A sheltered girl who's only read the Bible and the books her cool next-door neighbor sneaks her arrives in a school whose library stocks the most argued-over books in America. Director Mike Flanagan is definitely making some statements here.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Seen something in episode 3? Drop the frame The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Twenty minutes into the pilot, a whiteboard is already mapping the universal themes of To Kill a Mockingbird, with Scout, Atticus and Boo Radley drawn out in circles. A show about a girl the whole school has decided is the monster opens with a lesson on a town that picked its monster too.
Right after the gun drill, Carrie quotes Anne of Green Gables and the principal catches the reference. Anne Shirley is the original misfit with a temper who ends up adored by the whole town. Carrie's version of that story goes differently.
Stella, the neighbor, lends Carrie a 2005 YA novel about a brilliant loner who goes to school dressed as a character from a sci-fi movie so nobody has to meet the real her. Handing that to Carrie White is either the kindest thing anyone does in the show or the most on-the-nose. Maybe both.
Stella's latest drop for Carrie is a birdhouse, and the sticky note on the cover ends in LITERALLY. The mailbox was apparently too obvious.
Five books on a library table, and every one of them has been yanked off a school shelf somewhere in America. Carrie White, whose mother considers reading a gateway drug to hell, is sitting in a public school with the banned-books starter pack.
A kid in the library reading The Exorcist. Blatty's novel came out in 1971, King's in 1974. Margaret White would read it as a how-to.
A 2015 picture book parents read to babies, and the whole book builds to one promise: "And I'll love you, whoever you've grown up to be." It is in Carrie, a show whose entire premise is a mother who made the opposite promise. Maggie should have read this one.
Tommy Ross, the nicest boy in Chamberlain, has a favorite book, and it is Bradbury's story about people who arrive somewhere beautiful and ruin it. His line in the show is the giveaway. "We Earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things." If you have read the 1974 novel you know why that lands. If you haven't, finish the season before you look it up.
The one book in the whole show where the misjudged girl gets the boy, the town admits it was wrong, and nobody burns anything down.
Guidance counselor Peter Morton quotes it to Carrie: nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. She tells him she doesn't like scary stories. Bold position for the lead in a Stephen King adaptation.
Meg Murry: awkward, furious, gifted in ways the adults can't measure, and she saves the day by loving someone harder than the villain can hate. A Wrinkle in Time has been challenged by religious groups for being too witchy and by other religious groups for being too Christian. Margaret White would ban it twice.
Dickens gets two quotes in this show, which is one more than most of the cast. We need never be ashamed of our tears, and life is made of ever so many partings welded together. It is also the novel with Miss Havisham, a woman who stopped every clock in the house at the exact minute she was humiliated and has been wearing the dress ever since. Margaret White would call that a lifestyle.
Carrie, hallway, backpack, paperback open, spine reads THOMAS and ends in VELT. That is either a Roosevelt biography or a very specific prank. The frame everyone shared called it the Matildafication of Carrie White, which is the right read: Matilda is the other telekinetic girl who found her power in a library. Matilda got Miss Honey. Carrie got Margaret. First correct ID gets the credit.
