Summary
As predicted, Girl from Nowhere: The Reset fails to stick the landing, producing an ending as tame and inscrutable as everything that preceded it.
When you think of a season finale, you think of real stakes, so it’s probably quite telling that the best Girl from Nowhere: The Reset can manage is Nanno interfering in a harmless student election. Okay, maybe “harmless” isn’t necessarily the right word, at least not by the end, but it still carries an extremely muddled message and builds to a deeply unsatisfying ending. But that isn’t unique to Episode 6; they’ve very much all been like that, which is weird considering most of the creative team are the same people who worked on the far superior original series.
Nanno promises another semester at the end of “Election”. Honestly, I can’t think of anything I want to see less. But in the meantime, let’s break down what we saw and try to figure out if any of it actually made sense, since I’m not convinced that it did.
Nanno For President
The frame of the finale is a student election. Some guy named Paradorn is running unopposed, supported by his sycophantic friends, until Nanno arrives out of nowhere and decides to oppose him through a crowd-pleasing campaign that involves changing ideas for kisses. As in Episode 4, it’s another “look how hot Becky Armstrong is” plot, where the entire male student body — which seems, now that I think about it, to be the only student body — is manipulated utterly by Nanno promising to throw a bit of attention around.
One of Paradorn’s buddies attempts to reverse the trajectory by leaking Nanno’s sex tape, which is a bit pointless since she immediately exposes it as an AI deepfake and pins the sabotage on Paradorn, further harming his election chances. He begins to fall further behind in the polls, and his inner circle starts turning on one another.
Maybe it’s just me, but what is the point of this? Nanno doesn’t even have any policies! Paradorn doesn’t do anything wrong until Nanno’s intervention, and we’ll go over all that in a minute, so it once again seems like Nanno is just getting involved in things to keep herself busy and targeting kids who happen to be popular rather than sinister. Some later developments perhaps suggest some alternate motives, but they’re not very clear.
Kompromat
Paradorn manages to recoup some popular support when he saves a fellow student from being hit by a car. He ends up winning the election, presumably on this basis, but when Nanno congratulates him, she hands him a USB drive containing footage of him rigging the election by swapping out the ballot boxes. Having seen this, Paradorn brutally attacks his friend for reasons I’m not sure I entirely understood, then announces that the election was rigged and steps down as President.
So, after this, Nanno explains that she was essentially testing him. Instead of leaking the footage herself, she allowed him to make the decision to see if he’d do the right thing. And as far as I can tell, he kind of did, but Nanno still doesn’t accept that. Again, then, what was the point of all this? Nanno had already made up her mind based on Paradorn’s future, which she can apparently see, and she knows how his life is going to turn out either way. And that it’ll be violent. The whole idea of “testing” him, with that in mind, makes less than zero sense.
A Glimpse of the Future
Nanno allows Paradorn to see his own future. He aspires to a career in politics and justifies having made the right decision with the USB footage as a way to keep his record squeaky clean to protect his future career. However, in the glimpse of the future he sees, even though he’s successful, his career is ruined by the same footage being played during a speech he’s making at the school, as one of its most successful alumni.
This is where the ending of Girl from Nowhere: The Reset gets extremely weird. Having seen the future, Paradorn goes a bit bonkers and starts imagining a giant nail being wedged in his neck, which at one point — the best, most effectively grisly moment of the episode — he pulls free. This nail proves to be significant. When Nanno shows Paradorn proof that he also rigged his “heroism” saving the guy from being hit by a car, he stabs Nanno in the neck with it and then tries to strangle her. However, Sky arrives and intervenes to save Nanno. The point of this is supposed to be that most humans are susceptible to being engulfed by darkness, and only the rare few, like Sky, who resisted the urge to take revenge on his bully in the premiere, are able to resist it.
Except Paradorn fatally stabs Sky in the neck and then stabs Nanno to death, and ends up dumping both of their bodies in a river. His future shakes out basically exactly the way Nanno predicted, only this time his career is ruined not by footage of the election fraud, but by footage of the murder. Nanno obviously survived, since she’s not human, but as far as I can tell, Sky really did die, and Nanno was avenging him years later.
So the lesson is that if you’re a truly good guy who resists the darkness, you’ll end up being stabbed to death by a nutter and not getting the girl you spend the entire season creepily pursuing? I mean, if you say so. Thank goodness this show is over.
