Tell Me a Story: Loss

This show is slooooow. Barely anything actually happened in this episode. There's sort of some escalating tension but it's at a pretty low level. I think a big part of the problem is that we don't know any of the characters well enough to care about them. I'm not even sure who we're supposed to be siding with in the three pigs story. You'd think it would be the guy whose girlfriend was just killed (the wolf?), but the show seems to want us to care at least as much about the criminals (the pigs). And the three stories still seem completely separate, so it's not clear why they're all being told together.

This detective probably got as much screen time and dialogue as any of the "main" characters.

We also spend a fair bit of this episode focusing on the police investigating the robbery. Wolf (I'm just going to call him that from now on because I have no idea what his name is) is understandably upset and thinks they're not doing enough. They don't want to jump the gun and start charging anybody before they have enough evidence.

People in this show spend a lot of time standing in dimly-lit rooms.

Wolf picks one of the pigs out of a lineup, but he also has an alibi, so that's not going to be enough. So he (wolf) starts stalking the pig, following him to work and to his house. It's really menacing, but everyone is weird in this show so it's hard to tell how anyone's behaviour is supposed to come across. Is it good that he's taking the law into his own hands, or are we supposed to think he's crossed a line? Are we meant to sympathise with the pigs? I don't even know.

Two ordinary highschool students.

Red Riding Hood skips school to spend the day with her two new friends, but then ditches them by... tricking them into making out with each other? It was weird. And I don't know where she went after that because the next time we see her she's at home and it's dinner time. Her father yells at her about skipping school and she storms out.

I'll just turn on this dim lamp instead of the ceiling light, this is normal.

She ends up at the house of that teacher she had sex with last episode. Is he the wolf in this story? I think he is. But he seems nice so far. Like, he was a bit panicked at first about losing his job if anyone found out, but he got over that pretty quickly. And I have no idea what the point of this story is. There's no real antagonist at this stage, other than her father, and he's barely there. He certainly isn't stopping her from doing anything she wants to. But Red herself isn't much of a protagonist, either. There's just nothing going on here.

Why is this corridor in the back of the nightclub so green?

The Hansel and Gretel story could be about to get a little bit interesting though. We get a bit of their tragic backstory this episode, which isn't very interesting, and they (well, Gretel) threaten Hansel's friend to keep his mouth shut about the dead guy. Hansel accidentally overdoses on some sleeping pills but Gretel saves him. And then they hear a news report about the dead guy. Only he wasn't found in his hotel room, he was found in the river. Someone moved the body and they don't know who or why.

Just appreciating some art, like rebellious teenagers do.

The biggest issue so far though is just that I don't particularly like or care about any of the characters. The show constantly cuts between them and there's so many of them that it can't spend very long with any of them. This also means that the stories have to move pretty slowly, because they've only got an average of about 16 minutes each per episode, which is then divided among protagonists, antagonists and secondary characters. There's just not enough time for all of them and unless there's a really good reason for it, telling these three unrelated stories simultaneously is insane. And I really doubt there's a good reason. And I still don't know what any of this has to do with the fairy tales it's supposedly based on.

I guess the connection is the nightclub? It's sort of involved in all three plots.

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