First recap of the NOS4A2 series, Season 1, Episode 1

Cold's opening is no more frightening than the first scene of AMC's new supernatural horror drama NOS4A2. We ended up in a strange-named town called Here, in Iowa, where we met Danny, a teenager who spends the night alone while his mother gets caught by her boyfriend. Danny is really disappointed.

And suddenly, with all the fanfare of a Christmas miracle, Danny is no longer alone. "O Christmas Tree" begins to play through the static of his television. A sugar cane appears at his door. And right at the end of the street, you'll find a beautiful classic car – a Rolls-Royce Wraith from 1938, to be exact – with a back seat filled with beautifully packaged gifts.

When Danny decides to get in the car, the trap goes off. While sitting inside, an intruder slips into the house and eventually pushes a syringe into his boyfriend's neck. And when Danny's mother fled to the yard to save her son, an attacker comes up behind her and slaps her neck.

Danny is naturally horrified by this sudden turn of events. But even as he sobs and screams in the back seat, the Wraith pilot – a gruesome 135-year-old man named Charlie Manx – assures him that the worst part of his ordeal is already over. They head for Christmasland, a magical place "where every day is Christmas day and where misfortune is illegal".

It's a beautiful opening for a TV series. The stakes are high. The action is tense and annoying. And the public is left with a million questions, starting with: who is this creep? And what is Christmasland?

So it's a pity when, after the credits, NOS4A2 table these interesting questions and turns out to be a show divided in two. On the one hand, we have the strange drama of Christmas themed kidnappings, with the incredibly old old man in his center. And on the other side, we have a family drama broken by the numbers centered on a Massachusetts teenager named Victoria "Vic" McQueen.

In theory, this could be the thing that gives NOS4A2 the thrill he needs to stand out in a landscape cluttered with horror dramas: the juxtaposition of the nightmare and the supernatural with the human-sized horrors and sinks of Vic's daily cooking. (It certainly worked in the very long and very good novel by Joe Hill on which NOS4A2 is based.) And while Ashleigh Cummings is clearly older than the high school girl she is supposed to play, she has the assets to play to credibly sell most of those beats.

The problem – at least in the pilot project – is that all around Vic falls so flat. We meet her less than a year after graduating from high school. She is a brilliant student and a talented artist who dreams of moving to RISD, but her colossal economic reality makes it functionally impossible. His father, Chris, is a demolition man and an amateur mechanic. His mother, Linda, is a housekeeper (with a strangely broad accent in New England) and does not earn enough money to propel Vic into higher education or higher class lifestyle. of his best friend Willa.

Vic is painfully aware that his situation is not excellent. The situation worsens at the end of the pilot project, when she discovers that her father physically abused her mother, and then abandoned the family to settle with a younger woman.

Much of the NOS4A2 The first is spent accumulating misery on Vic so that she can escape and discover her own superpower. To amplify the drama at this point, NOS4A2 makes most people around Vic one-dimensional cartoon characters. A rich and snobbish child presents himself in a breach on the inhabitants of alcoholic cities. Another outspoken says that Vic's parents must be stupid. And when Vic rightly apologizes for spending more time with these ghouls, Willa's mother gently pushed her aside – in the middle of a party – to suggest that Vic and Linda go to a nearby women's shelter. to get away from Chris.

With friends like these, who needs Charlie Manx? So Vic leaves his bike on a snowmobile and discovers an old covered bridge called The Shorter Way, which appears inexplicably despite the father claiming to have demolished it 15 years earlier. She quickly discovers that the shortest way is a kind of portal. if something is lost, she can cross the bridge and find it.

In the first, Vic is still turning his head around his new bizarre superpower. But it's not hard to imagine how the shortest way could, hypothetically, be very useful if you are trying to find a kidnapped child (whose name might be Danny).

But NOS4A2 has a whole season to get there. For the moment, Charlie Manx has total control. And as the first one ends, it suddenly becomes clear why NOS4A2 Zachary Quinto, made up in the age of old age, embodies the old villain we met during the opening scene. The vanity plaque on Manx's car (and the title of the show) is not just a cute word game on the most loved cinemas Dracula flight. Manx is really a vampire. It only keeps energy, no blood. At the end of the episode, he looks younger for several decades, having undermined the boy's life that he kidnapped. And Danny went from a scared kid to a smiling little demon kid, with a terrifying array of sharp teeth.

It's a promising cliffhanger that alludes to dark places NOS4A2The first season might be ready to go. At the end of the first, NOS4A2 is half of a very beautiful, very strange horror drama. But a collision is clearly on the horizon, and if the story continues to accelerate at this rate, the other half will catch up in a short time.

• Standard reminder at the top: There are huge plot points in Joe Hill's novel that were not discussed in the first episode of the TV adaptation at all. If you read NOS4A2please do not spoil the twists of the story in the comments below. Be cool.

• In a third sub-plot that does not really pay off at the end of the pilot project, we meet Maggie Leigh, a librarian with her own superpower: she can use Scrabble blocks to receive cryptic but true messages from her. Aether, who has made her an asset for the unresolved crime division of the local police department. At the end of the episode, Maggie used it to discover that Danny had been taken away by THE WRAITH and that she could count on THE BRAT – Vic's nickname – to help her find her whereabouts.

• The first two episodes of NOS4A2 were led by Kari Skogland, a TV veteran with credits on similar AMT dramas The dead who walk, Fear the undead, and The slaughter.

• Jami O'Brien, also an actor, also has a long history with AMC, working both as a writer and producer on Hell on wheels and Fear the undead.

• Our quick look at other places on the map of Inscapes offers a multitude of Easter eggs to Joe Hill and his father, Stephen King. The Pennywise Circus is a nod to King's He. The Treehouse of the Mind is from Hill's novel Cornes. And the Lovecraft Keyhole comes from Hill's comic series, Locke & Key, who is about to get his own adaptation on small screen under Netflix.

• The name of Manx's unfortunate travel companion, Mr. Ives, is probably a nod to the Christmas man who expressed Sam the Snowman in the animated classic film of Rankin-Bass Rudolph the reindeer with a red nose.

• And although we are on the subject: Bing Partridge, the friendly guardian of Vic's school, is only briefly introduced, but his name, consisting of two separate references for Christmas, would certainly smile Charlie Manx.

• More fun with names: Vic shares a last name with Steve McQueen, famous for his motorcycle. The great Escape.

• The first is dedicated to James "Faz" Lafazia, who worked on both NOS4A2 and Stephen King pastiche of Hulu stone castle.

• Manx teases Danny about a game he will have the chance to play in Christmas. This is called scissors for the vagabond. It looks fun!