“First Period” proved Mike Flanagan’s Carrie had a reason to exist. “Foreign Language,” written by Elizabeth Padden and directed by Flanagan, is the harder assignment: the morning after, when a short novel has to stretch into a school week. It is a looser hour than the premiere, and a few subplots wander. The scenes that matter still land, because Summer H. Howell and Samantha Sloyan are already playing a war.
Spoilers for Episode 2 follow.
The cold open is not Chamberlain. In 1982, a mother watches a car collapse on her teenage son, grabs the bumper, and holds roughly 3,000 pounds for nearly three minutes. The narrator — still sounding like Kate Siegel’s Adelaide — says the press called it hysterical strength. It was not. Once the woman knew the power was there, she could find it again. The cut to Carrie White in Principal Grayle’s office is the point.
Carrie will not name names, even with Miss Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) insisting Chris Hargensen led the charge. Pads and pamphlets on menstruation and safe sex. A plea that her mother not be told, because school is the first thing she has ever wanted to keep. On the walk home, mailboxes flop open as she passes. She notices. She does not yet have a word for it.
Study hall does. The girls watch the locker-room video like it is content. Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette) is shaken by a kid who thought she was dying. Chris and Tina call her disgusting. Sue coins the nickname Carrie Red, then looks surprised she said it. Later Tommy tells her a joke is not the same as throwing tampons. It is the episode’s most useful line, and also its most damning, because Sue already knows the difference and still said it.
Margaret’s new job is a small comic horror. As a grocery clerk she scolds a mother for “poisoning” a child with sugary cereal, refuses to ring up condoms and a vibrator, and offends her tattooed manager enough to get reassigned to maintenance. At dinner she tells Carrie the world will crucify her for thinking out loud, advice that does not apply inside the White house. Carrie dreams of her father at the bedside and wakes to something worse: Margaret has found the pamphlets. The prayer closet. No cushion. A ruler under the knees. Margaret marches the “pornography” back to Grayle, who learns nobody told her about the locker room and answers with the sentence the show is built on: information is empowering, you have to empower her.
The adults get a night off, and it is the stretch that feels most like filler. Desjardin, Seth Peist (Rahul Kohli), and guidance counselor Peter Morton (Tim Bagley) drink. Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti), expelled for attacking a classmate with a cattle prod and described as the reason the school has metal detectors, hits on Rita and calls Peist a pedophile on his way out. Rita admits she spent the day wanting to smack Carrie awake before the jackals do, and that a few years ago she would have been in that locker room. She and Peist end the night in a backseat. Fine character color. Not why anyone pressed play.
The next morning she runs the gym class into the ground until Sue promises the locker room will not happen again, then privately tells Sue to look out for Carrie, include her, set the tone. Carrie is exempt and sent to Morton, whose pride flag and photo with his husband she clocks without a script for what they mean. They trade lines from Great Expectations, A Wrinkle in Time, and Frankenstein — “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change” — and Carrie answers with a picture book about growing up kind and loved. She tells him she has been seeing her father, “and other things,” and that she is not normal. Bagley plays the reply without condescension. He lost half her world. Grief can look like anything. Then he takes her to the library. “We’re allowed to read all of them?” The awe is the best image in the hour, until she sees Margaret leaving with Grayle and the stack of books starts to shake.
In the restroom the vision arrives: blood on her face, a reflection soaked red, a cracked mirror. Emaline West (Thalia Dudek), the new girl Carrie just displaced as the school’s favorite target, has been watching. Carrie demands to know what rule she broke. Emaline’s answer is the thesis: you have all the power; they can only hurt you if you let them; don’t give them ammunition. There is no Emaline in the novel. She is the episode’s necessary invention, a peer who is not Sue performing guilt or Chris performing sport.
Chris’s night explains the sport without excusing it. Dinner with her mother Madison (Heather Graham), Madison’s boyfriend Kent Kirby (Gil Bellows), and his daughter Brooklyn. Chris announces they are not a family and detonates the table. Madison’s only hard line is that Brooklyn is off limits at school. On the phone, Sue says they deserved the laps and tells Chris to delete the video if she feels anything. Chris says she will. She does not. She opens an Instagram account called Carrie Red, uses Carrie’s terrified face as the profile picture, and puts three drops of blood in the bio. Using the real app instead of a fake social network is the right call. The home screen, compass and iTunes Store front and center, is not.
The Whites finish the dishes, and Carrie finally says the quiet part. Margaret promised she would not go to the school. Margaret will not apologize for fighting for her daughter, and will not be walked away from. Carrie flexes her fists. The bedroom door slams and latches without a hand on it. She smiles. Emaline was right.
“Foreign Language” is the sophomore stretch you can feel. The bar flirtation and the Hargensen blended-family dinner pad a story that, in 1974, did not need an hour between the shower and the next cruelty. Padden’s script is sharpest when it stays in the house or the library. Sloyan makes Margaret’s love sound like a threat without turning her back into Piper Laurie’s gargoyle. Howell plays the first real disobedience as relief, not rage, which is the more interesting choice. The Instagram account is obvious and still effective: the nickname Sue invented in a moment of weakness is now a brand.
The premiere asked what happens when the kindest kid in the building has never been outside. This one answers, quietly, that she is starting to understand the door locks from her side.
