Summary
Girl from Nowhere: The Reset tackles the always-relevant subjects of social media stardom, cyberbullying, and cancel culture in “Hater”, but a totally muddled message makes for a weak episode, despite a neat gimmick.
I haven’t exactly been complimentary of the first couple of episodes of Girl from Nowhere: The Reset, but after Episode 3, I wish we could go back to them. “Hater” is a real mess, revolving around a semi-interesting gimmick but muddying its message completely. With a needless, looping connection back to Episode 1, and a totally unclear angle on the many topical issues it raises, the whole thing plays out like an excuse to get Becky Armstrong in Harley Quinn cosplay, much more than a coherent episode of television.
This is disappointing for two reasons. One is that the themes — social media stardom, cyberbullying, cancel culture, etc. — are extremely relevant, and only becoming more so as time elapses. Another is that I really do like the central gimmick here, depicting a teenager’s embittered psyche as a literal battleground. But some half-decent production design aside, there’s a show-offy, Nanno-centric quality to even that, which lessens the impact of some of its cooler ideas.
Anyway, the plot of “Hater” revolves around a student named Jamie, who has a flourishing social media career on account of his live streams with his supposedly adopted dog, Hong. His classmates — especially the girls — love him, and he seems like a fairly decent, uncontroversial kid who just loves his dog.
His classmate, Hongtae, doesn’t see him like that, though. Hongtae has social media aspirations of his own, but his channel is a non-starter, and nobody seems to notice he even exists. Out of resentment for Jamie’s success, he runs a fleet of anonymous burner accounts, leaving Jamie endless nasty messages, but nothing ever seems to make a dent in his image. All this is, at least initially, fairly innocuous. Jamie isn’t super arrogant and narcissistic; he just likes his dog, and Hongtae isn’t a cartoon supervillain either — he’s just jealous. Even his own mother doesn’t pay much attention to him, instead electing to watch Jamie’s live stream rather than listen to Hongtae’s woes about being ignored in class.
This makes Nanno’s intervention in the situation a bit weird immediately. Why is she getting involved in this? Nobody is dangerous, nobody is being really severely violated like they were in the previous episode. It’s a bit of a nothing situation. But Nanno nonetheless shows up and presents herself as a super-fan of Jamie, pushing Hongtae to take even more drastic action. His Hail Mary play is to accuse Jamie of sexually assaulting Hong, and somehow, this accusation takes off and gains traction. #BanJamie becomes a trend. And Hongtae — or at least his burners — start to gain followers.
In his head, Hongtae imagines himself excoriating Jamie online as battering him with a baseball bat. This is where Girl from Nowhere: The Reset Episode 3 excels, I think. When Jamie blocks one of the burners, his attacker in Hongtae’s mind disappears. When the assailants begin to build up, and Jamie gets physically overwhelmed, his cutting his stream short causes himself to disappear. It’s a neat way of depicting the overlap between social media and reality, and also equating verbal violence and bullying with a much more real and physical kind of mob justice.
Nanno continues to lead the counter-protest — she shows up in Hongtae’s mind playground in a pink leather jacket — and get Jamie back in the fight, causing Hongtae to go a little bit further each time. As public sentiment swings this way and that, it’s reflected in the battleground, with more “troops” emerging on either side. Eventually, Hongtae proves that Jamie didn’t adopt Hong, as he claimed, but simply bought him. It should be a slam-dunk. But Nanno exposes Hongtae as the owner of all the burner accounts, which have become generals in his imaginary war, and his own reputation is ruined.
Nanno’s logic here is hard to parse. She explains to a defeated Hongtae that she was never really helping Jamie — that he was helping him by blindly hating on him, causing a relatively unremarkable account of a boy and his dog to reach stratospheric popularity by miring it in scandal. She’s making the point that Hongtae’s hatred was beneficial to Jamie and that “sacrificing” his own reputation ultimately buoyed him even further. If the point is to highlight that hating never really pays off for the hater, I’m not sure I’m buying it. We’re all online, and we’ve all seen the haters win, literally more often than not.
But who is Nanno helping, and who is she targeting here? Hongtae’s harassment of Jamie didn’t amount to anything in the first place. And Jamie was lying about Hong, so it isn’t like he was a clear-cut victim. If Nanno hadn’t gotten involved, the situation probably wouldn’t have escalated. It feels like the opposite of the kind of problem she usually gets involved in. I like the ending — Jamie emerges as a conquering hero standing atop Hongtae’s dead body (in the latter’s mind, at least) and Nanno winks out of existence when she deletes her social media account — but I can’t help but wish more had been done with the premise.
Also worth mentioning before we go: In a brief scene, one of the rioters in Hongtae’s mind turns out to be Sky, from the first episode. What I gathered here is that Sky is still looking for Nanno after she helped him in the premiere, and has managed to find her online, since she was present on socials for the sake of this episode. Is Sky going to end up being a recurring thread in this season? We’ll have to wait and see.
