Summary
The clue’s in the title, but Girl from Nowhere: The Reset provides more than a few changes to the core formula, not all of which work in the premiere, “Sky”.
Change is good, or at least it can be, but it’s typically best if the change occurs for a reason. This is the key thing missing from the premiere of Girl from Nowhere: The Reset, which at least has the politeness to signal a bit of a shift in its title. The premise remains unchanged from the original incarnation of Netflix’s hit Thai series, but Episode 1, “Sky”, struggles to justify several fairly significant shifts in tone and approach that seem to be occurring, as far as I can tell, for no reason beyond being different.
The obvious change is to Nanno herself. She’s now played by Becky Armstrong, who is more than entitled to provide a new slant to the character. But the degree of slanting is questionable. After remaining unseen for a good chunk of the episode, Nanno arrives in a flurry of semi-supernatural giggling and then gets things over and done with in record time. The original incarnation didn’t have especially long episodes either, but this one feels collapsed to a detrimental degree.
It doesn’t help that there’s nothing interesting or original going on premise-wise. The titular Sky is being bullied by a much bigger student named Jom, seemingly for no real reason. The bullying is fairly extreme; Sky is savagely beaten and given a golden shower (!), which is pretty heavy as these things go. But it’s familiar. Jom’s tormenting of Sky follows the standard high-school bully playbook, including forcing the weaker kid to beat Sky or be beaten himself, and threatening Sky to write Jom’s essays for him.
This is where Sky rebels, filling the essays — knowing Jom won’t proof-read them — with a bunch of offensive remarks about the teachers, leading to his stern father being informed about his behaviour. Girl From Nowhere: The Reset includes this explanatory scene as a way to justify why Jom is the way he is; his father is a psycho, and maims him as punishment for besmirching the family name. It’s a grim story but, again, hardly an original one.
Jom responds to this by doubling down on his torment of Sky, visiting the same injury upon him, and then torturing him by setting his pubic hair alight, which he records, threatening to embarrass Sky by releasing the footage if he ever tries to act out again. This raises some awkward questions about what kind of school this is, since I’m not sure anyone would see that really extreme footage and consider it a laughing matter, and there’s even a scene a bit later where Jom pins a visibly battered Sky up against the wall right in front of the teacher, who barely seems to notice. But there’s no point splitting hairs.
At the end of his tether, Sky attempts to take his own life, which finally summons Nanno, whose services he was previously trying to enlist through forums and messages. This is the key thing introduced in Episode 1 that seems likely to really shift the tone of Girl from Nowhere: The Reset. Nanno is well-known, a kind of urban legend, and everyone seems to know who she is. That completely kills a lot of the character’s interesting mystique, since the entire hook of her — the show’s called Girl from Nowhere, lest we forget — was that she was totally inscrutable.
The new Nanno is a kind of pastiche of the old one, referring to herself constantly in the third person, and laughing like a maniac all the time, like the Joker. It’s very much a version of the character that exists in a version of the world where she’s a well-known celebrity, playing into the expectations that people already have about her, and this early in the season, I’m just not sure how I feel about that.
Because the premiere waits so long to introduce Nanno, her revenge, which is usually much more calculated and better paced, seems to occur on fast-forward. It’s also weirdly… silly? Her first play is to swap Jom’s classroom chair with a toilet seat, and her second is to remove his hand and replace it with a squeaky toy hammer. It’s an oddly slapstick outcome given how serious and brutal Jom’s abuses of Sky were, and it doesn’t exactly make the audience wary of what Nanno might be capable of.
The ending of “Sky” finds the title character offering his hand in support to a defeated Jom, instead of braining him in revenge, which is supposed to be a commentary on Sky not wanting to become the person he despises. That’s fair enough, but given that Sky doesn’t know anything about Jom’s home life, it seems unlikely he’d be this forgiving. The dude gave him a golden shower, for crying out loud.
Before Nanno disappears to move on to another school and another hapless victim, she almost plants a kiss on Sky, which is another uncharacteristic bit of forwardness that maybe suggests a bit more of a sexual connotation to this version. For now, though, it’s difficult to tell quite what the intention of anything is. Most of the same creative team is involved, so it’s odd for things to have jumped the shark quite this much, but early signs, at least for me, aren’t especially promising.
