This is not a thing-Absentia download
I don't know what I'm doing here, in this medium I haven't touched for literal years.
I don't know why I want to write this in any place that is at all public if you squint at it, but I'm certainly not going to court more hatred doing this fully in the open. And even if it weren't for the magic of troll friends, I truly don't want to dump on something others like. And yet, here I am.
On my most recent gym watch of Castle, I wrote a story-sometimes brief, sometimes a more substantial one-shot-for every episode from "Flowers for your Grave" up through "Hollander's Woods" (nothing exists in the series after that).
I'll go back to the beginning again at some point, but I do like to break up watches with something, and this time it was Stana's show, Absentia.
From the first, I knew I wasn't going to love it, but it seemed entertaining enough and Stana was (of course) very good. And that is more or less the only positive the show has.
I finished 2 x 10 today, and I swear I feel like I've been hit in the face with a 2 x 4, because of all the ways in which this is . . . just not good.
It is technically terribly inept. I grew to call the first season "Dumb people mumbling in dark places." In the last two episodes, there were long stretches of time when I had no idea where any of the characters were in relation to one another. The two male leads-Stana's character's ex-husband and a Boston PD detective-were not only unintelligible individually, as a reviewer of early screeners pointed out, it's all too easy to mistake one for the other, because of the mumbling and the fact that the lighting people seemed to knock off early. I would say that the technical aspects improve a bit in season 2, but that's not quite true. In a number of instances, I had no idea that something important had happened, the most notable being where Stana's character finds a clue in a murder victim's car, I had literally no idea that she had found a clue at all until all of a sudden everyone was making reference to this thing in subsequent episodes.
It's the writing, though, that I find so car crash, rubber-necking terrible. The plotting is completely erratic. By the end of the third or fourth episode of the first season, at least three people who were "definitely involved" in Stana's disappearance had already been bumped off, and oops! Not involved after all. The information that the character had been adopted (which turns out to be crucial) is not mentioned until at least episode 3, when it is dropped awkwardly into one of one thousand stilted, manufactured conversations.
There's yet another red herring cliffhanger maybe two episodes later: Stana's character finds evidence that someone has a very violent kink that involves details that mirror her abduction. The character films these kink sessions and names the women involved according to the same conventions as one of the already-discarded "definitely the killer" people-which is information that the person with the kink should never have had access to. After we learn this, too, is as swerve, this character is immediately rehabilitated and this huge coincidence (to say nothing of the intense misogyny of the kink) never comes up again.
The penultimate episode of season 1 is the frenetic stretch of mumbling in the dark. I am pretty sure every single character is ultimately tranq darted in the neck, and it is LUDICROUS. The final episode of season 1 is only 38 minutes long. It has clunky exposition crammed in. We learn that someone who has had maybe 10 lines is AT THE CENTER OF THINGS. This person makes a variety of rapid-fire statements that the audience has no chance to register, let alone evaluate. There is more mumbling in the dark, and then the show's other move, which is "panting in the forest."
There is then a bizarre "feel good" denouement between Stana and her ex. It's absolutely not earned, and when the ex tells Stana that his current wife is pregnant, it's like-is she though? She's just been drugged and tortured and starved for days, so . . . I'm thinking you might want to wait to tell anyone. The very end of the episode? No idea what happened. Stana's character has a panic attack. She sees an image of . . . a woman? Maybe standing over a body? Who knows? Not THIS audience, that's for sure. An online synopsis I saw claims that it is Stana's character standing over the body of someone we know for certain she could not have killed.
I'm going to stop there for now, but I am pretty sure there will be more of this catharsis.