Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, his first Prime Video series after a string of horror hits at Netflix, has a lot going for it. The casting and performances, led by Summer H. Howell, are fantastic, and the main story feels like a heartfelt, authentic update of Stephen King’s oft-adapted tale of teenage rage.
Other aspects of Carrie, however, are not so successful. King’s book suggests that Carrie White is not the only telekinetic woman out there with wondrous and terrifying powers, and Flanagan leans into that perhaps a bit too eagerly.
We get a little segment in every episode except the first that examines similar cases throughout history, going back to Joan of Arc. But when it comes to Carrie’s world, those broader stakes are a little unclear.
Some of the show’s plot holes could be deliberate, considering Flanagan’s stated hope that Carrie will run for three seasons. And we certainly don’t need every tiny thing spelled out or explained in detail.
But Carrie left behind so many dangling threads, we ended up feeling more confused than satisfied—an unfortunate end to a series that scored so many triumphs along the way.
1. What’s the real deal with Emaline?
Emaline West (Thalia Dudek) is an astral projector, something Carrie viewers no doubt realized long before the main character did. We all saw her clutching a blue cup at the party when everyone else had a red one, right? Clever use of props to continue your ruse, Emaline.
Emaline is seemingly there to encourage Carrie to develop her nascent powers. There’s even a training montage of sorts. But she has an angry undercurrent that rubs off on the impressionable Carrie. She wants the people around Carrie to hurt. That escalates from Chris’ broken nose in the school cafeteria to Emaline urging Carrie—in a vulnerable moment when she’s hardly in a position to resist—to let her “take the wheel” and make the prom disaster exponentially worse.
As Sue reminds us, Carrie is genuinely kind. So being possessed by Emaline is perhaps the only way she’d believably become a mass murderer.
But it’s also a letdown. Carrie is the ultimate revenge fantasy; that becomes diluted if it’s no longer about the protagonist reaching her own personal breaking point. Here, we get almost an evil puppet-master situation rather than true gruesome catharsis.
Carrie doesn’t come right out and say it, but there’s the strong suggestion that Emaline is the daughter of Amanda (Katee Sackhoff). Sympathetic to the perils of parenting a gifted daughter, Amanda tells Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan) that she tried to murder her child, but she “wasn’t fast enough.”
That tracks with the conversation Carrie and Emaline have in the getaway car at the end of episode eight, when Emaline sympathizes with Carrie about being attacked by Margaret.
However, Emaline keeps her identity cloudy on purpose. She doesn’t want any mind-readers out there to be able to track them. And she’s full of reassurances: “You’re a god. You’re a fucking hurricane. I am escorting you to safety from the monsters on our heels,” she tells Carrie.
We understand that there’s a network of superpowered women at play here, but where does Emaline stand with them? Kate Siegel’s mysterious character describes her as “dangerous,” and we get the sense that they’re actively trying to find her. Is Siegel’s group the “monsters” Emaline is referring to? Or does she mean Amanda’s network of assassins? All of the above?
And also: who shot Emaline while she was astral-projecting her dance moves through Chamberlain’s burning downtown?
2. What exactly was going on with the strangers at the prom?
First of all, considering Carrie makes a huge deal about the metal detectors that every person must pass through to enter Ewen High School—and the fact that the prom is nearly cancelled after all that violence in the community—how is it possible that Amanda is able to crash the dance while carrying a gun?
Adding to that, Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) spotting her across the room and hoping that she’s not a reporter, the worst-case scenario he can imagine, is also pretty incredible.
Meanwhile, three other strangers are also there; they’re closer in age to the students, but other than that, there’s no effort made to blend in. We assume that Amanda is there to shoot Carrie—based on her coffee-shop conversation with Margaret, that was clearly her plan.
But are the other women (played by Delainey Hayles and Cassandra Naud, who are also glimpsed in the first episode, and Ruth Codd) there to protect Carrie with their own superpowers? Are they there strictly to take down Amanda? Are they aware of Emaline’s influence? Why don’t they interact with Carrie?
3. What is Kate Siegel’s character trying to accomplish?
She narrates the vignettes that begin nearly every episode, and she’s also the person interviewing Sue, Tina, and other Chamberlain survivors. We assume at first that she’s gathering eyewitness testimony for law enforcement or perhaps making a documentary on the tragedy.
But as Carrie progresses, we realize this character is using her powers to control the narrative as well as her subjects. She psychically manipulates Sue into doubting what she saw at the prom. And she kills Margaret by making her heart stop beating, exactly the way Carrie does in King’s book.
So not only does Carrie not get to unleash hell of her own accord at the prom, she also doesn’t get to decide the fate of her mother. This isn’t the same sort of story change as, say, Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette) spontaneously inviting his buddy Carrie to the prom rather than being pressed into it by Sue, as Carrie usually tells it. Instead, these are significant alterations to the character’s journey.
In Flanagan’s show, Carrie flees Chamberlain with Emaline without knowing if her mother survived their house collapsing. But Margaret’s death becomes necessary because she later announces to Siegel’s character that she’ll never stop trying to find her daughter.
And also, she admits that her own emergent powers—briefly demonstrated in the debris pile of her home, proving Carrie’s abilities were inherited—have receded, and she doubts she’ll ever be able to access them again. Therefore, she’s expendable.
So, uh, what are the goals here? We don’t see the Siegel character’s face in episode one, but it sounds like Siegel’s voice is responding to the Delainey Hayles character excitedly reporting she’s received a psychic blast from a new girl on the scene. “Where?” is the first question, and presumably that’s when the hunt for Carrie begins.
What is that posh Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters-type place where they’re all hanging out? Do they go there to train? To plan? Beyond keeping tabs on other women with abilities, what is their purpose? Do they swoop in to take charge whenever a psychic blowout attracts too much attention? What’s the purpose of videotaping all those witness interviews?
4. Are these women actually running the world?
If a secret society of women with awesome psychic abilities really existed, united at last by the internet after suffering generations of isolation, it feels like they’d do more than just conduct surveillance and cleanup operations. But we get no indication throughout Carrie that the balance of power is at all different in this world, nor any mention of the women using their abilities for anything other than covering up the truth about Chamberlain’s mass casualty event.
It just feels like, if you introduce the idea that “they own the media” and “they have designed this entire world to keep themselves a secret,” as Amanda explains in ways that sound a lot like Margaret’s favorite conspiracy theories, there should be some payoff on that. Siegel’s character manipulating the memories of Chamberlain survivors feels pretty small-scale considering the suggestion of what Margaret might call a matriarchal deep state.
5. What happens next?
At the end of episode eight, speeding away from Chamberlain to an unknown destination, Carrie has seemingly realized she could take over the entire world if she wanted to. And she’s thrilled by the idea.
This is, of course, not where Stephen King ended his original story. (The 2002 made-for-TV Carrie movie did let her escape to Florida, though!)
We’ll surely know soon if Prime Video is ordering up more Carrie. Flanagan said he envisions a three-season arc for his tale, and more episodes would give him the opportunity to explain, well, all of the above. Will Carrie White and Kate Siegel’s characters become friends or foes? Will Siegel’s character get a name and maybe a shred of backstory? Please?
What did you think of Carrie? Did you have any more unanswered questions, even silly ones? Like, why did Tricia Helfer randomly pop up as a concerned parent at that school board meeting? Did Emaline actually think that the extremely pop-culture illiterate Carrie would understand her Star Wars Jedi reference? And speaking of, why would you cast Mark Hamill in a wacky cameo, only to completely disguise him under a prosthetic nose?
You can watch all of Carrie now on Prime Video.
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