The party was the invitation. “Dramatic Arts,” directed by Axelle Carolyn and written by Dani Parker, is the bill. Carrie Red goes from a private joke to the thing running Ewen High, Chris Hargensen keeps playing friend while she builds the trap, and the show finally puts Carrie White in the hole where her father died. It is the meanest episode so far, and the first one that feels like the story has stopped warming up.
Spoilers for Episode 4 follow.
The cold open is China, 2010, and a traffic jam long enough to become a news story. A woman trapped in the heat sits on the roof of her car, breathes, and opens her eyes to find herself hovering. She drops and dies. The clip is dismissed as a hoax and goes viral anyway. The narrator’s line is the episode’s thesis: whether people believed she floated or wrote it off, they love to watch a woman fall.
Then the montage. Carrie Red is public, the follower count is climbing, and the captions have settled into a house style: dick licker, STD stud, bulimia teeth, meth head. Teachers are scrolling. Someone hides a bloody tampon in Carrie’s backpack and puts gum in her hair. Two girls fight in the hallway over a post. Miss Desjardin takes a hit to the face breaking it up. Tina reports the collateral with something like pride. One girl’s parents sent her to an eating-disorder clinic after a post called her a whale. A boy was outed to his family and his church. Sue is barely tuned in. Her period is late, she is dodging Tommy, and she is researching how often condoms fail.
Margaret, meanwhile, has discovered other people can be managed. She watches Carrie on the hidden cameras and fails to get off janitor duty. When manager Joanie will not help, Margaret dips a mug in a toilet and starts a rumor. In the break room, practiced indignation on, she tells two coworkers of color that Joanie has never said anything racially controversial to her. “Some people, they don’t care who they hurt.” Corporate suspends a baffled Joanie. It is the first time the series lets Margaret menace someone who is not her daughter, and Samantha Sloyan plays it as competence, not a slip. Love is still the motive. The method has always been available.
She cannot get Carrie to talk. “I’m here, if you need my help. It’s really the only thing that I am here for, on this Earth.” Alone on another night shift, Carrie finds the funeral home’s letter about Ralph’s ashes. His specter sits in the chair, then crumbles. The kitchen rumbles. She walks out barefoot. Streetlights flicker behind her. Sue spots her, brings her in, and Mrs. Snell bandages the foot. Upstairs, Carrie says the most she has said about her father all season. He was great. Complicated. Afraid all the time: radio signals, chemtrails, biological warfare, the deep state. She is questioning the paranoia, and she would not go back to the house. She would rather know what the world is, even if it is bad. At home she begs Margaret to bring the ashes back. The answer is two hours in the prayer closet.
The Hargensen money trouble stops being background. Ralph’s death shut down a construction job John had a stake in. Chris overhears and puts it together. John calls Carrie “the secret closet kid.” Outside, the Mercedes G-Wagon is being repossessed. Chris calls Billy. Bored by her problems, he drives her to an out-of-service overpass, holds a brick over traffic, and waits to see if she has the stomach for it. She calls him a psycho, then tells him to drop it. It clips a car. For these two, that is foreplay. Carolyn shoots the house argument with a split diopter, a De Palma quote that actually earns its place.
After school, Chris pressures Carrie into Billy’s car. Chris and Tina let her think weed gummies are candy. Tina films Sue buying a pregnancy test. Night falls at the site where Ralph died. Chris has spent the school day promising she will find whoever runs the account and “fuck ’em up good.” At the trench she calls the place haunted and points at the exact spot. Carrie, high, hears something, sees hands clawing out of the mud, and goes in after her father. She watches the cinderblocks fall again. “Daddy, I’m sorry.” Tina films it. Sue shows up, a stoned Tina gives Chris away, and the friendship that was supposed to survive all the way to Duke ends in the dirt. Sue asks what is wrong with her. Chris, for once, does not perform. “Take your fucking pick.”
Carrie walks. Mud, no shoes, no version of the night that was real. The scream is the biggest shockwave yet: streetlights burst, a windshield goes, alarms answer. Emaline is suddenly there, “just taking a walk,” thrilled the suspicion is confirmed, and walks her home. Margaret starts the tirade and stops when she sees her. Carrie breaks. “You were right about everything. They’re awful people, momma, they’re evil people. And I tried, I tried so hard, but they were just laughing at me the whole time.” Margaret’s answer, three times, is the turn the season has been waiting on. Tell me everything that happened, and we will make them pay.
Carolyn directs the construction-site sequence like a haunting that happens to be a prank, which is the right temperature. Howell plays the unraveling without winking at the audience that Carrie will get even. Thornton has the harder job, and she is the reason the hour works: Chris is more legible here than in the novel or any of the films, and still unforgivable. The Joanie plot is nasty and a little tidy. The pregnancy-test B-story is mostly a fuse. Neither matters next to the promise at the door.
The premiere asked what happens when the kindest kid in the building has never been outside. This one answers that she tried the outside, believed it, and came home ready to let her mother be right.
