Summary
“The Fact That Meteors Are Made of Glass Is Pretty Crazy!” sets up a small-town sci-fi mystery, but it isn’t in much of a hurry.
This recap of Chosen season 1, episode 1, “The Fact That Meteors Are Made of Glass Is Pretty Crazy!”, contains spoilers. You can check out our spoiler-free season review by clicking these words.
The vast, unknowable universe is easy drama. You only have to spit a few cosmological facts and you have all the mystery you need. That’s where Chosen starts, by reminding us how little we know and understand. The quaint Danish down of Middelbo needed that kind of mystery, especially when, as an opening narration tells us, the closure of its shipyard sent it spiraling into economic ruin. The timely arrival of a meteor gave it a boost of industry. Tourists came from far and wide. Citizens, like Emma, who is doing the talking, got jobs. Hers is as a tour guide, or at least it is until she promptly gets fired for accidentally demolishing a glassy fragment of supposed space debris.
Chosen season 1, episode 1 recap
This opening episode is titled “The Fact That Meteors Are Made of Glass Is Pretty Cool!” because the destruction of the supposed meteor chunk exposes the fact that Middelbo has been living in the shadow of a fallacy. Meteors aren’t made of glass, so if the chunks in tourist attractions are, something’s amiss.
Emma has a bit of a reputation. She can’t hold down a job, she asks too many questions, and she’s being fed a steady diet of prescription pills so that she doesn’t get hopelessly irritated with everyone around her. She sees mysteries and lies in everything, and it’s preventing her from living a happy, oblivious small-town teenage life. But the fact that everyone, including Hussein, her former employer and the man who has seemingly profited more from the crash-landing than anyone, seems intent on perpetuating this lie only makes her more curious. Her idiot boyfriend, Jonas — “I didn’t think you’d find out!” — cheating on her sends her spiraling, so she drunkenly interrupts the speech of Thomas Damborg, a representative of Astraeus, an international hedge fund that wants to turn Middelbo into the shipping center of Northern Europe. She bellows that the whole thing’s a lie, the meteor is fake, and Damborg is a con artist. Nobody takes her all that seriously.
Chosen episode 1 seems like it’s building to an unreliable narrator gimmick, like the slightly drunk housewife who thinks she witnesses a murder, but Chosen isn’t shy about proving Emma right. We see teams of worried-looking people gawping at banks of monitors, fretting about whatever’s happening in Middelbo. We see a convoy of trucks race into town, almost knocking Emma off her bike. Hedge funds are always bad. But at a temporary loss, Emma heads out to the meteor museum, still drunk, and falls asleep on the road outside. When she wakes up she’s greeted by a group of unlikely rescuers, including Marie, who’s 99% vampire, apparently.
These kids make Emma look like a skeptic. They’re the only ones investigating what’s really going on in Middelbo, which they think is a cover-up for an alien landing. The “meteor” was apparently a spaceship, and everyone has been lying about it since. But, recently, there has been a call-and-response signal from outer space, and Middelbo replied. This explains the banks of monitors and the speeding trucks. But it’s hard to take big news when it’s delivered by a vampire.
Suddenly, the rationalism of Damborg seems appealing to Emma, so she tries to finesse a job with him, mostly out of curiosity. That, it turns out, is what unites Emma with Marie. She isn’t as into the conspiracy as Mads and Elvis are — she just likes watching people. And the more she watches, the more she realizes that everyone is just as messed up as she is. Emma likes that idea. As the two of them sit on a bench and watch Emma’s doctor clandestinely meet up with one of Emma’s teachers, they don’t realize that the shadow of an extra-terrestrial is snapping the neck of a deer in the woods. But if you watch closely enough, you’re bound to see something you don’t like eventually.
