First broadcast 7 October 2026.

In the second episode of Carrie, gym teacher Rita Desjardins (Amber Midthunder) punishes Carrie’s classmates for their bullying her in the showers. Carrie’s mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) struggles in her new supermarket job. Chris (Alison Thornton) is accepted into Duke University, but learns her father lacks the finances to send her there. Carrie (Summer H. Howell) finally meets a friend in fellow student Emaline West (Thalia Dudek).

I am immediately distrustful of Emaline, Carrie’s newfound friend who emerges in the girl’s bathrooms at too convenient a time and has no apparent connection to anyone else at the school. She is not adapted from Stephen King’s novel as far as I can recall, and I am questioning whether she is a student at all.

If there is a benefit to expanding on King’s novel and devoting eight full episodes to Carrie’s story, it is the series’ ability to flesh out and illuminate the supporting characters. The novel is not a work with significant depth, and its characters tend to operate as simple cyphers. This approach, favouring plot over nuance, was duplicated in the three film adaptations. With all of the extra time, Mike Flanagan (who writes this episode with direction by Elizabeth Padden) has room to do something different, and it is already paying great dividends.

Margaret White, played here by Samantha Sloyan, is typically portrayed as a hysterical, Bible-bashing zealot. She usually lacks any sense of complexity or sympathy. While that was very effective in previous versions, here she is allowed to form her own character and be a more believable person. Most importantly of all, this Margaret palpably loves her daughter Carrie, and is motivated more than anything by a desire to keep her safe from harm. Her extremely conservative views remain, but they are textured and believable. When she is criticised at work for letting her beliefs interfere with her duties, Flanagan writes her such that we can recognise the poor behaviours but feel sorry for the character as well. Sloyan takes enormous advantage of this extra depth, and I am surprised to discover that – two episodes in – she is my favourite character.

The other performance that dominates the episode belongs to Amber Midthunder, who was such an excellent lead in Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey back in 2022. She also enjoys some proper depth of character, and winds up being a very similar character in terms of motivations and behaviour. There is no one in this series so far who is expressly bad or good: each character is a mixture of both. What that seems to create is a circle of flawed people whose collective errors draw the story inevitably to calamity. That inevitability is core to the series’ success: this is less horror and more classical tragedy.