The fifth episode of Mike Flanagan’s Carrie TV series for Prime Video is called “Physical Education,” written by Elan Gale and Alexandra Magistro, and directed by Kyra Sedgwick. And this episode is a doozy, in that it features both some of the highest highs and lowest lows of the series thus far.
Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie (which also happens to be one of the shortest the prolific author has ever written) into an eight-episode season of television has been a waxing-and-waning experience for Flanagan’s series as a whole. On the one hand, the show has done a consistently great job of interrogating the text in thought-provoking fashion, especially as it pertains to the updating of the time period, with this version set explicitly in the present day and embracing modernity in every way. This has resulted in some recontextualizations of iconic moments from King’s book or De Palma’s seminal 1976 film adaptation, as well as some unique fleshing out of everything including character arcs, themes, and entirely new developments, many of which work great.
But on the other hand, some of these changes have served to pull focus from some of the core artistic traits of Carrie as an endearing story, and nowhere is that more apparent than in “Physical Education.” I said in my review of the previous episode that Carrie had settled into a distinctly Mean Girls-influenced niche that I wasn’t opposed to, but was a bit surprising. Well, “Physical Education” carries that thread through to its logical conclusion, with the episode essentially bifurcating its time between doing a riff on the latter-half of Mean Girls for most of the ensemble, while Carrie gets shunted off to go do a riff on Stranger Things’ much-maligned episode, “The Lost Sister.”
Carrie episode 5 review: "Physical Education"
I’m aware of how insane that sounds, so let me add a few quantifiers here. Stranger Things (especially the earlier seasons) was an obscenely Stephen King-indebted endeavor. The character of Eleven was strongly inspired by Carrie both as a character and a text, so yes, saying this episode of Carrie is now influenced by Stranger Things feels very much like a snake-eating-its-tail situation, but it’s true. I don’t even mean this as a negative (I like “The Lost Sister” way more than most of that show’s fans do), but rather just an objective observation: Carrie goes off on her own little side quest of honing her powers with a friendly character (who also has powers but of a distinctly different variety), who encourages her to test out her abilities Luke Skywalker-on-Dagobah-style before it all culminates in an unexpected separation that leaves Carrie very emotional.
This is all well and good, just a bit odd. The bright-side of all of this is that this section of the episode does put a real focus on Summer H. Howell’s lead performance, and allows her to shine once again. Her take on Carrie as a character, even amidst some of the show’s larger ebbs-and-flows, has remained consistently phenomenal.
The other part of the episode is the more Mean Girls-centric one and gets the lion’s share of the runtime, as it centers predominantly on Margaret White, Carrie’s mom (as played to volatile and surprisingly nuanced perfection by Samantha Sloyan) becoming a tradwife conservative influencer on Instagram, in the name of advocating for parent’s rights. Yes, that is an objectively insane sentence, but it honestly does work within the context of the episode. She outs Chris Hargensen as the founder of the ‘CarrieRed’ account (the digital equivalent of the Burn Book, where Hargensen has been posting lots of uncouth things about students, faculty, and beyond, including Carrie) and then crashes a school meeting to confront Principal Grayle (as played by Matthew Lillard, who has been a real pinch-hitter throughout this whole series thus far) and live-stream her calls for Hargensen’s expulsion.
This whole confrontation is great, and is some of the best stuff that the series has done up until now. Gale and Magistro’s script is able to interweave numerous threads from across prior episodes into this single scene, allowing it to feel like an organic and altogether incredibly satisfying culmination that both offers an immense sense of satisfaction and shifts things into a new gear. The stakes are raised here; it’s a critical moment that serves as a turning point for Margaret White and the narrative as a whole, and Sedgwick sells the hell out of it. The final visual flourish of having the camera crane-in from atop the gym bleachers full of parents into a close-up of Margaret as she essentially radicalizes them into an angry mob is potent choice, and one that sees Sedgwick’s direction in lock-step with Sloyan’s fantastic performance.
Outside of Margaret’s side of this story, the episode also devotes a substantial amount of time to the fracturing of Sue Snell (as played by Siena Agudong) and Chris Hargensen’s (as played by Alison Thornton) relationship. Much like the Carrie and Margaret dynamic, which I have praised effusively in earlier episodes for being fleshed out in really compelling ways, Flanagan and co. have done a stellar job of restructuring the larger trajectory of Sue and Chris’ relationship. They start the series as best friends, but as was glimpsed in some of Carrie’s visions of the future in the first few episodes and the debut’s opening prologue, audiences know that isn’t going to last. So seeing them begin to find themselves on opposite sides of the lines being drawn here is absolutely fantastic. Specifically, the scene in which Agudong and Thornton have an emotional face-to-face confrontation in Hargensen’s bedroom towards the epsiode’s end is astonishing, with each of them rising to new heights within their respective performances.
The only unfortunate thing about all of these moments I just praised and described as some of the best in the series’ entire run thus far, is that none of them center on Carrie as a character. Again, I am very much not saying that every scene needs to feature Carrie in order to be worthy of the audience’s time, but in broadening Hargensen’s bullying to a school-wide campaign that targets everyone, the developments concerning the ‘CarrieRed’ account often feel less tied into Carrie’s story and far more generalized. It makes Hargensen as a character feel much more imposing and like a real threat, and the exploration of her motivations has been consistently well-handled, as has her blossoming relationship with Billy Nolan (played as a real piece of shit by Arthur Conti with aplomb), but it all also diminishes Carrie’s role in it by making her just one victim in a crowd of seemingly thousands.
And then the episode unfortunately ends with the payoff to one of the most baffling creative decisions of the series thus far, with the reveal of the ‘true nature’ of Emaline. To be clear, I think that Thalia Dudek is doing great things in the role; I’m interested in seeing more of them moving forward. However, the idea that this character’s motivations or ‘secret’ was anything less than common knowledge is outright silly. This is a character that told Carrie and the audience exactly what they were present for in their introductory scene, and then the show just spent the next three episodes pretending it wasn’t plainly obvious that their ‘joke’ had been the truth. I wouldn’t mind all of this so much if the show hadn’t paired this reveal with intercutting flashbacks to hand-hold the audience through the revelation, as if it was some mind-blowing thing that we needed to be tenderly walked back through. My hope is that now that this whole song-and-dance is done, the narrative can finally move forward with Emaline in a more interesting way without this bizarre non-twist waiting in the wings.
Verdict
Overall, “Physical Education” is an episode built primarily on real strengths, that showcases precisely where this iteration of Carrie’s heart truly lies. In the episodes to come, I remain optimistic that those passions will align more closely with Carrie as a character and her actual arc, rather than existing tangentially.
GRADE: C+
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