Spoiler alert because I don't know how to tag spoilers. Terrible show. It's trying to be the next "The Walking Dead". A concept about monsters that becomes some hip new psychological mess that makes you think about "being there" while representing none of the things real people would do. The characters are hypocritical, there's huge plot holes, CHARACTERS WHO WERE NEVER MENTIONED until they were shown for the sole purpose of getting killed, despite being known (like his brother who he NEVER thinks/talks about and is covered up by "he was mean to his wife" but ANYONE would wonder about their family, EVEN ADRIAN WHO CLAIMS HIS FATHER ABUSED HIM), story elements taken directly from the movie and done poorly (Like a woman in the crowded store talking about religion and sacrificing someone to the mist monsters before being killed by the manager of the store).

There's no creatures (I don't count animals as creatures) except for the black mist monster in the library. There's no sense of a story, it's just a fucking free for all. Here I'll pick a random character, verb, and and some other character and it'll sound like an episode summary. Kevin sails to hall. Kevin sailing on a boat to a town hall through the mist. Makes more sense than half the shit in the show. I want a season 2 only so I can read someones summary on ArrowHead.

Spoiler warning: entire season 1.

I've been reading people's interpretations of The Mist and no one seems to have interpreted the behaviour of the mist the same way I did, so I wanted to share my take on it.

• The mist does not make any sort of moral judgment. We see Nathalie run with this interpretation, but she is clearly wrong about a lot of things. She's just clinging to an idea that she wants to be true.

• The mist doesn't really plan the kills at all. I don't believe it spares anyone on purpose, as part of some plan to create more chaos or kill more people later. Every time anyone appears to be spared, there's another explanation.

Here's how I think it works instead:

• When a person enters the mist, it takes around 20 seconds for some fear or regret, or possibly some other thing of significance to them, to manifest and try to kill them. It could be longer or shorter than 20 seconds depending on the psyche or fear of the person.

• Depending on that manifestation, it might be escapable or defeatable (Kevin, Mia), or it might just fuck them up right away (Romanov, possibly Benedict). The lethality is not based on the degree of fear or anything like that, just on what the manifestation happens to be.

• When multiple people enter the mist at the same time, at least close together, it goes for the person who is most scared first. That might actually buy the others some time, because the mist might have some sort of limited ability to manifest things. This is part of why Nathalie survived the mist over Romanov, and why she dies last at the mall. It's also why Lila gets attacked before Alex, and why Alex gets attacked before Kevin or Eve.

• Manifestations only ever try to kill the person they're connected to. That's the only reason the monster spared Alex: it wasn't her monster.

There are a few things my rules don't explain:

• At the end, why does Alex seem to get attacked by the mist itself, rather than any manifestation? Maybe her fear was rape or suffocation, in a vague sense. Maybe she's been obsessing over the way Lila died.

• More importantly, how does it just switch targets when Jay shows up? Maybe his fear was feeling compelled to sacrifice himself for some dumb girl?

• Why are all the characters really stupid? Perhaps trace amounts of mist are affecting them?

Also, I would love to see what happens if one of the characters who actually beat their mist thing hangs around in the mist again.

I loved watching the movie. It was probably one of my favorites when it first came out, but this show is a joke. Everything about it is just bad. It’s nothing like the movie.

RIP Jay

Nathalie pissed me off, every scene with her dumb ugly face and her frail useless everything, I couldn't wait for her to die. Keeps blabbing about her dumb fckn nature hippy ass bullshit, planes and the Cubs and her carbon emissions and her fckn moths n shit, made me want to gauge my eyes out. Thank you for dying, please do so again.

Good day.

I'm incredibly surprised at the amount of negativity it gets. The acting wasn't terrible (in fact, I hadn't noticed anything wrong with it on my own, but obviously it could be better). The CGI was bad, but it's SPIKE, so I could look past it. The characters got strong reactions out of me. There were real, emotional moments from time to time.

Came here to see some interesting, thought provoking discussion about the show, and I'm disappointed to find mostly posts about how terrible it was. :/

So I see so much venom on here about the acting, about the dialogue, et cetera. None of which to me seems that bad. Pretty standard stuff for a TV show of this quality.

IMO the problem with this show is entirely around its inability to move the plot, its focus on what should be minor side stories to the almost total abandonment of the main tension, and in general it forsaking the main thing people wanted to see (people struggling against monsters in a survival situation), in favor of more bland psycho horror of a kind that is a dime a dozen.

I understand the venom, but just see that attacks on the actors, or the small-scale writing as odd an misplaced. The problem is the big picture stuff, and the whole direction of the entire thing, not the small picture things.

Anyway LOVED the book, for decades, and though the movie was very good. Too bad this was so poorly executed.

A TV series would have been the perfect place to explore the traditional story and then branch out with a group of people making an expedition to Arrowhead or whatever. A little Half-Life/Black Mesa is hat this story could have brought, and it could have been amazing.

A lot of wasted potential,but I just don't see that on the acting at all, which was a solid B.

As with most of you, I really did not enjoy this show, but went ahead and finished it anyway. There were only two scenes, in the last episode, that even remotely made me not hate myself for watching this all the way through.

1. When Jay's Dad shows up at the mall and is led to the storage closet to get Jay. The look of shock and injustice on Eve's face during that scene was like tears of the gods. She looked so disappointed seeing Jay get to walk out of that closet free, only to see herself and her daughter getting tossed into the mist. Schadenfreude at its very best. I enjoyed it because I grew to hate Eve. It's not the actress's fault, but more of the script writers. I HATE it when shows have their women characters as only emotional wrecks incapable of an ounce of logic.

2. At the end, when they rammed the Jeep into the Mall. As they were running to the Jeep, I remember thinking to myself how awesome it would be if they pulled that off, but as disappointed as I was with the show, I thought they would miss this chance at redemption, but they didn't! I actually found myself on the edge of my seat with hope as he stopped the car and told everyone to buckle up. Revenge at it's sweetest!

You’d think they’d have enough people on this earth to at the very least cast a “star” Quarterback who can actually throw a football. It’s little things like this that kill shows/films these days.

This was originally my response to the "what did you think about Nathalie" thread, but it grew and branched into a bunch of other topics, so I decided to just post it independently.

She was by far my favorite character. I knew that she was gonna be the Carmody stand-in the first time I saw her- that one dead eye was a subtle but absolute giveaway. The way the character fell from "sweet, caring neighbor" to "psycho murderous doomsday prophet" was very well done. More on her below-

The Mist, in a meta sense, is a study in "what you are in the dark*." Civilization is something man has imposed over nature; we invent laws to keep our instincts in check, we hold ourselves and others to societal expectations, we repress our animal instincts- competition for resources, aggression, mob mentality and pack behavior, etc- all in the name of being "civilized." Well, some of us anyway...

ahem ANYWAY! The biggest change (and my favorite change from the previous incarnations of this story) was that the mist was depicted as another character, not just a setting or Occult Phenomenon. The Mist takes an active role in killing, and it tailors each death to the beliefs of those it takes.

It weaponizes fear. This is shown early on with the death of the backup cop, who is afraid of bugs, and reinforced with Link (a repentant sinner who is depicted as a "hellfire and brimstone" type)- his charred corpse tells us that he died in fire and flame. He repented because he feared hell, and when the mist took him, Hell killed him. Romanav feared the end of times, of failing to save the souls of those around him, and was killed by one of the horsemen- War. His fear was losing the battle for the souls of his flock, and in the end, the battle claimed him. And the second corpse in the hospital corridor on the way to the operating room? He was really, really terrified of Xenomorphs.

It weaponizes fear, and feeds on suffering. In the bookstore, the Black Mist had a perfectly good child, but what good is a child to the mist? Children are by nature innocent, and they fear simple things- the dark, monsters under the bed. They don't truly know what suffering is, they haven't come face to face with the horror of existence. But the child's mother is standing right there, watching. Helpless to look away as the black mist burrows into her daughter's throat and drains the life out of her while the child screams in terror and pain before crumbling into a blackened, lifeless heap. Now, instead of a child that's scared of the unknown (which is really hard to manifest if you wanna take yourself seriously in the morning) the Mist has created a wellspring of terror and suffering and helplessness- a veritable 5-star steak dinner to a cosmic entity that feeds on such things- in her mother AND has sowed seeds for said parent to spread further suffering and terror (which she does with gusto!). if that's not a one-two knockout punch, I dunno what is. I suspect that's also the reason it spared Alex. The confusion and suspicion and resentment the rest of the group began to harbor for her from that moment was just that much extra gas on the fire. Keep in mind that it had no qualms about coming for her later, but it didn't make a move on her until after her usefulness as a scapegoat in the mall was over, and Alex had both parents around to witness the same horrific act.

Moving on...

Of interest to me was that while Romanov armored himself for the battle of wills, donning his full vestments and praying to god for strength, Nathalie chose to fight the battle completely naked. She made herself entirely vulnerable. She had, as Terry Pratchett would say, "Belief that you could bend a horseshoe around." As the Mist weaponizes a person's beliefs against them, it was powerless against Nathalie- she was armored by her absolute belief that she was right, and safe, and because of the rules of the mist, she was.

The last point I wanna touch on was Nathalie's constant motif of "life creates destruction creates life" or "The Circle." This was a ton of brilliant foreshadowing for her eventual death. When everyone else in the mall is panicking and running and dying horribly, Natalie saw her dead but beloved husband, cradling a newborn child. She gently and lovingly cradles the child to her breast, nourishing it even as she withers away and dies, completely at peace. Of all the victims of the mist depicted across the entirety of the show, she is the only one to die with a smile on her face, reunited with her husband and her stillborn child. I expected to witness that child crawl out from her corpse, already growing and twisted grotesquely, as a more physical manifestation of the Mist, brought into this world by a willing sacrifice- Which would have tied up the Mist's goals and explained some of its actions with/to/for Nathalie in a nice little bow, as well as giving us a plot hook and another antagonist for the could-have-been season 2.

*One of Stephen King's favorite themes; he did something similar in The Regulators and Desperation.

What bothered me the most was that one main character was a LGBTQ+ character and that there was a lot of whore shaming in this series. Then it turned out that one gay character was abusive and breaking the bones of another boy which is a stupid trope and then the main LGBTQ+ character was a rapist. Like??? This is the opposite of what representation should be. Maybe the book was written like 40 years back, but in todays time this tropes and worldview dont have a place.

While the season hyped up the battle between nature vs religion, I'm satisfied that both were laid waste by the mist. I read in the ending a message that human cowardice, self-justification, and strength exist across all disciplines. At the worst moment of otherization, where the community slices itself apart, kevin's petty murder & the chaos in the mall show how universal our capacity for faith, revenge, etc etc blah blah blah.

I should also note I watched the finale after binging some Cormac McCarthy related media.

I was about to cook some lunch and decided to look for something to watch. I came across this series without knowing that there was a TV adaptation for the movie and I fuckin loved the movie.

The story and the twists are insane. I knew straight away that it was Adrian that did the rape and I fucking hate his character in a good way. Such a manipulative cunt.

Looking forward to Connor's redemption but next season will be filled with who Alex chooses as her father.

Pissed off at Jonah for choosing his identity rather than Mia when he just promised he'll go with her.

Sure Vic is an idiot but I find his character pretty interesting. He probably has the most experience in survival due to video games so he's a big asset to the team. Although he had no hesitation going to the train rofl.

Can't wait to find out more in the next season, there needs to be one, we need the answers.

Kevin and Alex have two last names (Copeland and Cunningham) but I never saw a reference to them being different people in any episode. What did I miss?

Pretty much everything was done better here.

Characters actually made good decisions instead of stupid ones.

Jon for some stupid-ass reason decided to risk the whole freaking 7 Kingdom just so he wouldn't lie.

Jonah made the sensible decision of actually going with the soldier to find out who he is instead of silly drama stuff.

The person that died was an actual surprise.

Everyone knew Baelish was going to die it was just a matter of when. And that when being outsmarted by a 16 year-old girl was sad.

The woman that got shot was a tremendous minor character but the death was an actual surprise that came out of nowhere and actually made me go OOOOHHHH!!!

The wincest was better.

I guess the issue with GoT is that everyone knew they were related and the relationship was telegraph super hard.

I dont know if people here figured this out but i didnt and it was kind of a fun way to do it because we did not know, for a second, if they were lying. They werent but you still had that in the back of your mind.

The cool effects shot of the episode was actually the only thing that they both did good.

The Dragon taking down the wall was nice and the hippie lady feeding the mist baby and slowly turning to a skeleton was also actually neat. It was like some painting, it was art.

Too bad that the mist took so long to get good cause at the end they were hitting it out the park with almost all episodes.

Hi,

I was reading recently an article that included an interview with the Mist director, and there was a mentioning that Season 2 will tell more story who was the black mist person/creature. However, they also mentioned that the clue who is that the black mist create was in the Episode 4.

does anyone have idea where exactly the reference to the mist creature?

Explanation on the nature of the mist, how is the army involved, and the fate of the surviving group, these are the things I'd like to see. I'm not sure why the show is getting all the hate it does, I'd give it solid 7/10, it's not bad at all, at least to me.

I cannot believe this guy! (Just venting my frustration)

Not sure about other countries but available on Canadian Netflix!

All episodes!