Summary
Girl from Nowhere: The Reset continues to confuse eccentricity with making a point in “Corrupt Lies”, which is arguably the worst episode in an already deeply mediocre and confounding reboot.
On a serious note, what, exactly, are we even doing here? Girl from Nowhere used to be a show with a point, a dark, horror-adjacent social issues thriller about an avenging angel righting the wrongs of the student body’s most deplorable bullies and scumbags. Girl from Nowhere: The Reset isn’t any of these things. It’s a silly, pointless, and oddly leery parade of eccentric ideas and confused messaging, totally in love with its recast protagonist at the expense of everything else, even the most basic semblance of sense. Episode 5, titled “Corrupt Lies” with the kind of hilarious thoughtlessness that has defined the season, might be the worst of them all.
Nanno is fighting corruption here, essentially. A school faculty has approved the half-hearted restoration of a 100-year-old campus building, but the whole thing’s a con job, and the place is a death trap. The episode’s ticking clock is a grand unveiling that continues to edge closer throughout the runtime, with the threat being that if the largely clueless students buy into the official line, they’ll all be inside the building when it inevitably collapses on their heads.
A small clutch of students known as the Atsajeree Gang is trying to draw attention to the corruption in secret meetings and through calculated propaganda campaigns, but they’re stymied at every turn by a witch-hunting director and a squad of Gestapo-style sycophant students known as Scouts. For no reason at all, the director wears a red wig and lipstick and carries a little dog called Dobby like Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat. The director seems to use female pronouns, but everything about them is deliberately framed to be eccentric and ridiculous in a deeply mocking way. The entire episode is like that.
Nanno infiltrates the Atsajaree Gang to help out, then positions herself to become a Scout so she can leak information from deep within the faculty, and then… doesn’t really do anything, to be honest. There’s supposed to be some ambiguity about whose side she’s really on, but why would she be on the side of the greedy developers who are risking killing the entire student body to line their own pockets? The real villain of the piece is one of the director’s deputies, Kai, whose wife’s company handled the renovation. He knows the entire thing isn’t above board, but nobody else seems to, and yet the entire faculty is deemed to be equally responsible.
The director isn’t cool, to be fair, and frequently acts like an authoritarian maniac, but it’s clarified towards the end, when Nanno tricks all the teachers into being inside the building as it’s collapsing while using drama between the student “it” couple to keep all the kids at a safe distance, that the director genuinely had no idea about Kai flouting the safety standards. And yet the director is buried in the rubble with everyone else, equally culpable, despite being oblivious. At least Dobby survives.
Girl from Nowhere: The Reset is aggressively dumb and weird in Episode 5. The idea that anyone, from the students to the director, wouldn’t have noticed that the building wasn’t up to code is absurd, because every time the camera cuts to it, it’s visibly collapsing. If the building at least looked safe, the idea would work better, but as it stands, it just makes everyone look extremely dumb. And what’s the deal with every single student in the school being lured away by the relationship drama? Is the point here that contemporary students are so obsessed with asinine gossip that they’re literally too stupid to get themselves killed accidentally? Surely not.
“Corrupt Lies” also contains an absurd number of sequences in which Nanno walks in slow motion towards the camera while her theme music plays. On a couple of occasions, she starts dancing seductively to the same tune for no reason. The show is absolutely in love with Becky Armstrong in a way it never was with Kitty Chicha Amatayakul, which is why her take on the character was so much subtler and more menacing. But Nanno isn’t doing anything impressive or frightening enough to deserve this level of attention. She just turns up, flirts, and basically allows things to play out as they otherwise would have, with only minor intervention.
At the end of the episode, Nanno messages Sky, just to keep that weird plot thread ticking over. I have no idea where it’s going, but with only one more episode to find out, I suspect Sky will feature heavily in the finale as he did in the premiere. When I was watching that, I never thought for a moment it’d turn out to be the season’s standout. What a shame.
