody, neither friend nor authority. He is not an excessively powerful, fast, or brutally strong man, and this – and this is the problem – is the entire point of the story.

Mister Hyde listens to nobody. Not to Jekyll, to whom he owes literally the entirety of his existence; not to the law who chase and persecute him; not to anyone nor anything save for whatever urge catches his fancy at the time. Wednesday’s “Hydes” being perfect sleeper agent obedients to any master is upsetting at the least, and to have it be to the one who either A) awoke them, or B) happened to be standing nearby (?), is both upsetting and insultingly nonsensical.

Mister Hyde is not a powerful man. He is younger, smaller; he wounds and even kills people, but not by virtue of being ten feet tall and made of sinewy muscle. He kills people by the sheer lack of fucks he gives, laughing as he beats them to death with his cane – in the words of a Kennedy, not because it is easy but because it is hard. Wednesday’s Hydes being razor-clawed speed demons hulking at fifteen feet tall- I mean, sure, they’re imposing, except for that face, but why?

Why?

What could possibly have possessed any person within the world of Wednesday to name this beast a Hyde? Is it just because “oh this used to be a person but then turned into something”? Well so’s a fucking werewolf! Shit!

The entire point of Jekyll and Hyde is that Hyde is a wholly disobedient, violently urgent creature that blends in perfectly to society until he sharply fucking doesn’t. It’s that he can walk down a street with his cane, tipping his hat at passersby, and have them all smile until a young child bumps into him and he throws the child to the ground and stomps on it. Not because he’s some superhuman monster, but because he is a human.

Jekyll and Hyde isn’t about monsters. It’s about the fact that we are monsters, or at least we could be, and having the same name applied to a creature that is immediately noticeable and gains its vicious wins not through personal callousness but through the fact that I mean, fucking look at the thing, of course it’s going to win, like, shit – and then having it be a slavish puppet as well?

These people never read Jekyll and Hyde.

…but Wednesday did. She must have.

You cannot convince me that Wednesday – the Wednesday depicted in this show, who loves literature and especially classics of gothic literature to the point that she’s writing her own (kinda awful but that’s fine our first ones are usually kinda awful) story on a typewriter – hasn’t read this story. I will not believe you.

Yet, never does she say “What a terribly unfitting name. Hyde would hold this creature sharing his moniker with such utter contempt it’s almost amusing to consider.”

She should.

Calling them Hydes isn’t necessarily inexcusable, but having her not comment on it? Kinda is, and it just- all of those things happen more than once. Hydes are just the highest example on the mountain of “things that aren’t what they say on the tin”, and why?

Why are they even in this story at all?

Why is Nevermore here? The Fangs, the Furs, the Stoners, the Sirens, the other eighty percent of the student populace who shall remain nameless (seriously, there are more Seers in this by an order of magnitude than there are any one of Furs, Fangs, Stoners, and Sirens; there’s Wednesday, guy-who-fails-to-kill-Wednesday, [guy-who-fails-to-kill-Wednesday]’s mom, Wednesday’s mom, Xavier, Xavier’s dad, and that’s just off the top of my head).

Why is any of this here?

It’s not needed. Most of it’s just fluff, just set dressing, and it’s not even really doing much work.

There’s a Disney property called Z-O-M-B-I-E-S – a movie series of teenage musicals about zombies getting integrated into human high school, etc. – which has fucking fantastic set dressing both literally and metaphorically. The zombies were blockaded into a section of the city decades ago, and it shows when you look around their area: all of their stuff is outdated, it’s all adapted, it’s all made out of bits and piece of things from the eighties and it’s fucking fantastic. It’s a damn teenage musical about zombies and cheerleaders, it didn’t need to go that hard, but it did, both in terms of literal set dressing and the metaphorical stuff, and Wednesday…

…just didn’t.

Wednesday (the character) should have scoffed at the naming convention of the Hydes given that their slave nature is the first thing she learns about them alongside the name. She would know this story, she is snarky and sarcastic; she just should have said it, and for them to get it wrong so that she could comment on how wrong that is would have been one thing, but for them to get it wrong and then for her to just let it go?

It’s a microcosm of the main issue with the show from a technical standpoint, and that is that it can’t decide if it wants to be all about the nitty-gritty details, or to be a thoughts-light breezefest through coolsville (I will bet you actual money that “thoughts-light breezefest through coolsville” showed up on company messaging servers at least once during production).

It wants to be both, but that’s not how things work.

It calls Hydes Hydes not because they have anything particular to do with Mister Hyde, but because “isn’t that fun? Hyde! Like that story, Jekyll and Hyde, that we’re pretty sure you haven’t read and just think is about a guy who turned into a monster!”. It keeps bringing up Poe’s name not because it’s drawing anything in particular from him but because “hey you know Poe! That guy! The broody one!”.

(Mary Shelley is laughing in her grave)

At the same time, it wants to think that it is a very clever mystery. It wants to be a tense, thrilling, exciting brainteaser, so it drops in little details, but the whole problem is you don’t know what’s a real detail and what’s just something they said for fun.

They said that guy’s a vampire. Okay cool so… then is the fact that he presumably can’t go into sunlight important to the mystery? Or…

It just wants to be too many things at once. The “Fangs/Furs/etc” crap, the different Halls (yeah you might’ve forgotten that too – Ophelia Hall, remember? That’s where Wednesday is staying, and it’s important for… the boat race and nothing else. Important enough to spend five minutes of screentime on though), the fucking Seer types (“You’re a Raven. I’m a Dove. I was paid seventy thousand dollars to read this line.”), this show wants so badly to be Divergent, or The Pretties and the Uglies, or Harry Potter, or- any of them. All of them.

At the same time, it wants to be Poe, and Stevenson, and Shelley, and- they’re not the same, and I’m not saying you can’t do a gothic YA, and quite frankly I’d love to read or watch it, but you don’t do it by just ramming the two together like a fucking Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial!

Damn, that’s not even how Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are made!

(This review not sponsored by Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups)

Not as much, though – not nearly as much, does Wednesday want to be all of those – as it wants to be Pushing Daisies…

At first it seemed like a quirk. The truck crash, with Wed and Weems returning to school (I can call her Wed, right? That’d be fine, right? Totally not cringe-worthy) – I chuckled and made a post about “oh hey somebody told the crew to try to be Brian Fuller!”

In hindsight, that was a more accurate prophecy than a lot of the ones in the show…

Speaking of. Everyone is real damn convinced by that one picture which, firstly: not clear at all. Secondly? Okay, she’s standing there. She’s not burning the school, the school is burning, and she’s literally standing between a clearly imposing figure and the school.

But also, seriously? That degree of certainty based on that picture?

Anyway, back to what I’d been saying before that…

More and more, the Pushing Daisies references just kept piling up, but honestly the most damning is Eugene. For those who haven’t seen Pushing Daisies – first of all, why not? Go see it. Secondly, though, it’s a fantastically and gorgeously bright and twistedly grim-at-times tv show about a man who can inexplicably wake the dead, and his efforts to uh, not do that, pretty much. He works with a PI solving crimes, mostly murders, and in the first episode, brings his childhood sweetheart back to life… but now can never touch her again, or else she’ll be dead again forever.

It’s a lot of things Wednesday clearly wants to be, but shoots itself in the pursuit of: Wednesday wants to be a show about an outsider in a world that doesn’t accept her, but then it makes the whole world odder than Wednesday because of all the YA monsters and shit, and then because it realizes it’s fucked up a bit it just kinda shrugs a bit and shoves Wednesday off to the Outside anyway. Ned, in Pushing Daisies? Aside from being a delightfully awkward and very smiley Lee Pace (HE’S HOT OKAY), he genuinely and regularly struggles with his Outsiderness, despite the fact that it’s nothing that can be seen.

It’s not a flawless show, but it is fantastic, and Chuck – the love interest – is like, really into bees. Really a lot. She spends a lot of time around bees, she has beehouses up on the roof, and one whole episode revolves around murders at a honey company and involves several people covered in bees. Did I mention bees?

Why is Eugene?

The guy doesn’t have a revealed power – until the last second, which makes his ever wearing a bee suit kinda… silly? Pointless? Like, I don’t put on a radiation suit when I go outside, because we have a Van Allen Belt. This kid has his own personal Van Allen Belt for bees [fuck I hope a cosmology nerd is reading this at some point just for these references] but he still puts on a radiation suit? Seriously – anybody, give me one good reason for Eugene to wear a bee suit, when he is out at the beehive alone and knowing that nobody else will join his club, other than “to preserve his power’s reveal for the audience”, please.

I’ll wait.

…

…still waiting for anyone to provide a reason…

…yeah, there isn’t one, is there? If – if – there were other kids in the club, you could say “he wears it to remind them to wear it” and I might even buy it. Kinda. If there was a fire elemental at that school in metal shop, I’d hope they still wore gloves to handle the hot metal, even though it wouldn’t burn them – or whatever. If they couldn’t psychically control the heat, that is, so even that isn’t really a valid comparison, but it’s something at least. I could see it being a rule that “students immune to [X] must still protect against [X]”.

…but Eugene’s alone. He’s so alone that he’s shocked to see Wednesday there, he thinks everybody hates him and nobody wants to join his club, so why in the name of nothing that makes sense does he wear this beesuit? Hell half of his introductory scene he is wearing a beesuit and Wednesday is not, and also this kid can control the fucking bees.

He could just tell them not to sting the other Hummers. Or to sting no human unless they like, attacked a hive, or something! Fuck’s sake, it doesn’t make any sense, and so much of this show is like that and it just expects you to ignore it or thinks you’ll ignorantly not notice in the first place.

Bianca is a powerful siren and a big bitch, and she’s won every single year of the “no rules at all” boat race ever, and her ploy – her big master fucking plan – is one dude gets in the water and pushes the boats? Shit, these students are terrible at this. Seriously their plans for “there are no rules” are fucking awful, even Wednesday’s: a net launcher? How the fuck did you know there would be a guy in the water? How did you know he would be exactly there? How did you know there would only be one guy? Physical spikes on the side of the boat. What, did you use all of your pneumatics on the net launcher and couldn’t make a spike launcher? Shit. “Hey the three of us will sit here while you alone run off to grab a flag” WHY?

The mayor confesses out loud to conspiracy to cover up the murder of probably hundreds of children – and he confesses to it in 2024 in front of a millenial/gen z, who people expect to be using a phone, and just… thinks nothing will come of it? Sheriff “I will never let this go” just lets everything go and doesn’t investigate further? Wednesday thinks it’s a good idea to split up when both a murderous creature are around and her main nemesis is a shapeshifter? Even after somebody says “let’s not split up”? The camera that just keeps sporadically taking pictures after dropped? The blonde girl in pre-colonial America? Crackstone’s- fucking- anything? His glorious crypt, his return, his magic?

So little of this show makes any sense and it is trying to make SO MUCH SENSE! It has teases, and reveals, and pindrops of clues, and riddles that oh fuck I can’t, I have to-

Okay.

Okay so.

Hey.

So, a riddle.

We all know what a riddle is, right? It’s a phrase that is a little mysterious, posed usually as a question, and has an answer that is difficult to figure out from the question or prompt but that, once you hear it, makes sense in at least a “oh okay, I can see that” kinda way, and loosely speaking should be based on some sort of reasoning capacity.

A very famous one: Riddle of the Sphinx. “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs during the day, and three legs during the evening? A human.” (Well, a Man, clasically, but I’m allowed; I’ve allowed myself).

Question, tough to figure the answer to, kinda makes sense if you take the ‘day’ as metaphorical for a lifetime, say that crawling as a baby counts as walking on four legs, discount anyone with an adulthood requiring mobility aids or amputation (or lacking a limb from whatever else) and then further presume that canes are universal in old age. That’s the “solution” such as it is: a baby “walks on four legs in the morning”, an adult “walks on two legs in the day”, and an elderly person with a cane “walks on three legs in the evening” as their evening heads toward the night of death.

A riddle.

You know what’s not a fucking riddle?

“Two months before June.”

Th-

F-

I- I- I’m so mad at this, as an audience member, as a lover of riddles, as an author, as a writer, as a human being with reasoning skills, as someone who owns a calendar, as- with every fibre of my being I am irritated by this being posed as a riddle because no it is absolutely fucking not!

What’s the next riddle, “what’s two plus four?” That’s just a question, it’s not a riddle at all, and I’ve my irks with the Riddle of the Sphinx but at least it kinda sorta counts. Two months bef- TWO MONTHS BEFORE JUNE! TWO MONTHS! BEFORE JUNE!

What a riddle – what an absolute fucking stumper of a riddle that is, I sure hope that whatever writer pitched that one was summarily pitched, in return, into the water headfirst.

No obviously I wouldn’t say “out of a window,” that’s a drastic overreaction toward something as overall inconsequential as this ‘riddle’, but I definitely do think they should have been thrown headlong and headfirst into a lake off of a dock, fully clothed, whilst protesting, to emerge coughing and spluttering and furious.

They deserve that, not a defenestrative death.

Two months bef- okay I’m moving on. I can’t any longer, but- but before I do, this is so emblematic of what the show gets wrong, because it thinks that that is a riddle. It thinks that that is a riddle and it thinks that it is clever and it thinks that we will think that it’s clever too, and that’s just- genuinely that’s insulting.

I am, legitimately, insulted by that. Dora has better riddles than that. I know it’s a bit harsh to hold a single line with this degree of power over the whole production, but it’s not just the single line; Wednesday, as a show, does this all the time.

It keeps referring to things it thinks it clever, but none of them are.

It keeps trying to be factual, to make sense, to be sophisticated and grounded and all kinds of crap, but it’s just not, and it’s a big issue.

The final fight.

…the guy has magic? Um?

The thing is, so many of these issues are fixable with one or two lines. Hydes can be fixed with Wednesday making a derisive comment at how nonsensical that is. The final fight can be fixed by having what’s-her-face (Christina Ricci, forever excellent even when her character’s been written to be a bit nonsensical and impossible but I’ll get there) turn to him at the start and instead of doing her overly-worshippy thing to gain his ire, do this:

Her: *gasp* “But- but that looks like magic! How are you us-“

Joe Crackpipe or whatever his name was (I know it’s Crackstone I’m being silly): “Silence, human female! Hah, fool wench, you believed me a pious Puritan and nothing more? Nay, but I should be pleased that my deception so endured: know your foolishness then, that I was no Puritan seeking the destruction of all witches, but only doing so as a ploy to root out that hag and her coven! My own warlockish kin and I had great plans with which she consistently interfered… but today, I shall win my ultimate victory over her! Ha! Unlimited power!”

There. It makes sense now.

Him using magic of like fifty different kinds all over that end fight, him using magic to come back from the dead, all kinds of shit. Although something even I can’t make sense is “I’m gonna chain every one of the fifty people up in the barn before I light it, but this girl – the most important one, who I’m gonna spend extra time kicking around with everyone else – I’m just gonna toss in there and hope for the best. Not even gonna kick her that much first if I’m honest so she should be able to run pretty easy quite frankly.”

Look even I’m not capable of fixing some things. Also that’s not how witch-burning worked: the burning wasn’t a punishment nor execution, it was the test; dying to the fire meant you were not a witch, and congratulations, your soul now rests easily in heaven. People think the witch-hunters made more sense than they did.

The fuck did they think they’d do if they caught an actual witch who would survive the fire? That logic… makes about as much sense as a large portion of Wednesday’s, as a show.

So little of it makes sense even while it tries to. The confrontation between Weems and uh shit I don’t- I’m just gonna call her Ricci because her name doesn’t matter anyway; that final confrontation, with Weems in a Tyler suit, is pretty good. It’s really good, overall, except for kinda one thing. I appreciate that they showed Ricci drawing up a syringe of the Nightshade poison at the start of the scene, because it explains why she has it in hand to kill Weems.

…except… it doesn’t.

Why did she draw it up? Why was she preparing a syringe of Nightshade poison?

It wasn’t for Wednesday – Wednesday had a specific, ritual death planned. It wasn’t for Weems – she didn’t know Weems was there. Was it just supposed to be for general-purpose self-defence? What an awful fucking self-defence, especially given that she apparently also had a gun which she goes and gets later but decided for [reasons] not to carry with her all the time. Was it supposed to be for Tyler? Why? He’s one of those Hydes that has to unerringly obey its master, which is her, remember? No reason for her to kill him – except for, maybe, to kill all of the Outsiders, but… therein we reach a bigger nonsensical thing, because we could maybe say that. I’d say it would be more sensible for her to only kill Tyler after every other one was dead, not just at Nevermore but everywhere, but whatever.

There’s something that makes far less sense, though: I just do not believe that someone who hates a group that much could convincingly pretend to love them, that much, for that long.

She’s deep in their ranks in cover. She’s giving Wednesday advice, a shoulder on which to cry (metaphorically; I would never slander my girl by suggesting she’d cry, and the Thing bit doesn’t count anyway, anyone would cry at that). She’s not just near them, she’s talking and listening and interacting with all of them, and smoothly and softly and sweetly, and I just do not buy it and you can’t make me.

Do groypers exist? Sure. Double-agents? Absolutely. Do I think it’s possible for a highly trained spy to pretend to, for instance, have a family, and love that family, when in truth they are planning on killing them if needed? Maybe even that the mission is to kill that family? Sure, I guess.

This, though, is a little different.

She’s not a spy. She’s not trained. She’s just a MAGA bitch who’s gone to a Queer School and decided to pretend to be a counselor there in order to murder all the queers but pretends convincingly that she’s actually an Ally and I just don’t buy it. It’s obviously the framing the show gives it, too, with her trying to bring back the Puritan bro – and even his “silence wench woman lady” shit; this is obviously meant to be a “women who voted for MAGA” reference.

…but it’s not believable.

If you put a homophobe anywhere near anything that even mentions anything gay, they will tell you. A rainbow shows up in the sky? Homophobes will tell you they’re homophobic. You can put them near fucking nothing and they will tell you. I have had a coworker come up to me out of nowhere and say “I got in a fight with my mom over dinner last night. Yeah, she was talking about how there’s more than two genders and I was telling her that’s bullshit.”

Firstly worth noting: I’m nonbinary and not exactly fucking subtle about it. Secondly worth noting: coworker in question is about fifty and still having dinner with his mom regularly? Thirdly worth noting: this coworker clearly thought I would agree, he wasn’t challenging me. Fourthly: this is how hateful shitstains work.

They can’t pretend to be compassionate.

You can’t convincingly fake compassion when what you have is hatred, not in the long term and not in every direction – to one person, yes sure. That’s how con men work. I know we all know stories about Bundy and Dahmer and bad guys getting caught by the cops but being sided with by those cops because they were able to convincingly fake their way out of it (which could also be about how cops are not actually designed nor trying to catch bad guys but uh-), but that is not what this is: this isn’t “she ran into a cop one or two times and talked her way out of it,” this is “she lives surrounded by cops every single day, and goes out of her way to go an engage them in conversation, and invites the cops over to her house, and-“

Ugh I’m upset that I compared queer folks to cops there. Sorry everyone, I’ll try to be better.

Look, as a reveal, I prefer her to the therapist, partly because my spouse is a therapist (music therapist, in particular) and seeing them always cast as the evil guy gets a little tiresome after a while. I’m not saying there are no bad ones – I’d say therapists at large are about on par with doctors and lawyers for that, and I’m saying that as someone who knows a lot of doctors quite closely and has for a long time, and a few each of the other two including being married to one. Some of them genuinely just want to help people. Some of them genuinely just want power or the paycheque. Most of them are somewhere in the middle. The vast, vast, vast majority of them are not sociopaths.

…but speaking of, let’s talk about Tyler.

As a character, I liked Ricci. As a reveal, I liked her well enough, but I just don’t buy the depths with which she was integrated into Nevermore academy (also damn, Wednesday, when you found out it wasn’t the therapist, it took you a real long time to realize the literally only other normie you knew who was the right age, shit) – putting that detail aside, though, pretty good.

Tyler? Tyler was fucking fantastic.

Look, the Hyde even has his eyes. Alright? That transformation where we get to see it – that gave me chills, and rightly so, because the eyes were always noteworthy about the Hyde. Silly at times, disturbing at times, but they are Tyler’s fucking eyes as much as Hulk’s eyes are Ruffalo’s (or Norton’s, or Bana’s, if you want to talk about Hulks I prefer but- ugh I can’t start ripping into MCU right now, I don’t have the strength).

The scene in the jail, where Tyler goes up to her to say goodbye… that was incredible. The actor playing him did a great job – he seemed muddled and muddied for most of the beginning, a real kind of “alright he’s a white boy I guess” kind of archetype and he played it beautifully, from “confusion smile” to “chucklewhat?” to “I have eyes look at them” to “work in coffee shop drive car”.

Honestly the reveal of him as the Hyde was fantastic, because for once the details were there. That reveal – that’s what the whole damn show should’ve been, and that’s why I’m so exasperated by the rest of the show, because why wasn’t it?

They took their time with it, laid stuff out, knew when to be subtle (wasn’t the “issue” he had with Nevermore previously that he’d done a big graffiti thing? So he’s an artist too – plus a barista, although I wish they’d shown more of his latte art in that instance) and when to be obvious (clearly has some anger issues, had knowledge or reason to be at every Hyde popup, anti-Outsider sentiment to the point he was sentenced to therapy for it) and when to be misleading (him getting hurt by the Hyde, some transformations where he isn’t present but just had knowledge of where Wednesday would be).

They played everything about it very well, and pretty much everything about Tyler was true and so the clues mattered because none of it was played off for cheap laughs (“put your best face forward” and then cut camera to some faceless people. Will we see more of them? Nope. Also that’s not even the phrase; it’s “best foot forward”).

The thing that really clinches it? That makes Tyler’s character perfect?

The way he taunts Wednesday.

The fact that he goes up to her in the local lockup – after puppy-dog-eyeing his dad and saying she used to be his friend – and then leans in and tells her quietly, in front of everyone, everything that’s happened and how intentional it all was? That’s perfect. That’s perfect.

I mean obviously he’s a piece of shit, but-

That’s the point, though. It is believable that he could fool Wednesday in the same way that Ricci couldn’t convincingly have fooled everyone, because Tyler was never trying to fool everyone, just her. Everyone else he could just be unknown or unnoticed to – he didn’t live near or interact with any of them, barely even his own father with whom he technically cohabitates. Wednesday he initiates many interactions with, and has perfected the blankly-blinking white boy “wait huh what?” opening when he is confronted to begin an interaction, ensuring he’s always got a minute to get his legs under himself.

It’s perfect, because the taunting confirms that yeah, he’s not just a slave. He’s not even just an ass, or angry, or violent, or hateful; he is genuinely and fully, down to his core, a sadistic sociopath who is devoid of anything approaching kinship, empathy, or compassion, he takes delight not just in causing suffering but in seeing that suffering (and not just in seeing the suffering, but also in causing it, the inverse corollary) and that’s perfect.

It’s the only way the Hyde arc could make sense – if the Hyde had been Xavier and he’d just been blacking out, there’s no way that would be believable; the Hyde transformed mid-way through the forest outside that cabin, and what, we’re supposed to just believe he found himself wandering in the woods and chalked it up to “oh whatever”?

After a certain point (like, for instance, immediately – and certainly after multiple attacks) that sort of thing gets kind of irresponsible.

Tyler, though, doing it all intentionally… makes sense. If he’s that sadistic, it makes sense that he wouldn’t just wait for Ricci to tell him to nab Wednesday; he’d try to get close to her, in order to make it hurt more. In order to see the pain, the struggle, to watch her squirm from as close as possible because he is – as we see demonstrated so beautifully in that scene – exactly that much of a heartless bastard. It’s great, it’s excellent, and it’s sadly maybe the only piece of the plot that is. Other parts are pretty good at times, but excellent? Not really.

I could only wish that the rest of everyone’s individual arcs were as coherent.

Edith? Let’s go through her arc, such as it is: oh she’s fun, RAINBOWS!, oh no werewolf isn’t really a wolf, her family kinda sucks, teen relationship drama (honestly I’m giving this show a pass on 99% of its teen BS because it’s actually pretty thoroughly believable), and then uh… I dunno, she turns into a wolf I guess?

Why? Like the scene where she transforms is great because of the subversion of the “running through woods tripped on branch” trope, but other than that?

…also, fuck, is her name Enid or Edith? I know I could look it up, but again I’m trying to prove a point here, and that point is that a good three-quarters of the characters in this show – at least – don’t really matter. Replace Enid with Edith and it’s fine. Replace her with Ricci, and is the story that different?

I really did like the Edith/Wednesday arc. The way their relationship evolves – including, especially, their break-up and subsequent reunion – was actually pretty good. It wasn’t incredible but it was quite good, the way both of them are awakened to things.

Her character arc, though? So little of it has any import or anchoring in the story. She gets stood up by Ajax – okay. Does it serve any narrative purpose? Nope, just a brief moment of drama – and confusion on our parts, because I don’t know about you but I would’ve at least made up some lie like “hey sorry I got sick” or “must’ve eaten something that didn’t agree with me, I was hurling all last night I couldn’t even send a message sorry, but maybe we could do something in a few days?”

I understand and even appreciate his viewpoint of “hey it’s embarrassing to admit to the girl I like that I accidentally turned myself into stone in my own mirror” (EVEN THOUGH GORGONS DON’T WORK LIKE THAT but whatever I’ve already done that rant it’s fine) – but make up a lie, bud! At the very least! Damn, but no, he just walks past her at the dance and then – the same episode – it all gets neatly sorted out, which… is fine.

It is, it’s fine, but also it’s not anything more than fine, is it?

It’s all a little “it was all a dream”, because who really gives a shit about who shot JR anymore – but the show wants you to care! It wants you to be investigative and invested and hanging off the edge of your seat but just so little of its follow-through actually delivers anything that is worth anything on the front two-thirds, seat-wise. Maybe 40% depending on how generous I’m feeling.

This show wants you to care about Eniddith, but it doesn’t even care about her, not really. It just puts her there to be a quirky tumblr liberal (which – oy – especially given the baddies’ MAGA vibes – that was something) and then kinda cashes in on that immediately.

“Hmm, maybe, buy some stoc- SELL THE STOCK IT WENT UP!”

That’s not really investment.

I do like Eniddith. Not enough to learn her name, but I’m not blaming that one on myself, I’m blaming that one on the show not going to really any length to teach me the character names. I still recall the names of all of my friends from Kindergarten – all seven of them (Paul, Krysta, Thomas, Brandon, Laura, Kris, Nicole; not counting relatives) – as well as my five main bullies (Chris, Steven, Lauren, Lauren [a different one], and Nick) , and the two kids who in hindsight I probably had crushes on (Nicholas and Andriss). I’m not saying I remember everyone’s name ever, but I swear some of these people only had their names stated four or five times total in the series, and again while that’s fine, I’m clearly a little irked by the amount of stuff in this show that’s just fine.

Okay. The tumblr liberal stuff.

That put me on edge a little, but then they didn’t even really do anything with it – from stuff like Wednesday’s german-language spiel at the fudgery, to Eniddith’s “*gasp* you can’t call them abominable snowmen that’s a slur!”, to Goody’s “We lived in peace with the people and the land” (and would somebody please tell me where this blonde white girl came from in precolonial America exactly? Anyone?); there’s a lot of it. There’s a lot of setting up the kids as being a certain sect of online left-leaning speaker, for seemingly no payoff.

Does the show think tumblr libs are right? Wrong? Does it think they sometimes miss vital context of the complex real world, in their speeches? Does it think they’re the only hope of salvation for a doomed world and people?

To sharpen this, the “baddies”, in several flavours, are written as boomers, MAGA, etc., the natural counterpoints to the many little Thunbergs of Wednesday and her ilk (Greta if you’re reading this I love you) – from most blatantly Crackstone with his “I’m literally a comic-villain Puritan”, and Ricci with her “I’m gonna RETVRN to a comic-villain Puritan” (did I use RETVRN right? I don’t actually know what it is and refuse to search it up online because they’re not gonna get me like that), but even beyond that you have Tyler’s dad with “No! No Therapy! Real Men don’t talk about their feelings! I’m gonna go do arrests and threats! Don’t talk about my wife!” and Weems with- well, the general seething distaste, but especially with the “no that’s the wrong way of doing protests, freedom of speech only covers what I say, you’re actually being the homophobic one here”.

Quick sidenote. Weems says she was hot for Gomez, but I’d put down fifty it was actually Morticia. “She stole my man” will give a bit of a grudge, I guess, but “she rejected me” just feels like it’s gonna burn way longer, especially since Weems was never with Gomez just says she liked him. It makes more sense if she actually loved Morticia and has just been lying to everyone for decades, including maybe lying to herself, which could actually sharpen the grudge. Repression is a hell of a drug.

Also, Weems, you’re a shapeshifter and clearly morals are not your strong suit given the whole “yes a child got murdered but I’m going to just pretend that didn’t happen and hide it so nobody knows and I’d do it again too, a hundred times” – you’re telling me I’m supposed to believe that she never, not even once, shapeshifted into Morticia in order to get with Gomez? Or vice-versa?

Man I’m still sad she got got, though. Weems was a solid character, gotta admit; especially the first couple episodes where we’re supposed to be doubting and suspicious, Christie did a great job with little mechanisms: twitches and shifts of the eye, face, and body. Very, very good job of portraying someone who is wound up intently and intensely inside, and whose gears may be involved in machinations we as the audience would not appreciate. Really quite great.

A lot of the acting in Wednesday, actually, I’ll say, is pretty high-tier. Ironically CZJ seems to be kinda the short end of the stick there, but I don’t know that she was given a lot of space to breathe really. I genuinely forgot she was in it at one point – made a comment about Christina Ricci being the biggest and most well-known actress in this, and my spouse said “I don’t know, Ortega- but I guess this was kind of what launched her,” before my mother-in-law cackled and said in disbelief “um, Catherine Zeta-Jones?” I paused in silence for a few confused seconds before remembering that she was, in fact, Morticia – but again, I’m gonna chalk her relatively wan performance up to stage direction or edits, etc.

Sorry I got distracted. I was thinking about Gwendoline Christie, you’re not allowed to blame me for that.

Where was I?

Oh, right, all the “bad guys” are portrayed as MAGA boomers or 4chan incels (TYLER), and many of the “good guys” are portrayed as tumblr libs (Wed, Eniddith, Goody), or… also 4chan incels (Eugene a little at least to start sorry but I’m not really wrong, he definitely has watched too many “art of pickup” youtubes) – but… nothing really comes of it.

The tumblr lib-ness isn’t important to the young kids winning. The MAGA boomerness isn’t important to the bad guys’ downfall. It’s just kinda… there, an unfired gun that is taken off the wall, meticulously cleaned and tested, and then left, and honestly I think if you’re taking that and doing it deliberately then that can be quite cool as a story aspect but I just don’t see the deliberation here. I don’t see the payoff of it.

Speaking of downfalls.

No, stepping a bit before the downfall. Let’s talk a bit about the return first.

Why would Goody’s book be needed to bring back Crackstone? He didn’t seem surprised by it either, not shocked and disgusted that some Evil Witch Black Magic had been used to bring him back. I get that maybe Goody’s book would have general “raising the dead” spells, but even that feels… not very “living in harmony with the people and the land” (where did this blonde girl come from where did this blonde girl come from where di) of her.

So Crackstone comes back, and kills Weddy, and then Goody unkills Weddy, because if this show loves one thing it’s doing something just to undo it thirty seconds later, and then Crackstone uses an absolute metric fuckton of magic all over the damn school and-

…and that’s just… not mentioned at all?

Firstly, everyone at this school of magical powered kids who have been so hornily repressed with their powers that Eniddith literally can’t keep her claws in her pants when Ajax’s lips touch hers (which by the way, it would’ve been a much better thing in her plotline to have that awaken her wolfishness instead of… well, the plot needed it) and yet, I mean… a few of them put up some attempt to stop Crackbro.

Where are the fucking teachers exactly?

His whole assault, he just kinda goes, and I understand the whole and only purpose of the scene was to put food on the CG team’s families’ tables, but damn. Crackbro just gets off all over everything, using his magic flamethrower staff and then also telekinesis and not once does Ricci go “hey uh, the fuck? You’re using a lot of magic and Witch shit?”

I tell you – and this is why I rip into things sometimes – this doesn’t work. It kinda works okay-ish in an unimpressive and underwhelming way if you only glance sideways at it, but there are such better things that are right there, and part of why I like digging into these things is to see those. To highlight what was better, and why, and in that way hopefully help other folks see other opportunities in their own stories.

Have Crackbro show up and go nuts all over the kids. Hell, double down on it – have Ricci laugh and make some comment about how they can’t resist him and have him cackle about how they’re weak and he was always going to win, how they’re not prepared for him. Then, as he keeps using more magic of more different kinds, have Ricci comment on it. Confusion, concern, upset: “But- but this is Witches’ magic. The fire you used to burn that kid was fun and totally chill, but you just turned one into a frog, that’s Witches’ magic, what-“

Then have Crackbro laugh at her and tell her it was all a lie. He pretended to be a Puritan Witchfinder just to take out Goody and her coven, because they were threatening him and his coven. Of Witches, or warlocks, or – given this show’s history of awful nomenclature – gremlins. No of course we’re not little impish creatures. No we don’t cause problems in mechanisms. We’re just human men who use dark magic, why would you think those other things just because I used the word “gremlin”?

It’s better. It’s better, and I’m not just saying that because I came up with it; if they’d had Ricci’s blindness toward this serve a narrative purpose, then it would’ve been the better choice. If Weddy was going to confront her or Crackbro angrily about using magic even though they decried it, and thus turn it into a left-vs-right freedom debate (“I think free speech means I’m allowed to choose my pronouns” “Well I think free speech means you shut up and I’m allowed to say the N-word”) or any one of the things where r-wingers kick and scream about how the libs are using X thing to infringe on society and poison youths and generally fuck everything up, but then r-wingers are more than happy to use X thing to infringe on society and poison youths and generally fuck everything up – if they were going to do that, then it could’ve been good.

Have him use the magic. Have Weddy be like “bro wtf? I thought you thought magic was bad?” Have Crackbro say “just bad for you ya dumb bitch, it’s good for me”, and then have that some way serve into his downfall (he uses too much magic and it starts to burn him, uses too much and then runs out, it turns out Hydes like eating magic users and nobody’s noticed that before, somebody let a magic-hunting killer magicwasp out of its enclosure by accident, I don’t know these are just ideas rectally produced at the time of writing in real time literally any one of which would’ve been better), then it would’ve been narratively a good plan.

As it is? It just isn’t. It’s just… there.

I’m not going to tell you that you’re not allowed to write a story in which a disadvantaged youth is told that they’re simply incapable of success, and then they live a life struggling against that perception, but it turns out actually they are simply incapable of success and then they die unsuccessful because they’re just like that.

I’m not going to tell you you’re not allowed, but I’ll tell you it’s a bad story.

If that’s the point of your story – if that’s something that just happens in your story, if it’s structure or setting or backdrop, and your story is really about how success can be a moving target, or the appearance of failure and the reality of it aren’t always aligned, or how one might or maybe even must cope with a world which consists wholly of failure and never success, then that could maybe be a good story!

Narratively, “Jim was the strongest man in the world and could beat everyone in an arm-wrestling match. Then he arm-wrestled everyone in the world. Because he was the strongest man in the world and could beat everyone in an arm-wrestling match, he beat everyone in the arm-wrestling matches, and proved that he was the strongest man in the world. Then he got a hot wife and got laid super often the end yay.” is an absolute fucking dogshit trashpile of a story. It just is.

Shut up, we’re not talking about Beowulf. Beowulf is allowed, Beowulf gets a pass because it was first.

Shut up we’re not talking about Gilgamesh either.

Again, though, in those stories the point is something alongside. If you want to tell me the epic of Gilgamesh is more about his strength than his agony at the loss of Enkidu, you can tell me that, but I’ll disagree. If you want to tell me Beowulf is about “strong man rip monster arm off” then- well, okay, honestly? You’re kinda right there. Beowulf is mostly good because centuries of lit-heads have been retranslating and artfully reframing it to make it good; at the time, maybe for a bit of surprise.

Most stories in the old days of “don’t fuck with this colossal supernatural power”, very notably, do not have the human winning. If they do at all it’s in tiny ways, or is immediately turned into a loss, or results in the human becoming a colossal supernatural power.

Or is Greek, but I’m discounting those because in Greek if you’re not a God or a Titan, you’re not a colossal supernatural power. Sure, Perseus defeats Medusa, but Medusa wasn’t really that powerful.

Sorry, I’m getting distracted again. Beowulf. Back on track with Wednesday.

The ending fight sequence is just there because it “needed” a big fight sequence. That’s why it’s there. The Hydes are big vicious monstery monsters and Eniddith is a werewolf because they “needed” to have a big monstery monsterfight, and Eniddith is only struggling to “become a real werewolf” (sidenote: unfortunate truscum vibes there) because it heightens the tension of her being able to fight the Hyde, but also… does it?

I don’t think it does, because here’s the thing – so much of Wednesday’s plot is so corporately formulaic that it becomes predictable.

“Oh hey, Tyler’s beefed out, and Weddy’s alone with him. I sure would be worried that she’s defenceless and going to die, except I’m sure that either Goody will somehow return to give her magic powers that let her fight him off, or that her werewolf roommate who’s been struggling to transform will finally be able to- oh there we go, yeah.”

Also, Weddy (I’m calling her Weddy now, you can’t stop me, only she can do that) – how dare you not quote Mark Twain? How-

Tyler: “So-and-so said you were dead.”

Weddy: “You might think I’d take this opportunity to say ‘Rumours of my death have been vastly overstated,’ allowing me to deploy what is arguably one of the more well-known witty riposte quotes of all time in a perfectly-framed response, whilst also indulging in my own personal recurring love of literature given the quote’s origination with Mark Twain, and also given that it is in line with my general penchant for both biting sarcasm and erudition. Instead, I’m going to make what might be a poor-to-middling Monty Python reference; I got better.”

(“She turned me into a newt!” “A newt?” “Uh… I got better!”)

Is it a Monty Python reference? I can’t say for sure, but why would Wednesday not take the opportunity to quote Mark Twain? Alright fine, he’s not exactly gothic literature, but I can’t bring it in myself to believe that Weddy as depicted wouldn’t harbour at least some degree of respect and appreciation for his wit, especially in this instance. It was perfectly framed for it.

It was perfectly framed for it. What, did they write the script with that quote in, and then get denied the usage by Twain’s estate, and then just… decide to halfheartedly rewrite her response because they didn’t want to axe the line entirely?

That exchange is sort of representative of the overarching issue with Wednesday’s plot and construction: a lot of it is just kind of there. Maybe it’s there for a laugh, or a reference, or just because corporate said it should be to satisfy genre requirements, but it doesn’t actually serve a purpose – and/or, a much better and more purposeful alternative is right there on the shelf, but is passed over in favour of… I don’t even know.

I can only return so many times to “this show isn’t as clever as it thinks it is”, and unfortunately it infects other things: the riddle, I know, is not clever. Name-dropping Jekyll and Hyde in such a way as to make it clear they’ve either never read it or certainly never understood it, is not clever.

…is the finger-snapping?

Snap twice – that’s the eventual riddlish output, and smirking smugly as her namesake show is, Wednesday raises her hand and snaps her fingers twice in swift succession which we all recognize from the theme song of the Addams media (which again, noteworthily is not used here), and for the life of me I can’t decide whether it’s clever that they did it.

So many other things that this show presents as clever simply aren’t. Some things really absolutely are.

The finger-snapping?

I’ve sat with it a while and still can’t decide if co-opting that was a sly stroke of a reference, or thoughtless aping. I’m leaning toward the former, but at the same time it does feel like one more bit of the Addams Family which is chopped up and disfigured as fuel on Wednesday’s fire.

Herein lies a personal gripe about the show: I’m just tired of shows doing that. I’m tired of gritty reboots. I’m tired of Riverdale making everyone edgy and making Grundy hot, tired of New Sabrina or whatever it was even called – tired of all of that.

I’m tired of someone saying “vampire” and then showing me something that eats sunlight and garlic, and hates bats, and then seeing them smirk smugly to themselves as if they’ve fooled me when I expect the vampire to prize darkness because it’s a vampire.

Congrats, you said we were playing poker and then put down an Uno Reverse card and pulled out a chess king and claimed you won. Whoopee for you, I suppose.

However, I want to talk about Wednesday some more. We’ve gone over some world stuff, some character stuff, some plot stuff – I want to hit up technical aspects, too, some of which have been mentioned before.

Much of this show existed to serve the CG team. It’s not quite “2000s animated films having something flying toward the screen for no reason to show off that they’re in 3D” levels of bad, but… it’s pretty bad. Note: I’m not saying the CG is poor quality – or not all of it – but that its inclusion, its deployment, is egregious and pointless at times.

Oh shit I just realized – it’s Logan’s Run.

It’s caught between Midichlorians and, I don’t know, Bill and Ted in its worldbuilding – no, Midichlorians and Johnny Mnemonic is even better; between “explaining how this works down to the ground” and “who gives a fuck how it works look how dope it is that that guy got sliced to pieces where he stood!” (and to Johnny Mnemonic’s credit, it absolutely was fucking dope). It’s very Wolverine: Origins in its approach to its originating IP. It’s trying to be every YA story whilst getting tangled up in gritty CW reboots on its worldbuilding, and for the CGI/SFX?

Wednesday is very Logan’s Run in its approach to SFX, and that is to say that it doesn’t really know what special effects are for, it just knows that they’re part of the budget and they’re something audiences and critics mention so they’re something that needs to be in the show.

There are a few VFX aspects that felt bad or egregious at first but actually aren’t: two that spring to mind are the Hyde’s eyes, and Xavier’s spider.

The Hyde’s eyes, at first glance, just look like bad CG; is this Gremlins? Beetlejuice? This doesn’t feel 2025 so much as, oh, 1995 probably? However, I’ll give them a pass as it quickly feels like the eyes are there for recognizability – so you can see Xavier’s drawings or the digital photos and immediately know “oh shit, that’s the monster” – (though there’s still an issue with recognizability re: Weddy and that prophetic painting) and even better than that, in fact, those eyes end up being a very different reveal when we see Tyler transform. They feel bad at first, then feel like they’re there for a certain narrative reason (which they do fulfil), and after that are revealed to have an even deeper narrative purpose.

This is good storytelling, good structure; this is how the whole show should have been.

Xavier’s spider, at first glance, seems like an egregious bit of CG. Like a scene that exists for no reason other than to have an effects shot – however, it’s not, and is in fact intended to make us worry that he’s created the monster. Although, even in that, it’s self-defeating, as Weddy clearly shows that Xavier’s drawings when come to life are no stronger than the ink or graphite that makes them up – indeed, when she slaps the spider, it appears to scatter into graphite dust, which renders the concept of Xavier having made the monster somewhat laughable.

Even if he had, presumably a moderate rainfall would have turned it into swiss cheese.

Overall though, Wednesday as a show doesn’t really know what to do with its special effects – from CG to practical effects – and this shows. Some things are oddly framed or focused on, like the mermaid/siren swimming underwater (comprising, somehow, bafflingly, the entirety of Bianca’s plan which always wins the Poe race): these shots are long and they don’t really seem to know or care how they’re shot or framed. This is ignoring the fact that because of human reflex being insufficiently trained out, this guy does not look like an aquatic humanoid but rather like a human holding his breath underwater – the camera itself doesn’t really know what to do.

“I just point at the guy, right? The guy who’s swimming? I’ll just hold on that, for a while. Just right at him. There we go.”

It’s shot like a parent’s home video of their kid’s soccer game – “there he is. There’s Connor, number 23, centre of the screen, see? There he is. There. Him.” It’s not awful but it is a bit lazy and as far as I can tell, was really only done to give more effects shots. Although, even at that, it feels like they recycled some footage there – which only makes the oddly protracted nature of the shots all the more pronounced.

There are also some clashes between the CG/FX and basic logic, in the boat scene as well as the statue burning. The boats: would that break a canoe in half? Really? Pushing it sideways through the water against what appears to be a tethered floating buoy? There’s no way, and it doesn’t even look vaguely believable on screen. He should’ve flipped the canoes, or lifted them up out of the water to breach themselves on rocks when dropped, or- again, so many better alternatives were right there but left untouched.

The statue burning: so many issues; one jerry can of gasoline poured into a fountain full of water would not be a massive conflagration if it was capable of burning at all; one jerry can of gasoline would absolutely be smelled by everyone present, trust me as a mechanic, gasoline is a strong and lingering scent; also, are we supposed to believe this fire is hot enough to melt the metal statue? Is it made out of fucking solder? Lead? I’m not saying it’s impossible to melt brass or bronze with fire, but a bit of gasoline in water outside? I don’t buy it. Should’ve cut to Thing dropping in a bottle labeled “fire salts” from Nevermore’s alchemical stores or something. Also where the hell did the black powder come from? Also also, if you’re already using black powder, why not just explode the statue? Also also why the hell use the black powder at all?

The answer is: for a dramatic scene. For the bit, and that’s so frequently the answer with Wednesday, and that’s a problem. Partly because it’s not a great way of making a show, but honestly it can be – Tank Girl does almost everything just for the bit, and it’s pretty fucking great honestly. The larger problem comes in the mismatch of Wednesday also trying to present itself as an intellectual thriller, a tangled web of mystery and suspicion which you should try to pull free the disparate threads of in search of answers.

It’s just jumbled. Pointless effects shots can be fine, but most of them in this don’t even serve their own purposes well: what felt more dramatic to you, the statue scene or Weddy playing “Paint it Black”? How about the story about Nero, or the birthday party clip with the pinata full of spiders?

So, so, so much of Wednesday happens just for the bit, and it’s irritating because it does so in ways that fly in the face of either our reality, or in the reality of the world. Thing lights a trail of black powder leading to the fountain not because it’s a good idea when they could’ve just lit the fountain directly (nobody saw the trail of black powder leading up a ramp into the fountain which means nobody would’ve seen Thing in the same spot), but because it’s a dramatic shot. Eniddith is a werewolf not for any real plot reason except for to fight the Hyde at the end; she doesn’t even win, by the way. Tyler’s dad shows up and shoots him nonfatally – that could’ve happened thirty seconds earlier and it wouldn’t affect the plot at all. Eniddith is literally just a werewolf for the monster fight effects shot, and for a bit of “familial pressure” stuff that doesn’t really actually get addressed at all it just gets put down and then left.

It’s just there. So much of it is just there – not for any purpose, not because it makes sense, not to fulfill a need.

It’s just there.

Weems says “put your best face forward”, inexplicably getting a common idiom wrong so we can cut to a pair of faceless students of some magical sort looking at each other in what’s supposed to be an unimpressed fashion I’m sure, and why? They’re not important, are never seen again, they’re not named. They’re not Fangs or Furs or Scales or Stoners. It’s just for a joke “HA HA HA SHE SAID FACE AND THEY DON’T HAVE FACES HA”.

What passes for a joke perhaps not far off from what passes for a riddle.

Some of the FX shots are just patently bad. Fester – overall, very much liked, and stepping into big shoes from Christopher Lloyd that was never a guarantee – but his lightning fingers when he’s reawakening Thing? It- Palpatine did this better fifty years ago, give or take. That’s just inexcusable. Youtubers with demo versions of Adobe AfterEffects do a better job of electrical arcs. I don’t even have anything witty or humorous to say about it, really, it was just bad.

Similarly, one scene leaps to mind for camerawork: the Hyde’s cave. At least I can be a little witty about it, though…

Look, I get it, camerafolks. Steadicams are big, and they presumably didn’t fit in the cave very well, but holy shit could you have used a tripod or something? Shit, for ninety seconds this show turns into the Blair fucking Witch project for the camerawork, and it’s not for any reason; in Firefly and Serenity, the team used shaky camerwork to show rapid motion – things are flying, and quick, and they’re hard to follow, and it’s great. In contrast, the camera gets bolted to the floor during any tense scene. In Kingsman, they use fluid camerawork to counteract frenetic action – it’s what makes the fight scenes so good and noteworthy, that chapel scene in the first for instance (or at least, it’s one of the things – but we’re not talking about the various Kingsmans right now).

This scene has no reason to be shaky. No other scenes are this shaky, not anywhere else, and the only thing I can figure is that they shot it in an actual cave and the camerafolks were unable to use their physical Steadicams for size, and nobody bothered to try to fix it in post. It speaks of not just amateurish technical stuff on the capture side, but also the processing side, and really moreso of the whole production: somebody should have said something.

Somebody should’ve been on the set to make a note to pass on: “steady these shots up”. They should’ve been in the editing suite to see the shots against everything else and say “hey this is odd, tighten these up a bit to match” – but that’s the thing, it really doesn’t feel like anyone on the production team sat down and watched the whole show end-to-end. It feels like they only ever got dailies, only saw clips at a time, and decided since those were good the whole thing must be, but a show should be more than a collection of disjointed but individually passable parts.

I ragged on the statue burning scene a bit, but it would’ve been a perfect fit for a different show. It would’ve fit fantastically into the Addams Family movies we remember from childhood, with Christina Ricci playing Wednesday: those were less grounded, less real, less realistic. They were more about drama and spectacle and suspension of disbelief – Wednesday takes a jackhammer to Pugsley’s chest, but he’s fine. She hooks him up to batteries and there’s smoke and flashes of light and his hair’s all on end and face covered in soot – but he’s fine. Why, is he immune to electricity? Did it kill him and revive him? Is some spell at play? No, none of those. It’s just a silly, dramatic shot, don’t think about it too much.

That’s the problem: Wednesday, the show, wants you to think about it.

Sometimes.

Only sometimes, but sometimes, and that’s kinda the issue. It’s like this show was cobbled together from several different runs of source footage – some from a series that was shot to more faithfully capture that feeling of the Addams Family movies of the 90s, some from a gritty Riverdale-style reboot, some from a Descendants-inspired Disney version – and they weren’t even pieced together painstakingly with some vision of something greater being salvaged from the scraps, they were just kinda drawn out of a hat at random and put together.

It’s not like it’s a terrible show, but it’s so sporadic. A few great moments can’t save all the bad ones – and speaking from my experience, if you have a delicious hot turkey sandwich but there’s a tooth in it? You’re not going to remember the deliciousness nearly as much as the tooth.

I may have once gotten in a wrestling match with a cousin at a family party and accidentally lost a tooth into my sandwich without noticing. That’s not the important part.

There are some really great things in Wednesday. There really really are, and I want to talk about a few of them here now.

Ortega is great, which I’ve said before, but haven’t spent much on why – I’m hardly the first to say it. I think “I love Jenny Ortega” is about as controversial a topic as “Tom Hanks is good”, these days, but it’s not just the flatness. That’s a bit standard for Wednesday – and she does a good job of it – but what is really noteworthy about Ortega’s Wednesday is the pauses. The way she works a pause, holding it not just set off on a shelf but actively: she grips the pause between her teeth, holds it at the back of the throat not quite swallowed but neither spat out, and it’s excellent. Little shifts of the face, of the jaw, of the eye – sometimes in redirecting or sometimes simply in focus – tiny little things that are easy to miss but impossible to miss the impact of. They portray Wednesday as a deeply, maybe even too deeply, thoughtful young woman – one who chews on her thoughts like a goat working over kudzu, and whose veneer of self-certitude slowly gets peeled away by the acerbic force of those pauses to reveal the deep anxiety underneath. Yet, she’s still self-certain. Both can co-exist, and thanks to Ortega’s very impressive acting (and I’m giving this one wholly to her, because as much as these little facets might be difficult to notice independently, they would probably be even harder to write on a script or give as on-set directions), they do.

Thing is fantastic. Thing exists almost wholly at an arm’s length from most of the show’s attempted worldbuilding – where the rest tries to ground itself in a modicum of magical realism (something which I like, but again, it gets itself tangled) whilst also having “don’t think about it” shenanigans, Thing just is. No attempt to explain is made. Instead it’s lampshaded with Weddy saying “yeah we don’t know what’s up with Thing really”. How are the physics of Thing? Dunno. Can Thing fly? Not exactly but also kinda. How much force can Thing exert? Eh, enough for the current scene – or not, if that’s funnier. Can Thing see? How does Thing sense surroundings? No fucking clue. Thing is pure rule of cool, zero percent Midichlorians, and it’s kind of great – but also odd compared to the rest of the show at times. The only thing I wasn’t specifically happy with, re: Thing, is Thing’s near-death and revival scene. I did like it for the character building opportunities that it gave to Weddy, Thing, and Fester, and I don’t even mind the fact that it’s still just sort of a “I dunno, let’s see” scene as opposed to anything based in fact or reality, but it felt a bit like forced drama. Something going wrong just to go wrong, another piece of “just do it for the bit, who cares?” which, as we’ve discovered at this point, is something of a recurring theme here. Mostly that only applies to the intensity of “oh no he’s really totally gonna die” that the show tries to push at us.

The show spends a lot of time pushing things at us. What actually happens, though, is… pretty much what we already knew would, with one or two exceptions. It tries so hard to make Ricci look obviously nonthreatening that it makes it clear she’s the bad guy; threatens Thing’s death so forcefully that we know Thing will survive – and Weddy too, of course, as I don’t believe there was anyone for half a second who thought that that death would take.

Sorry I’m supposed to be saying good things, and they really are here – they really are – it’s just that it’s so easy to get your foot caught in a bad one while you’re trying to walk over to the good ones.

Okay, I talked about Tyler’s arc and raved about that, but really truly, it deserves it. His arc was written by someone who is trope aware, who is narrative aware; I will say that overall he could be said to fall into a bit of the same thing as Ricci, in that the show spends so much effort trying to play him off as harmless that it makes him seem a bit threatening, but it comes across differently with him for a few reasons. He’s a love interest, for one, and especially being a masculine love interest for someone presented as a young woman, “forcefully harmless” is an understandable narrative choice, so it doesn’t raise the same eyebrows. With Ricci, we frown at the screen and ask “Why is it trying to hard to make her look harmless?” With Tyler, a young white man, we know exactly the fuck why he might be presumed as harmful. Additionally, he is right from the start shown as going to therapy, and we quickly find out he has a history of aggression and anger and acting out; these things dovetail well to let us develop suspicions and then soothe them, and as I previously said, the lynchpin that holds it all together is the fact that he’s not just bad, he’s heartlessly sadistically evil and wants to see Wednesday suffer.

The friendship Weddy forms are also really well-done: there’s a trio of them, centrally, consisting of her friendships with Thing, Eugene, and Eniddith. They all evolve simultaneously, dancing around each other well, and each of them stands well on its own and even stronger together: Weddy is already friends with Thing, but the depth of it shifts; not only does the plot have Weddy defending her autonomy and self-asserting with Thing, but it has her somewhat forced to recognize Thing’s autonomy as well, acknowledging Thing as more genuinely a person and not just an accomplice, a pet, or- uh, well, a thing.

Her friendship with Eugene is an excellent one as well because we can see the effects it has in him, pulling him away from some of his early Reddit-incel-light pickup artist BS; at the same time, Wednesday develops a sort of empathy for him that I don’t think she’s had before. She loves Pugsley despite him being weak, but she isn’t soft on him for it – quite the opposite, she’s harder in an effort to toughen him up perhaps. Her closest pet was a scorpion, hardly a defenceless animal. In Eugene, I think for the first time, she finds herself caring for something soft. Inherently soft, and in a way that she cannot protect the way she protects Pugsley; Eugene’s wounding also serve a narrative purpose in illustrating the stakes of danger both to us in the audience but also to Wednesday herself, but it’s what she does with that danger which is a change – with Nero, her scorpion, she mourned; with Pugsley and his bullies in the beginning, she attacked back; with Eugene, she puts in the much more gruelling and non-performative work of aiding. She’s not wailing in grief or screaming in anger, she’s sitting beside his bed (and giving Ortega ample opportunity to do that thing I contend she does so well in acting out her pauses, externalizing her inner thoughts through tension and subtle shifts) and it’s great. It shows growth in her as well as him, and they’re both outsiders amongst the outsiders – all of Weddy’s friends are, some more obviously than others.

(Note: I don’t necessarily love Eugene’s character arc, nor character, but a large part of that is because neither really exist outside of how they interact with Wednesday. He’s an unsexy lamppost.)

With Eniddith and Wednesday’s friendship, I’ll admit I wasn’t convinced at first. It felt a little too forced and was exceedingly clear that somebody on the dev team had seen Wicked (I mean come on with splitting the room down the middle and everything? Damn) and said dev seemed to have missed the point of that story. By the end, though, I liked their friendship arc a lot more, and think it stands as a very good one – it’s complex, including Eniddith’s friendship with Thing as well (and affecting Thing’s with Weddy, which she views at the outset as a given which cannot be threatened and which, when it wavers, startles her I think as much as Eugene’s physical injury toward realizing the risk of consequence of her actions). It wasn’t until the fight and breakup – and subsequent getting back together – of Weddy and Eniddith that I was really sold on it, but it’s a good exploration of how people can weather real disturbances to their relationship, both internal and external.

Weddy’s secondary friendships are also pretty good – with Bianca, for instance, transitioning them from eye-rolling villainesque duelling high-schoolers, through begrudging respect, to friendship.

The acting overall here was quite strong; Christie plays Weems as sharp and tense in a very tangible way, and really only has any issue whatsoever when it comes to scripting problems (like giving Wednesday a pass on what was called a hard-line issue, but then immediately saying “but nothing else and you’re not allowed to do anything more” and then getting mad at Weddy when Weddy doesn’t cue her in on further developments… as if she’d, y’know, done exactly what she had done and told Weddy to cease and desist). Ricci does a great job of shifting from “I’m a lovely loveydove” to “fuck y’all bitchfucks” – even if, again, I maintain that a person that hateful could not convincingly keep up that ruse for that long with that degree of exposure and integration. The mayor’s son does a great job in his somewhat smaller role, as does Bianca – even though both can be irksome characters especially toward the start, they’re well-acted and I like their arcs. Yes, there’s some slightly tedious elder-teen-to-young-twenties drama in here (I have no clue how old these children are supposed to be – I know Wednesday says her age at some point in reference to Shelley [I think] but I can’t recall it) but it’s not too bad and it makes sense. These people are, after all, in that kind of age bracket. I really can’t think of anyone who does a bad job in the acting department, but admittedly I need to discount Gomez and Morticia as undefinable in this arena because I just- can’t separate what was odd direction given to them, and what was odd acting.

Some of the scenes have issues, but some are really really strong; from a cinematography standpoint, one standout is the “Fire will rain down” written in flame, reflected in Wednesday’s eyes – fucking beautiful. It’s gorgeous. It’s the sort of scene that isn’t exactly groundbreaking in its conception – I’d wager that almost everyone who’s ever held a camera with an eye toward artistry has tried to catch “thing reflected in other thing” and especially “thing reflected in eye” – but the execution is just excellent. Underlined, of course, by Ortega’s pause-acting: the way her eye holds, eyelashes flicking just barely, leaving us uncertain as to whether she’s forcing herself to keep her eyes open as they’re trying to slam shut or whether she’s trying to shut them and incapable of making the action go through to completion.

This is why I rip into things, by the way. In what they get right – and in what they get wrong – there are recipes, guidelines, signposts for how to make something that’s great. In all of the things that are done well, there’s something beyond simple mimicry to try to get the same stuff right in the future, and in all of the things that just don’t land there are reasons why. Things which can be avoided. The reason I write these kinds of rants is for myself, for other creators and creatives and developers, to try to unveil some of that – it’s not about rules. There are no rules. It’s about awareness, intention; that combination of art and science.

Another scene that’s fantastic is the Dance Hall Deluge (trademark pending): the “prank” at the Rave’n (nnnnh I’ll admit that that’s the sort of thing that makes perfect sense for a school dance name, the kind of thing administrative staff would think is cool, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cause me to reflexively cringe slightly; it does, but that’s okay) dance, with what appears to be blood spraying out from the fire suppression system.

It’s not a flawless scene overall, potentially suffering from a few logical/factual issues – which one of these kids can drive an industrial vehicle of that size? I don’t believe it’s possible to run liquid from anything other than the water main into those sprinklers, but even if it is, how do these kids know how? Why didn’t the alarm go off, letting the sprinklers just start out of nowhere?

However, if we suspend our disbelief enough to say that this can happen, then the way it happens is great; the prank itself, in-universe, draws heavily from “classics” involving pig’s blood (referenced by Weddy) whilst at the same time the cinematography references other productions – Carrie and Blade springing most readily to mind but others as well – mirroring each other and combining in a sort of gothic/horror/americana pastiche that lets the factual stuff fall by the wayside. By framing it with all of those references and underpinnings, the show cues us in: “maybe this doesn’t make perfect sense or really work,” it swiftly whispers, “but just go with it,” and as we do, it’s fun. It’s an example of how it should’ve done all of its “vibes-based” stuff, to throw in yet another term for those to whom “rule of cool” is unparsable.

It’s also a very well-constructed scene in terms of the soundtrack (a regular winner throughout the show), and the way it cuts between shots – how long it lingers and holds on the sprayer nozzle before the deluge begins; it can feel subtle, but I guarantee if you shaved a half-second off in editing, this scene wouldn’t be as impactful. If you cut straight to a spraying nozzle, it wouldn’t have the punch.

The Gomez murder thing was pretty well-done, with really only one factual oddity: what “evidence” did the coroner supposedly cover up in that first investigation? We know he really covered up the Nightshade poisoning, but the note that’s left… what about “yeah the guy was stabbed” could have been a cover-up that would somehow implicate Gomez, exactly? We’re supposed to believe that the presumed coroner’s report of “stabbed to death” was a cover-up that pinned the blame solely on Gomez… but how? “I saw in the autopsy that Gomez had stabbed his own initials into the dude, but left it out of the report because honestly I was just a little high and he had a cute smile so I let him off. Also the fact that he stabbed his initials into a guy means he was definitely the killer.”

Overall though, it’s a good mini-arc: it’s teased well, and Gomez suddenly confessing is confusing but gets around the factual issue just mentioned above – and seeing what really happened, his confession makes sense, with him trying to defend Morticia. It’s well-acted on the parts of pretty much everyone involved, and the way the reveal unfolds is pretty well-done.

Slightly odd that the guy would choose to go get in a fight before poisoning everyone, though? I feel like if I was going to poison everyone including the dude I hated, I’d just… poison them. Also feels like Tyler’s dad should’ve addressed it after the fact somehow, he just kinda brushes past it – has been grinding an axe on his Gomez grudge for decades, but now just… drops the investigation? After finding out the kid was poisoned? I was hoping he’d keep investigating and find out more. Also Weddy should’ve taped the mayor’s confession.

Also “was poisoned” doesn’t actually remove the “murder” tag from “ran him through with a sword” (this wouldn’t be murder – but that’s what the accusation is).

“You shot that guy to death!”

“No he had terminal brain cancer and was gonna die soon anyway.”

“Oh, okay then.”

Anyway. The scene was good. The plot of it doesn’t necessarily bear out.

I want to take a second to compare, from a technical standpoint, the two villains in terms of their discovery within the narrative – and contrasting them against their false starts such as they are, and maybe against each other too.

I’ve talked about Tyler. Here, though, I’m gonna talk about Tyler’s tropes, because Tyler’s arc and reveal being great are proof that you don’t need to deny tropes. “The quiet white boy is secretly dangerous,” is a very common trope, and one which the inspirations behind are probably fairly well-known. Indeed, the show leans into these tropes a bit – Xavier’s warning-off of Tyler meeting up with a few pieces of evidence, leading to a minor confrontation between him and Weddy. It demonstrates what being trope-aware can give you in a story, because the show leads us toward those tropes and then has him defuse them. He feels understandable in his presented history of acting out against the Outsiders due to social pressures, and we believe that renders him harmless; he doesn’t say “I’ve done no wrong,” he says “This is what I’ve done wrong and this is why,” and so we believe there is nothing else there, and so does Wednesday.

This is why him being aware, cogent, and gleefully in favour of everything evil he’s doing, is so important. This is why it’s necessary, because otherwise the double-bluff just becomes some more mismatched details about the show that don’t add up. In having Tyler’s reveal be not just that he’s the monster, but that he truly is monstrous, it makes that make sense. The tropes behind him, the show’s awareness of those tropes, and how it treats them – leans into and lampshades them – in combination with his ultimate revelation, are what make his storyline so impactful.

It’s not about the fact that the tropes – or any other narrative “rules” – were followed, it’s that they were attended to, deliberately and consistently throughout. They were countered at times, in ways; even with the end, having his dad shoot him non-fatally, that’s a trope denial. The trope is absolutely “guy has to kill the thing he loves” (I am Legend, MCU [that’s a bullshit I may dive into later – you can’t destroy the thing you want most for something else because you de facto want the other thing more -but it’s how it’s presented at least], I had more but thought about Thanos and it made all my thoughts get replaced with simmering water).

Also we all know that his dad shot his mom, right? That feels pretty obvious. Not obvious, though: how the fuck getting into Nevermore works; Tyler’s mom was there… even though she didn’t yet know she was a Hyde, because her first transformation was triggered by her postpartum? Did she already have him, before attending school? Unlikely. Did she somehow know she was a Hyde before her first transformation was triggered? We’ve been told it’s impossible. Is there some sort of entrance exam that decides if you’re “An Outsider” without determining how – some crystal that glows around “Others”? If so, we’ve never been shown it or even had it mentioned – a major narrative failing, to have a gun suddenly shooting that didn’t exist earlier – and also, if that did exist, it feels like “hey this guy is magic but we don’t know how” would start to be a pretty major red-flag or at least cause for further tests, or- I don’t know, something.

Sorry I was supposed to be talking about things that they did well.

That’s the thing, though: they don’t exist independently. The successes and failures – they’re all there, in the same show, and they intermingle. They affect and weigh on each other – sometimes a success might buoy up a failure, improving it (the Dance Hall Deluge, for instance, overall good despite a few factual issues – and the arrest of Gomez is similar). Sometimes a failure might drag down a success, reducing it (Ricci’s character arc, a bit – overall good but soured by factual and narrative issues; some I’ve covered, some I’ll get to in a sec).

Sometimes a success makes the failures all the more obvious, as in my opinion happens most frequently in Wednesday: Tyler’s arc shows that someone on the staff probably knows how characters work, and that’s reinforced by strengths on interpersonal development with Weddy and her various friends.

So… why are there so many other character and inter-character things that are weak?

The cinematography in a few scenes is great to excellent; the fire reflected in the eyes, the Dance Hall Deluge, the camera focus during Tyler’s revelation, Weem’s first revelation as a shapeshifter fucking slaps, to name a few.

Why, then, are so many of the scenes either uninspiredly lacklustre or even outright technically sloppy like Wednesday going into the cave? Some cameraperson on set knew what they were doing! The proof is in those other good scenes, but the bad ones are still there and all the starker for it.

Okay, but getting back to tropes and how to work with them: comparing Tyler to Xavier, posited as the potential Hyde. Xavier is presented as a closer fit, but also with no awareness or motive – an unwitting and unwilling source of the attacks, which is a trope in and of itself; he is a Cold War Sleeper Agent, awaiting a secret activation phrase to become a sudden saboteur or assassin, or reporting back information and then forgetting it entirely so he thinks he’s not a traitor at all.

Them using these tropes specifically heightens the strength of Tyler’s reveal: we presume that he must also be a Sleeper Agent, because we’ve been set up to do so – when he turns out to be deliberate and willing, it stands at such strong contrast to what we expected that it’s a shock, a slap in the face, but because (and only because) they’ve been careful with his setup and backstory, it still makes sense. It becomes undeniable. All the stronger too, given his own double-bluff with his own tropes, so we’ve shuffled him into the “harmless” category in our heads.

To compare and contrast with one that doesn’t land quite as solidly: the other baddie.

I’ll say up front, I love that they didn’t make Lindholme’s therapist the villain. For personal reasons (I am married to a therapist and seeing them commonly cast as the villain is rough; in my opinion they’re about on par with other doctors, that is to say that yes there’s a sizeable cohort who are in it for money, power, or glory, but there’s also a sizeable cohort who are genuinely just trying to improve lives and help people heal) but also for technical reasons: it’s a straight trope and they never double-bluffed it like they did with Tyler. Lindholme is put in a “bad” space from the start, narratively and by the characters personally, and she never really emerges from it, so it’s good to see her somewhat exonerated by this trope denial.

Plus, I just like Rikki Lindholme. Shut up, I’m allowed.

Having Ricci be the villain is a big reveal, yes – maybe even a bigger reversal than Tyler’s, but in that way, kind of worsens it. As a show, Wednesday presents Tyler as someone to be worried about, with Xavier’s threats and the revelations of his past: it lampshades his tropes, and plays them deliberately.

Ricci, on the other hand – the show spends so much effort on making her seem harmless, soft, kind, like someone who is trying to help, and it just… it undermines things in a few directions.

Firstly, because the show tries so hard to convince us, it seems unconvincing. We feel inherently suspicious; “nothing behind this door, certainly nothing valuable, so just move along and don’t bother looking for anything to steal!”

Well I’m definitely looking behind that door. Looking, and then shortly thereafter, stealing.

Secondly, the entirety of what the show uses to make us find her harmless – her kindness, openness, acceptance toward the Outsiders and especially Wednesday – kind of flies in the face of logic. When Tyler reveals himself, we gasp because it’s a puzzle piece that fits; when Ricci does, her sudden furious violence feels too much at odds to everything else, and it only steepens.

I maintain that someone so hateful to a group could not convincingly hide within them for that long, not as some peculiar hideaway – “huh, nobody ever really sees her around” – but as a very much in-the-thick-of-it daily face and common appearance.

Ricci’s acting is of course great, she’s believable in her kindness and in her hatred both; that’s not the problem. It’s not that she acts it insufficiently – if anything, her chumminess being less well acted might actually have helped.

The reveal feels much weaker than Tyler’s, because the only facts that it really relies on are: she’s a human of the right age.

We’ve known that the whole time.

After Weddy discounts the now-dead Lindholme, she spends an agonizingly long moment deliberating who else it could possibly be, but we all already know who it is because there is only one human who is the right age. One “normie”, that is. In our house, we’d been calling Ricci as the lost daughter for a couple episodes, basically since the house was seen. Tyler has a presented history, warnings and defusings of those warnings, a history of seen action, and it all supports his revelation. Ricci just… is revealed.

They don’t use their tropes here, nor their narrative reveals – and I can kind of prove it with something my spouse provided: a fix. They’re very good at those.

Picture this: Ricci acts everything the same. Sweet and all smiles, helpful and kind – but, as the RA, she is regularly asked for advice or help by the kids and the teachers. Eniddith goes to her to ask for help dealing with Wednesday, and Ricci smiles; “she’s having a tough time, I think. Show her that you really care, show her that things can be fun here – all that dreary black surrounding her, that’s not helping. You’ve got lots of colourful things, spread some over on her side of the room!”

Blowups ensue.

Weems goes to her for advice; “sometimes kids actually crave structure when they’re acting out – don’t think of it as punishment or rigidity, but providing a scaffolding, a framework, support!”

Problems.

Again and again, different people with different problems, but with the same outcome: Xavier goes to her for advice about Weddy – or about Bianca – and she does the same; gives bad advice, under the guise of cluelessness and good intentions. Not advice that seems bad, advice that seems solid and well-intentioned, but is secretly designed to create friction and cause problems.

Pretend that you’d seen that, all season… and then she was revealed as being the traitor.

Suddenly, her reveal feels much stronger.

Now we see evidence all throughout the series to date that shows her antagonism, even though we didn’t really get it earlier and thought “she’s a bit ditzy” or “oh she really believes the best in people and that’s just sometimes not true, oof”; now we see how she’s managed to stay hidden amongst people she hates, by blinking her big eyelashes whilst sowing chaos around herself under the guise of helping. It provides her an outlet, a relief, as well, that makes it more believable that she wouldn’t just scream “fuck all you weirdos” and run away.

Again, this is why I write these things: highlight what doesn’t work, and why, and how it can be fixed. I don’t think there’s much – or maybe anything – that a story cannot make work. I think almost anything can make sense and hit hard: with the right setup, the right support, the right reveal. There are no rules to writing – no “you must do this” or “you must avoid this”. Use adjectives if you wish; deploy them not just freely but exceedingly so, rules do not exist. There are no rules.

There is only the internal context of your story, the external context of the world in which you’re releasing it, and the context of that to which it stands in comparison – other stories generally, and specifically those in similar genres or positions.

Internally, Wednesday’s context is weak at best. It can’t decide when to be a facts-based intellectual thriller and when to throw away its own consistency for a gag. It soars in some instances only to have those skills fail to apply elsewhere on the same issue.

Externally to the world, Wednesday’s odd but not bad in its obvious boomer and young-liberal coding, but the implication that a hardcore right-winger could, for instance, be a group leader at some sort of consortium of transgender people or queers generally, and be planning to slaughter every single one of them – and have them all suspect nothing – is… a hard sell. Trollposting is one thing, but this is every day and down to the details.

Compared to other works? Wednesday is caught between trying to be them (YA novels with their categories, Wicked with- oh come on, Pushing Daisies with its everything [the balance of whimsical and macabre in that show; go watch it, please go watch it], gothic horror writ large) and trying to avoid them (you can’t tell me the early dissonance wasn’t deliberate to “distance themselves from Addams Family”) and just trying to reference them (POE POE LOOK IT’S POE WE’VE READ POE WE THINK I- I mean we’re not actually referencing any of his works exactly but we said his name and there’s ravens, look! And Shelley, too, she- she did Frankenstein! And um- yeah that’s kinda it. But, witches maybe?) that it gets so tripped over itself. It can’t decide what it’s supposed to be, tries to be everything, and perhaps most sadly of all?

Perhaps most sadly of all, it actually succeeds. Maybe once or twice, at each thing… but that’s not enough.

If you make someone laugh twice, in an hour on stage, you’re not a comedian. Or, rather, at least, you haven’t been successful at comedy then and there – I’m not trying to say one bad show, one bad night, makes a ruin, nor am I trying to construct either Scotsmen nor Strawmen here.

What I’m saying is that putting up one set of bookshelves – even if you put them up great – doesn’t make one a carpenter. Changing one’s car’s oil once doesn’t make one a mechanic even if it’s without a hitch, cooking dinner once doesn’t make one a chef even if it’s a great dinner, and Wednesday really isn’t much of anything beyond “a show” for pretty similar reasons.

Is it a comedy? There are some jokes, but not really.

Is it a drama? There are some good dramatic throughlines, but not really. There is drama but that’s not quite the same.

Is it a teen flick? Has some of the underpinnings, but no.

Gothic? Sometimes. Ish.

I’m all for genre-bending and -blending. I’m currently aiming to self-publish a novel that I can’t describe as anything more brief than “An LGBTQ+ anticolonial steampunk adventure story with romantic and thriller elements” without feeling like I’m thoroughly misrepresenting it (and at that, I feel like it’s far from perfect).

There’s a difference, though. You can have a work be multiple things by succeeding at all of them, by doing them all well, and it doesn’t need to be laugh-a-minute to call it a comedy. Doesn’t need to be wall-to-wall tension to be a drama (and in fact please gods no ugh).

Wednesday isn’t bad. It definitely is not excellent, though, and to all the people claiming it is, I’d love to hear why. I’d love to hear counterpoints and debate over the things I raised here – questions, commentary, corrections even! I really, really, really would, and I’ll take them all.

If someone comes up and says “oh hey actually here’s a historical group of First Nations that were well-known for being blonde”, I’ll say “damn I was wrong, Goody’s in the good books now!”. If someone says “actually in this scene and this scene and this scene, you can see Ricci undermining things in the background, it’s just subtle” I’ll say “fuck that’s incredible I love it, thank you!”. If someone says “actually, Joe Crackbro at the end using magic and having nobody mention it makes perfect sense, because [insert thing here I literally cannot invent one for this other than what I’ve said and that clearly didn’t happen]” I’ll say “whoah, [expletive], that’s- how did I miss that? I can’t believe that it’s literally right there laid out on screen in an aside, and I just totally missed it!”.

I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, here, either. If you loved Wednesday, great! I would love you to share that love with me, even if it’s just “dunno why but I loved it!”. I would love to hear why, and what you loved about it. I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong for liking something – and, while I’m on the subject? Something being correct and something being liked are two very different things.

I like and even love some movies that are internally flawed, technically suffering, and more. That’s okay! It’s good, even! I do also try to stay aware of those flaws, though, and I find that important for myself; you don’t need to prize that.

I’ve truly forgotten so many things here, but that’s okay. Twenty thousand words is probably enough.

I’m going to watch the second season of Wednesday, at some point. I’m curious to see how they continue with it. Speaking of – so either the stalker is Xavier, or got the number from Xavier; unless Weddy gave out her number to other kids, but if so, we need to be shown that. Not to say it’s a rule, but-

You can’t call yourself a clever detective show if you fail or refuse to show the audience any of the clues until after the mystery’s been solved. Or rather, I guess you can, but I disagree and also fucking hate it. Imagine if Murder on the Orient Express had ended with Poirot saying “Alors, mes amis – the murderer is… Captain Davis Clancy, a disgraced British soldier who lives in these mountains and entered the victim’s room in search of records he had heard playing there!”

That’s not a fucking reveal. There was no prior mention of records in the victim’s room, no prior mention of this guy in the mountains, and far to the opposite effect great effort made to suggest that nobody else is around at all. That’s not to say it’s an ending that makes no sense – it technically makes decent sense, and even if it didn’t it would be allowed, but regardless of all that it fucking sucks as an ending if the point of the story is the murder and its solving (and in Orient Express it is). A twist is fine – Tyler was a twist in Wednesday – but the rest of it should align a little bit with the rest of your plot. With the point.

Wednesday, on the other hand, doesn’t know what its point is.

Is Wednesday a good show? Eh, it’s good enough. It’s less good than it thinks it is; it’s less good than I’d heard. It’s better than I thought it would be by the end of the first episode. It’s often entertaining even when it’s not good, and if you go into it with lower expectations – and a conscious reminder not to hold onto details too strongly – it might even be a quite good watch!

Wednesday is now streaming on Netflix, who pretty obviously did not pay me to write this review.

If you read to here, you have my eternal love and affection! Comments are open below if you agree or if you don’t. If you want to inflict this on others, here is a share link.

Jared

Review: “Wednesday” Season 1; It’s Woetime

Absolutely No Spoilers Short Review:

Spoiler-free Review:

Spoiler-filled Review, and Deep Dive Analysis:

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