The Mist - S1E1 - Pilot

Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode of The Mist, Eve Copeland (Alyssa Sutherland) points out that her husband, Kevin (Morgan Spector), loves their town, Bridgeville, Maine.

“It is pretty,” he says.

“Not if you look closely,” she responds.

And she’s right. The first episode of The Mist spent a great deal of time scratching the surface of Bridgeville’s residents, and, for the most part, they’re pretty shitty people who do shitty things. By the time the deadly mist rolls in and blankets the town, you’ll have at least a half dozen people you’ll want it to devour — you’ll get your wish with two of them.

Freshly fired from her job for teaching an unapproved sex education curriculum, Eve forbids their 16-year-old daughter, Alex (Gus Birney) from attending a party. Kevin goes behind her back and tells Alex she can go as long as she takes her close friend, Adrian (Russell Posner). Despite his presence, Alex wakes up at the party after blacking out and discovers she’s been raped. According to Adrian, her assailant is Alex’s crush and the high school star quarterback, Jay Heisel (Luke Cosgrove). Eve tells a tearful Alex that she must never blame herself, but it’s clear that Eve does blame Kevin; at least in part.

As the mist looms, the family is separated with Alex and Eve making a stop at the mall on their way out of town for a few days, and Kevin at the police station to file a complaint for the vandalism that occurred at their home after word of the rape got out.

One of the things that made the novella this series is based on (“The Mist” by Stephen King) and its 2010 film adaption of the same name so compelling was the idea that people with volatile personalities and history would be forced to work together to survive. This is definitely present in the television series. Kevin and Adrian are at the police station with Officer Connor Heisel (Darren Pettie), Jay’s father; Alex and Eve are at the mall with Jay; and to complicate matters further, two possibly dangerous people are cooling their heels in cells at the police station. One is a soldier named Bryan (Okezie Morro), who has no memory of who he is other than his name, and the other is a Mia (Danica Curcic), a woman arrested for breaking into a house to retrieve a bag filled with cash and a passport.

Bryan was the first to witness the danger of the mist firsthand when he awakened in the woods outside of town and watched it kill his dog. And considering that when we first saw Mia she was being beaten up by a man she later killed, hers might be the second biggest mystery of the series after “What the hell is in the mist?”

Into the Mist (And Other Bits of Note)

Something about what happened to Alex at the party feels off. I believe she had intercourse, and the medical exam proves it, but I also believed Jay when he said he was innocent. Is it possible someone else raped Alex and Adrian mistakenly ID’d Jay?

I need to see a bit more before I comment on the special effects, but what we got in the pilot was certainly frightening.

So far, Frances Conroy as Nathalie is great. What happened to her and her husband in the mist was shocking and terrifying.