mysterious quigley you have my heart

yes shauna is interesting and part of the reason i watched the show is because she was so compelling. however i think her character is suffering right now because of the lack of adult natalie.

i have a lot of thoughts to ramble and no place to put them so here we go:

1. i still enjoy the show, it has issues but i appreciate the original idea and themes and i haven’t been put off into not watching it

2. the writers have a clear racial bias. to the point in which it feels intentional. tai’s family being an important (and arguably one of the more well thought out parts of the adult timeline) of the story to basically disappearing this season is an obvious starting point. unless akilah is alive (and i’m not a believer of the eight survivor theory so i think she could be), out of all the adult survivors we have left, only one of them is a woc, who like i said her whole family pushed aside to spend most of the adult timeline cleaning up shauna’s mess

3. following on from my last point, mari as pit girl being the perfect decoy was good storytelling and i love her making a sacrifice to save her friends. but stripping her, wearing her hair as a costume and basically degrading her existence feels like such a racially motivated attack on shauna’s part. especially as its the 90s its not out of the question that someone shauna’s age would be acting in a racist way when there’s no true consequence to her actions. also on a side note, i do not see why it would make sense for mari to take off her trousers during the hunt, her jacket was a good tactic, but the trousers seem weird as she didn’t even hang them up or anything

4. i know for plot reasons they couldn’t all just jump shauna, but during this hunt she and lottie seemed to be the only ones into it and lottie was not much a physical threat. i think i would have preferred the girls to go deeper into madness for this hunt so it would be believable why they didn’t just think to point the gun and crossbow at shauna while nat went for rescue (especially as shauna didn’t have the gun on her for most, if not all, of the episode)

5. back to the poc characters being underutilised, it feels like such a waste that travis was killed so early on, especially now that lottie is dead. i still want to know why she thought the symbol was so important to put under him as we’ve barely seen it this season (and even before then it felt like we were going to get a backstory as to why it was important and we just never did) and if he actually wanted to feel close to it, since everything now is pointing to the opposite

6. the time jumps in the teen timeline feel counterproductive to the storytelling. they were there for nineteen months but it feels like they’ve just rushed through those months to get to dramatic bits of plot. i would have liked to see more of their transition into the village they built, and also how they didn’t starve during that time between the cabin burning down and spring.

7. i feel like a lot of characters underwent major personality changes in too rapid a period. shauna partially, because while she’s always had a violent/vindictive side they’ve basically turned her into wilderness joker, whose consistently super fast (i know she’s fastest on the team but she gave birth with no medical care and has been starving, there should be more effects of that), knows how to use guns and seems almost impossible to take down even though most of the people there had the same level of athletic training she does (arguably nat should be stronger considering she was hiking almost every day with travis looking for food and scouting the area). also shauna used to be really caring in the first season, she slept in the attic with tai, looked after javi and even tried to comfort lottie and mari at various points. and it feels like in both timelines that part of her personality has been completely erased, to the point in which she feels like a different character. but also van, in both the teen and adult timeline van used to be one of the most devoted followers to lottie’s beliefs and the need for the hunts, yet this season she seemed to be leaning away from it almost entirely.

8. while i like that the adult timeline is starting to connect with the teen one, and the teen counterparts starting to act like their adult versions, it doesn’t feel well thought out. by this point it’s clear that the girls are going to get rescued soon thanks to nat, but then how do gen and melissa specifically get close enough to hanna for melissa to know about her daughter and the tape? also how and why does hanna die because all the girls seem so clearly against the murder thing now that it seems they would kill hanna in such a short space of time

9. this is just a random thing, i feel like i’ve seen a lot of people say that pit girl in the pilot was always meant to be unsolved to set up the show for having dark themes. i disagree strongly just because the rest of the show seemed to set the premise that questions would be answered as time goes on (eg jeff the blackmailer) so it would’ve been weird to just leave that seen like that (maybe if they hadn’t shown misty’s face it would have made sense but since they did it always felt like something to come back to

10. while i’m so glad callie and jeff left shauna i really hope we don’t see them for a few episodes, just because i feel like the two them, especially callie need a break from shauna. especially since it seems like this whole time the only thing she wanted was for shauna to love her. however, i am also upset that we barely got any explanation of lottie’s death. like yes callie accidentally killed her but i feel like none of lottie’s behaviour was explained. like why she was let out of the mental hospital, who she was talking to, why light all those candles etc… it just feels like another woc being used to further the storyline of a white woman in this show which feels like a huge waste of all the interesting characters available

i love taivan, i truly do, but one thing i will say is that it would have been more interesting for them to break up over tai wanting to stay and van wanting go home, than if tai was worried about being out.

because yes that is a legitimate concern and it’s even stronger for tai as she would have to deal with being black and gay in 90s america, it feels a bit boring for that to be her main concern about going back and the reason they break up. the two of them had already been hiding their relationship and seemingly for a long time, so it’s not like van wouldn’t know the danger they would be in by being out.

i think it would have made more sense for tai to be concerned about their secrets/crimes being exposed because again she is black (a fact i feel the writers often forget) and knows that whatever punishment she faced would be worse than what others would be given. also the heartbreak of tai feeling she has to stay in fear despite the fact that other tai definitely influenced a lot more of her actions than she knows would have been incredible to see. there’s also the added layer of her fear of what other tai would do in civilisation that van wouldn’t be able to help her with as she had done in the wilderness. on top of that, from the little we’ve seen (and i wish we had more) van’s home life was not great. it was just her mum who didn’t seem very present or at least aware at times but van still loved her and wanted to call her first. then there’s tai who had two parents that she’s probably scared to disappoint based on how hard working/ambitious she seemed pre crash (and somewhat post rescue). this is all to say that in her emotionally rattled mind tai could have felt that she had more to loose when they went back. she was also right to point out that they needed a plan for hannah and kodi otherwise they were risking themselves for the hope that kodi actually intended to leave them to civilisation.