Recently, the official DVD of the first season of Outsider, based on the novel by Stephen King of the same title, had its premiere . This author does not need to be introduced to anyone, but knowing his occasional declines in form and the difficulties that screenings always face, it is worth looking at the series with a critical eye.
I will not surprise anyone if I say that the action takes place in a small American town. One where everyone knows but doesn’t necessarily like each other, and the demons of the past raise their heads when an unexplained tragedy occurs. This is the case with the Outsider … but maybe not entirely. You can feel this recognizable atmosphere of King here from the very beginning, but it does not mean that we will not find any changes and attempts to give the story its own character.
From crime fiction to paranormal discussions
First of all, the whole thing initially seems not very fantastic and no more mysterious. In a town called Flint, Oklahoma, an eleven-year-old boy is brutally raped and murdered, and there can only be one perpetrator – Terry Maitland, the local baseball coach. There are witnesses, there’s tons of evidence, including camera footage, fingerprints, and DNA samples. The man is captured, and this would be the end of it, were it not for one trouble: equally strong evidence shows that Terry was in fact miles away in another city at the time of his crime, attending a conference. Ralph Anderson, in charge of the case, is unsuccessfully trying to rule out one or the other version of events, as it is impossible for Maitland to be in two places at once … right?
As things develop, Anderson believes less and less in the guilt of the detainee, and Holly Gibney collaborates with him on the trail of more cases of murder of children whose alleged perpetrators were seen at the same time, both at the scene of the crime and elsewhere. In light of subsequent discoveries, investigators must stop rejecting seemingly contradictory evidence and find an answer to the question: how is this possible?
This summary is a good illustration of the shift of emphasis from episode to episode from the classic crime novel about the search for a murderer and researching clues to consider where the boundary of the “impossible” actually lies and how we can learn and overcome something that, according to our knowledge, has no right to exist. Such an idea for a story works well in terms of theory, but on the basis of the series it was implemented correctly at best.
Source: rollingstones.com
Hypnotic melancholy or just glacial pace?
The on-screen Outsider is definitely in no hurry. In fact, everything about it is uniform and methodical. The puzzle unfolds systematically in front of us, new information flows steadily. Forget about chaotic trial and error, breakthrough discoveries and game changers that drop suddenly . Here everything happens slowly and is a consequence of specific actions and events that are easy to understand.
On the one hand, it has its charm, on the other, it means that we will have much less fun and less involvement at this stage of the story, which is less interesting for us. This means that fans of horror and fantasy will get longer episodes, and fans of crime fiction may start yawning in the second half of the season. The story itself is by no means bad, but the painfully steady pace of plot development turns out to be quite ruthless – if we don’t like a storyline, we just can’t count on it going to end and we’ll be over it.
The same regularity is visible in all other aspects of this production – we do not experience energetic or expressive motifs in the soundtrack, the frames are rather static, and the lens likes prolonged glances at the characters’ faces or dark interiors of rooms. This is the type of series where we can easily go to the kitchen for a snack and lose nothing as long as we continue to hear the spoken dialogues. It is also not a very confusing brain that does not allow us to connect threads and understand the plot, if we do not follow the action in the smallest detail.
Source: medium.com
Heroes save the day!
A work of this kind would be simply unbearable if we were not able to enjoy the mere contact with its heroes. Fortunately, the Outsider is doing quite well here. A good start is already guaranteed by Jason Bateman in the role of Terry Maitland, who can easily convince the viewer that his character is an unjustly accused honest man, even before the protagonists take it into account. Of course, the actors of the roles of Ralph Anderson and Holly Gibney (Ben Mendelsohn and Cynthia Erivo, respectively) have the most opportunities to show off, and they meet expectations as much as possible, especially in the later episodes, where we receive more monologues and careful philosophical discussions from them.
The latter, moreover, is the main strength of the Outsiderand the source of chemistry between the characters. All of them, even the secondary ones, get their five minutes sooner or later and have the opportunity to appear in our consciousness as a personality, not just puppets playing their part in the plot. It is, moreover, a veritable galaxy of diverse characters, which in a very interesting way plunges into a mixture of momentary conflicts, which must ultimately fade into oblivion without any greater escalation, in the name of a shaky alliance necessary to solve the puzzle. This aspect of the series and the accompanying skirmishes and balanced, careful reconciliations are viewed with pleasure and almost breathlessness. So I can assure you that lovers of in-depth psychological portraits of heroes and loose philosophical deliberations will find something for themselves here!
Source: forbes.com
A DVD release worth reaching for!
In the complete first season of Outsider from Galapagos Films, we will of course find all 10 episodes of the series in excellent picture and sound quality, along with several language versions. The audio track can be English (original) or German, and in the case of subtitles, we can choose the same languages in the form for the hearing impaired and Polish or Dutch translation. The whole thing is conveniently divided into three DVDs, and each of them also includes various extras, such as behind-the-scenes materials, discussions of the main characters or the genesis of the essence of the title Outsider. Unfortunately, special materials are only available in the original language.
