Kate Siegel’s first hour behind the camera is the party episode, which is usually where a stretched adaptation starts killing time. “Social Studies,” written by Justina Ireland, does not. It gives Carrie White the ordinary teenage night the novel never allowed her, then lets Chris Hargensen turn the evidence into a feed. The cruelty is no longer a locker room. It is a brand with followers.
Spoilers for Episode 3 follow.
The cold open keeps building Adelaide’s unofficial history of gifted women. Angélique Cottin, the “electric girl” of 19th-century France. Eusapia Palladino. Stanisława Tomczyk. Annemarie Schaberl. Nina Kulagina. Extraordinary claims, accusations of fraud, usually from a man, then ridicule, disgrace, or worse. Carrie is already in the library reading witch trials and the murder of magical women, with last episode’s car-lifting mother still open in another tab of her mind. Emaline asks if she believes any of it. Carrie, who has spent her life learning what belief costs, answers that the consequences were certainly real.
Chris’s Carrie Red account is still private and already collecting requests. At Sue’s prodding she apologizes in person, calls herself a total monster bitch, and invites Carrie to a party in an empty McMansion. A rite of passage. She writes the address and a heart on the palm of a girl who does not own a phone. Carrie believes her. That is the whole trick.
At home, Margaret unboxes tiny security cameras and consults the empty chair with Ralph’s shirt on it. “You always think I overreact.” The funeral home is still trying to get her to collect his ashes before they are “respectfully disposed of.” She is working the night shift now, bumped from cashier to custodian, which means piss, crack pipes, and condoms in the S-Mart bathrooms. Carrie alters a lost-and-found T-shirt on the sewing machine and gets a ride from Stella Horan, who looks genuinely thrilled that the pilgrim child survived long enough to go to a party.
The McMansion is the first room where Carrie is not the problem. Tommy fist-bumps her and says she looks great. Chris steals her for a tour, a selfie, and a toast: Carrie is under her protection tonight, so nobody be a dick. Beer pong. Solo cups. Dancing. Tina Blake films her on the sly and recognizes the shirt as hers. Chris shuts that down by calling Tina dramatic. Billy Nolan shows up selling weed and pills, calls Chris a prom queen and a little princess, and describes the sound a pig makes when it realizes it is about to be strung up. They make out. Tina, losing the room, calls Brooklyn a Chris 2.0. Chris tries to throw her mother’s boyfriend’s daughter out. Brooklyn answers that Madison has filed for divorce from John. The fear of being replaced is the only honest thing Chris has said all season, and she cannot stand hearing it.
Outside, tipsy and euphoric, Carrie tells Emaline she used to dream about this. Parties. Friends. Being a character in a book. “I never had anybody like me.” Emaline says she found her people among the other headcases and weirdos. Carrie, happier than the show has let her be, decides she found hers tonight. Sue and Tommy finally sleep together upstairs and come back flat, dressing on opposite ends of the bed, both insisting it was fine. Book readers will recognize the temperature. Tommy’s next move is to get “your new bestie” home safe.
On the lawn, Carrie has to lie down and look at the stars. Tommy joins her and delivers the series’ first real Flanagan monologue, by way of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles: Earth men have a talent for ruining big and beautiful things. Leave it alone. On the drive, smiling, hand in the air, Carrie lifts the car a few inches off the road. Tommy feels a bump. He does not know what it was. Earlier she had reversed a raindrop. This is a different category of accident.
Chris, drunk in bed, opens Carrie Red and starts posting party photos she has been sent, with captions like “pregnant or fat?” and “sophomore slut vs desperate douchebag.” She takes the account public. By morning it has passed 350 followers. At school a kid shows Carrie the page. Her disbelief rattles the lockers. Emaline sees it. Peggy’s “Villains Aren’t Born (They’re Made)” rolls over the credits, and for once the needle drop is doing the work.
Siegel directs the party without turning it into a music-video montage, which is harder than it looks. Howell plays the happiness as something Carrie is trying on, not something she owns, and that is why the morning after hurts. Alison Thornton keeps Chris from becoming a cartoon: the apology is fake, the toast is a performance, and the 2 a.m. posting is the real girl, terrified of being replaced and building a stage where she cannot be. The Morton scene with Chris, telling her that who her family is in this town means nothing past the county line, is the episode’s sharpest adult beat, and it is wasted on her.
The hour still carries some of the season’s padding. The financial-aid conversation and the pig squeal are character notes that do not need this much air. None of that sinks the idea. King wrote a girl who was never invited in. Flanagan invites her in, lets her believe the invitation, and then puts the night on an account named after her blood. That is a meaner update than another bucket.
