School Spirits is a real hidden gem. I was flipping through Netflix, as one does, and found the beauty. Immediately after watching the first episode, I spend my entire day watching this show until the end. I got all the way to the end and was mad! Now, this is only season one and this doesn’t have an effect on how I view the show was a whole. The show was great but the ending left me really confused.
Madison Nears is a rebellious teen at Split River High School. It’s the typical teen drama…at first. She has two best friends. They aren’t popular. She has an antsy boyfriend who is too cool for school. His dad is the town sheriff. The three best friends are planning to go to college together and they’re, more than likely, top of their class. Madison’s mom became an alcoholic after her dad died, so home life is a sore spot for her. The goal for her is to escape Split River, Wisconsin to basically kind of start her life over, which oddly comes into play in this finale. Then, everything stops because Madison, also known as Maddie, goes missing one day. We, as the audience, find out that she’s dead, and as it turns out, other people have died at her high school. Throughout the show, she grapples with being dead and trying to find out who exactly killed her because, as we find out while watching, she doesn’t have memory of her death which is not common amongst the deceased.
That’s all I can write before I have to say SPOILERS AHEAD. I would employ you to watch the show first and then come back to argue with me because I’m going to unload a lot where and you have to watch the show to get it. So, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
The whole show revolves around what happened to Maddie. How did she die because, as I said, she cannot remember and that is not normal of the dead. Every one else can remember how they died…except her. Now, I loved the journey to figure this out, but what I didn’t like is how we ended up finding out that no one living killed Maddie. Maddie’s not even dead. Maddie is somewhere in limbo, I guess. That’s also not clear either at the end of this first season. So there was another spirit with the team named Janet. Janet was mentioned a handful of times, and then, all of a sudden, she becomes a major element to the story in the last two episodes. I don’t like this. Here are a couple reasons why:
1. Janet inhabits Maddie’s body. So, in the end, her living friends see that she is still alive. What they don’t know is that the person they see is Janet in Maddie’s body and not Maddie. None of the other spirits introduced to us in this high school have that ability. So why does Janet? Didn’t make sense. I don’t like it.
2. Dawn is another spirit adjacent to the group. At a certain point in the show, she crosses over. Apparently, Janet was supposed to have crossed over. Mr. Martin said so and no one has seen her so they go with that. Now, the way Dawn passes over has the team confused because what happened with her did not happen with Janet. This who scenario is dumb to me because as tight as the dead group is, you would think that Janet would be an integral part of the group. Someone in the group would have been close with her to know if she was getting close to crossing over. It seems, during the final episodes, that they team has no idea about Janet. They had to do research to figure out her whole name and how she died. So, my irritation comes from the show making it seem like Janet was apart of the group, but then backtracking to be like…these people have no idea who she is. Which one is it?!
3. Before Maddie died, she was in the boiler room and she overheard a conversation between two people. The conversation she heard was between two dead people. In the show, we establish that the living, besides Maddie, cannot hear the dead. So, how did Maddie hear Janet and Mr. Martin arguing? Maddie’s best friend was about to communicate with her in rooms throughout the school where people had died, and I just assumed because they had such a strong love for each other that the rules were broken for that reason. NOW, with the information given in this bullet before, you have to explain EXACTLY how she is able to hear them talking. She shouldn’t be able to…based on the rules the show set up. YOU set these rules. You can’t break them just to make a twist.
4. How did you just make a random character that you talked about a couple of times the star of this show? Is the next season going to tell us that Janet is a witch? Janet should have been a regular student at this school who died with her chemistry professor. But with this ending, she’s a supernatural being who can inhabit people’s bodies. There is not backstory. Nothing is named after her. She just died in a fire and probably hates her professor. Unless the angle is they were in a relationship which….I mean…I guess but we don’t really need that.
Has anyone else watched this show? Can anyone else back me up here?
nice!!
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