The Girl in the Woods: The Door to Tweendom

Deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, there is a door that holds back monsters.  A cult known as the Disciples of Dawn are charged with protecting the door and making sure none of the demons escape into our world.  This is the plot of the new Peacock Streaming Service show, The Girl in the Woods.  The series is based off of Crypt TVs short films, The Door in the Woods and The Girl in the Woods.  The series stars Stefanie Scott as Carrie, the main female protagonist, who runs away from her duties as a protector and escapes to the small Oregon mining town of West Pines.  There she meets Tasha (Sofia Bryant) and Nolan (Misha Osherovich), who befriends and helps Carrie escape from the cult.  Not long after Carrie arrives in West Pines, a relative of Nolan’s disappears and Carrie vows to help them get her back.

THE GIRL IN THE WOODS — “The Guardian” Episode 101 — Pictured: Stefanie Scott as Carrie Ecker — (Photo by: Scott Green/Peacock)

The plot of the series may sound familiar as it has been done several times before, and unfortunately, it has been done much better several times before.  As an older male, watching the first episode, I got the distinct impression that the target audience was a much younger demographic.  The dialogue and the storyline, all feel like something out of a “Y/A” novel.  For a first episode, there also was not a lot of information given on who Carrie is and the exposition we do get is mainly about the town of West Pines and the financial and environmental issues tearing the town in two.  There is a line that is difficult to determine on how much information needs to be given to an audience to keep them interested and informed and how much is too much that it causes the dialogue to feel forced.  The Girl in the Woods falls short of this line.  We aren’t given much about the world Carrie comes from.  I am not sure if the writers are assuming that everyone watching has seen the original short films, or if their intention is to gradually reveal this information.  If the latter, they missed the mark by not giving us enough to really connect with Carrie.  We know she has been through a lot, she is missing an arm and her back and face show scars, some from battle, others look to be inflicted as punishment.  In PTSD like flashbacks we see she was beaten by her own cult members and it was alluded this was punishment for being a lesbian, but this was not fully expressed in the pilot.  I do applaud the show for having two leads that seem to represent the LGBT+ community.  Carrie with the afore mentioned lesbian allusion and Nolan, who seems to be finding his gender identity.

The acting is what you would expect from a tv series like this.  The storyline has potential that wasn’t fully realized in the first episode.  The production value, as a whole, was “Okay”.  The settings are a bit dull, using a muted color pallet.  The one fight scene we do get left a lot to be desired.  If they were going for a “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer” vibe, they didn’t quite get it.  For a girl who supposedly was trained to protect the world from monsters from a different dimension, the bit of fighting we see doesn’t look like she was trained very well.   Carries mechanical arm also seems a bit clunky, and since it seems to be her main weapon at fighting the monsters, something a bit more eloquent should have been built.  The show isn’t bad, but it just didn’t have anything new or special.  It didn’t have that magic element that makes something unique and grabs the viewer’s very soul and makes them want to binge watch the entire season.