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The Mist

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Cast

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Reviewer

Paul Asay

TV Series Review

Bryan Hawk ‘s the first guy to see something amiss with the mist.

The soldier wakes up on a forest floor, unable to remember anything. He knows his name because of his wallet. He sees a dog standing beside him and assumes it’s his. But then the mist comes and … no more dog. What’s left hangs on a tree, beheaded.

He runs away into the hamlet of Bridgton, Maine. As the strange, thick fog rolls over the hills, he dashes into the local police station to warn them. Warn everyone.

“I’m telling you, there’s something in the mist!” He says.

They don’t believe him, of course. Why would they? But boy howdy, the guy’s right.

It’s not just the creatures in the mist that the folks of Bridgton need to worry about, though. The creatures in town—neighbors, classmates, friends—may be just as dangerous.

Cloudy With a Chance of Monsters

“The Mist” first wafted onto the pop-culture scene as a 1980 Stephen King novella, published in the Dark Forces horror anthology. In 2007, Frank Darabont directed a ferociously disturbing movie based on the novella. In both, the action takes place in and around a supermarket enveloped by an otherworldly fog and populated by creatures straight out of Lovecraft.

Spike TV’s weekly series take on The Mist broadens King’s original story. Gone is the supermarket, and in its place stand a shopping mall, a police station and a church, each stuffed with a handful of seriously stressed-out characters.

The Copeland family sits—separately—at the heart of the action.

Before the mist rolled in, Eve Copeland and her daughter, Alex, were at the mall, picking up some sedatives that Eve hopes might help Alex better deal with an apparent sexual assault that she suffered at a party two nights earlier. (The boy Alex accused of the rape is locked in with her.) Alex’s father, Kevin, begins the foggy siege at the police station with Alex’s gay best friend, Adrian; mysterious prisoner Mia; and Bryan (the guy with the dog). Kevin’s determined to find his way back to his wife and daughter and protect them by any means necessary. Meanwhile, at the local Catholic church, newly-widowed gardener Nathalie wonders whether nature is flexing some glorious muscle, while Father Romanov prepares for the end of the world.

The beasts outside get very little screen time by comparison. But when they inspire some screamtime, they make the most of it.

Thick as Pea Soup

Spike’s Mist can be an incredibly bloody show. Living, breathing people become mangled corpses in short order—often staggering into view missing a body part or two. And the beasties aren’t the only ones who do the killing: Nervous, angry, gun-toting humans cause plenty of havoc themselves. And as the situation grows increasingly intense, the citizens of Bridgton grow increasingly testy.

If that was all we had to worry about, that’d be reason enough for many folks to steer clear of The Mist. But the show also wants to dole out quite a bit of social commentary with its slaughter.

Eve, a high school teacher, got suspended from her school for teaching some explicit aspects of sex education to her students—teaching the show seems to support even if Bridgton parents did not. (An uptight, conservative mom is, naturally, one of the first people to be grotesquely killed.) Adrian wears makeup and makes crude references about other guys. It’s unclear what will happen in the church, as Nathalie and the priest parry over end-of-times belief systems, but I suspect the show’s creators have some sort of environmental/theological point to make.

Brief nudity and same-sex dalliances may be a part of the show’s menu, as well. Crass language can include s-words and censored f-words.

Yes indeed, the mist enveloping Bridgton is plenty dangerous. The Mist enveloping your television may be less physically threatening. But it’s still not a place I’d like to go.

Episode Reviews

The Mist: June 21, 2017 “Pilot”

Alex, a 16-year-old high schooler, has eyes for her school’s handsome quarterback, Jay. And when Jay invites her to a party, she’s thrilled. Alex’s mother, Eve, forbids it, but her more permissive father, Kevin, tells her to sneak out for a couple of hours after Eve goes to sleep—and be back by midnight. Alex does just that, but with disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman named Mia sneaks into someone else’s storage shed and digs up a satchel filled with money and passports before she’s caught and arrested. The only other person in the jail cells is a guy named Bryan, audibly obsessing over “something in the mist.”

That something is, as yet, mostly unseen. Sure, one man is attacked by largish skittering bugs: We see him in the final stages of his life, an eyeball and half of his face eaten away as a bug crawls out of his mouth. (Someone shoots him in the head, leaving a gory, gaping wound in the back of his skull and blood spatter everywhere.) But mostly, we just see the results. A woman whose jaw was apparently ripped off hammers at a glass door, her face a mass of blood and gore. The mangled body of a man lies in the roadway. The beheaded, disemboweled body of a dog hangs from a tree branch, the head some distance away. One man, in a panic, shoots someone else in the head with a handgun (we see the spray of blood), then turns the gun on himself and commits suicide (with another spray).

Two people fight in a barn. One is kicked repeatedly and slammed against a wall; another is hit in the groin, smacked in the throat with a pitchfork handle, then skewered in the gut by the same pitchfork. Other people get hit and knocked around. Eve slaps her daughter.

Alex says that she was sexually assaulted at a party: She was unconscious at the time, but her friend, Adrian, says it was Jay. (Doctors examining her say that there’s evidence of intercourse, but no sign of violence.) Adrian wears eye makeup at home (much to the frustration of his father), ogles high school boys during a football game and makes sexually charged jokes at a party. But he reminds Alex that he might still love a woman, too. “I don’t fall for gender. I fall for personality,” he says. (He’s nearly beaten up at a party because of his sexual persuasion.) Eve, a teacher, is put on administrative leave for teaching her class about sex. In a confrontation with a mother, she mentions condoms, oral sex and points out that the mother’s son watches porn on his phone. The word “whore” is written on Alex’s driveway. Alex tells her mother that she knows Eve’s own reputation as a teen was that of a “slut.”

Alex promises not to drink at the party, but does anyway, getting “very drunk.” (Something else might’ve been added to the drink as well.) Eve takes a pill and goes to the pharmacy to pick up valium. Two s-words are used. Other profanities include “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “f-g” and “p—y.” God’s name is misused three times, once with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused twice. Three f-words—silenced in the Amazon version of the show I watched—seem to be uttered.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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