#'teenagers are so out of control that they would kill themselves/others without parent/teacher/cop involvement'

[devilfruitdyke]

will i sound crazy if i say that 'WACKY new tiktok trend has teens drinking BLEACH en masse 😱😱🤯🤯🤯❓️❓️' is anti youth propaganda

[dani-camp]

overall review of season 1 of panic on amazon prime. i haven't read the book (though i soon plan to), so i'm not sure how much of what i love about panic is from the book or show but seeing as how lauren oliver wrote both the book and the screenplay, we can assume a good majority of it came from her and i'd like to give credit to her for that.

that being said, i think the whole concept of panic could've been so much more thematic and deeper with just a different villain. word vomit below.

THE THEMES, VILLAINS, AND ENDING

all small towns are the same. filled with secrets and scandals that everyone finds out eventually, crowded, seemingly inescapable. removed from the reality and sanity of the wider more diverse world. that's what we know from all shows set in small towns.

carp, texas is a character. any good show about small towns should recognize that that town must be a character, and when the small town comes with a deadly game, it makes sense for the town to be an ominous villain.

i wish this had been a more consistent thing throughout the show. after more than a year of lockdown, financial complications, continuous conflict between younger and older generations, upper and working classes, and politicians and constituents, it would've made sense to me for the story to align all of those villainous stories together. panic (the game), is apparently something that has gone on at least as long as all of the locals can recall. it doesn't make sense that the parents of the kids, or the cops on the force would be clueless about how the game works if they were once players and judges themselves. especially since the oldest character on the show, anne, seemed to know enough about it that she didn't even have any questions. how could this game survive in a town full of players and spectators? how is it still a mystery? there's not much keeping others' mouths closed if they're not concerned with playing and spectating privileges anymore.

personally, i would've loved if the judges-slash-villains were like the "elders" of the town a la the secret circle. i would've loved for anne to be the benevolent mastermind of the whole thing, believing in keeping the tradition alive and testing the wills of these kids before they go off into the rest of the world. she's already shown to be a risk-taker, a believer in respecting the danger and courage of things. the sheriff could still be in on it and running the numbers, which he keeps from the other judges, and keeps the cops from catching on or stopping it while playing the grieving dad for all of them. one is spurlock, who pretends to be a territorial nutcase every year while knowing the contestants are crawling all around his property and grabbing whatever innocuous trinket he's planted around. one's a teacher at the high school, who can identify which theatrical charismatic students would make good emcees, which sneaky secret-genius students could be spies for them, etc.

maybe anne and melanie cortez are friends. maybe when melanie reveals that jimmy intentionally threw the game and killed himself due to cortez' influence, anne could sick the tiger on him personally (not that i endorse the mistreatment of wild animals ofc). heather getting the money would make more sense when ray and dodge also really needed it. where the money even comes from would make sense. how the game survives would make sense. maybe that's even more cliche than the hiram lodge expy. but at least it would've been a more cohesive story.

and imo, panic (the game) and the character studies were the best parts of the show. it didn't need the drug subplots, or the gambling red herrings, or constant mystery about who was crazy, who was a liar, and who was just desperate. it could've just been a show about teenagers trying to get ahead in a world that has told them they are powerless by literally risking everything they have (their futures, their bodies, their lives, their cars, their phones). teenagers don't have a lot. and $50,000 could be life-changing and life-saving for all of them in a world the renders you financially dependent on your parents, who hit you (bishop), lock you up (ray), steal from you (heather), control you (natalie), or manipulate you (dodge) for years and years and years after you're told you're an adult only in name. and this is only highlighted by the fact that most of the kids only have one parent or guardian to begin with.

like i said in a post before, the actual villain and the actual show ending kind of just felt like they were throwing conflict after conflict on the screen, pinned it on a character that the audience already didn't like, killed him, and then gave all the characters what they wanted anyways. it felt like hiram and riverdale and how he has a hand in politics, business, drugs, local gangs, and the mafia. and also a bad father and husband. and is also willing to kill teenagers and children for the lulz. cause he had a giant boner to pay off some debts? if you say so.

if what i read in the book is correct, this ending is not remotely in the book and was probably added to the show to give a surprise to people that already read the book. or just to beef it up. i think they could've come up with something better and more original, personally.

KUDOS

i love that it's set in texas. though the southern accents come and go with much struggle, i love that they mention the rodeo and take it seriously. i love that the cops wear cowboy hats. i love that they acknowledge the nature around the setting through all the farms and animals and insects. i love that there's a lot of anxiety around pay, employment, drugs, and reputation without completely losing the charm and beauty of the surroundings. being from a small town in south carolina, it really felt so familiar.

i loved the casting for heather, she was a very natural actress even though she always had me wondering what other wavy-haired blonde actress she was reminding me of (the answers were jessica rothe, kathryn newton, or angourie rice, by the way). jessica sula always kills it, and did a good job of not playing a character that gets killed off this time. the acting and characterization for dodge was good, though we lost his mysterious-spartan-ambitious bits at times and then he was just another white boy plotting and swinging at people. moira kelly is always great, but given very little to do. shame.

i loved the writing of the relationship between heather and her mom. i thought it was on point with french and his mom on the oa. reminded me quite a bit of jlaw's character and her mom in poker house. i see from a brief summary of the book that this was not heather's first motivation for joining the game in the book and kudos to them for fixing that. it looks like they tweaked dodge's goal from killing ray to hurt luke to instead be to arrest luke, which works so much better with dodge's character imo.

i loved some of the smaller characters and details. i loved loved loved both diggins and summer and the idea that these two were handpicked just to be emcees--maybe because i was such an insufferable talkative teacher's pet/go-getter/theatre kid that i know i probably would've been tapped for it had i grown up in carp. super small detail but i love how they just casually mention that sarah is ray and luke's half-sister. maybe because i was the kid with the huge complicated family in a small town and i know everyone would often look at me and my siblings and cousins and ask others how we were related. i loved that natalie was allowed to be really nasty and still a sympathetic character. i loved troy. you really do have to be a badass to be androgynous in a small town. i loved that they showed brief glances of their home life. i loved drew and how he was still involved even though he wasn't competing.

GRIEVANCES

on the other hand, some characters were just really unnecessary. why did adam and troy ever get storylines? why were natalie's dad and christine given so much to do when a lot of it was telling us things we already knew? i'm not sure why dayna had (very much well-deserved) angst about her family's ableism when there was no follow-up to it. why were there scenes between heather's mom's abusive sort-of boyfriend and ray's older brother? why did the photographer have multiple scenes? we barely know them!! all these scraggly white men look alike!! why were leela and hunt multi-scene characters? it was so quick and irrelevant that i didn't even get the actual explanation, but bishop and natalie were judges for some reason? and sarah found the money? heather made up stories and was teased to be a writer? there was an underground drug den and a bunker under spurlock's house? abby aborted a baby? some kid pulled a gambit and died on the spurlock farm? because of the game or because of drugs? and there were several mentions that one character used to date another character in the past, that one character had this occupation or this habit, and i honestly couldn't tell you why they wasted script paper on it, much less actual production and air time. feel free to let me know if there was more plot relevance to these things that i'm just missing, cause that's entirely possible.

also... why was little bill? he was only around to freak heather out, tell us that anne's nice, and remind everybody that hey, people in small towns do drugs!!! and they die from it!! and when he and/or his body are burned alive in a house all the main characters got out of, it's mentioned a couple times and then never again. and there's already plenty of other characters whose storylines and development completely revolve around drugs and anne being nice to them. so why. honestly, i found it kind of offensive and potentially racist, but i don't think it's my place to talk on it so i'm gonna take cues from others on that matter.

next, ray. i'm just gonna say it. the casting was not good there. ray nicholson acted the role well, don't get me wrong. but he looks at least a decade older than a high school senior. it was off-putting. it made the heather x ray scenes super uncomfortable, so much so that i can't ship them even though i truly love a good girl/bad boy, enemies to lovers, belligerent sexual tension ladykiller in love type of thing. but i just couldn't like ray. he could not appear to be some kind of impulsive manchild to me when he instead came off as an overgrown bully taking advantage of barely-legal girls and bullying high-schoolers and taking their money when he should be working a full-time job as a mechanic or something. yuck yuck yuck. and even if i can see the appeal of their relationship to the narrative, not sure why heather chose him over bishop other than he wasn't going off to college (even though I figured heather was going to college since she got the money?)

the pacing was really weird. i think they were trying too hard to end every episode on a cliffhanger or something, because it absolutely butchered the tension of every scene it happened in. they constantly revealed really big things off-screen while keeping the filler fluff i mentioned above on-screen.

can we, as a society, stop making cop characters anything but vague villains who get in the way? we really didn't need to know anything about their personal lives. like, at all.

also, why did cortez call his wife "caramel" in the first scene with her? had me confused af. thinking caramel was a cat i missed or if he was shaming her for eating candy or if she was drinking caramel-flavored wine or something. what kind of pet name is caramel? what the fuck.

CONCLUSION

honestly, between panic and the wilds, i think amazon prime could really benefit from bringing on some writing consultants or test audiences to prevent this kind of incohesive and inconsistent writing from happening in the future. it seems to be continuously holding back a great story from being an epic one.

that is all to say that only something i love a lot can inspire this many thoughts about it, and now that i've finished all ten episodes and am about to start the book, i will be diving straight into the fandom, thank you.