oh this was something. i found myself being so frustrated that we weren’t able to see the actual trial, or learn about the motive, etc. but you quickly realize that that is NOT what this series is about. 

this isn’t a crime/drama tv show. this is almost a true crime documentary. as true as it can be without it being true. the choices that these writers and directors made were excellent. everything they showed was intentional. 

ep 2 was particularly interesting, as we really dive into WHAT this case was about. it’s not about a kid who snapped and killed a girl because he was angry. it’s about what is lying underneath the surface of our society’s youth. what the internet, media, WE breed as humans and what accountability we must take in it. 

ep 3 was another doozy. we don’t see much of jamie and the one half of the time that we see him, he’s crying and claiming he never did anything wrong. you want to believe this 13 year old boy. you want to believe that someone else is in the tape. you want to believe that maybe he has a split personality. and then you get to actually know him in the third episode, and you realize, jamie most definitely committed this crime. it’s not that he’s mentally unstable or mentally ill, which he likely is, it’s who he becomes without even realizing that’s who he’s becoming. he tells dr. ariston that what makes him better than other boys is that he wanted to touch katie, but he didn’t. he tells her that he didn’t like the incel rhetoric. he tells her that he in fact DID like katie, although mentioning beforehand that she wasn’t his type because of her being “flat-chested”. he even tells her that he was mad at fidget for not getting more pictures of girls before becoming untrustworthy, although he later reveals that he was actually mad at fidget because he spread the nude photos of katie without her consent. ALL of these things may be completely true about his character, yet he still murdered katie. is it because he thought that’s what he was supposed to do as a man to show dominance? was it because she rejected him and he was angry at her for bullying him? was it a snap of anger when his original plan was to simply scare her? we don’t know, and we honestly don’t need to. we are here in this scene in the same way that dr. ariston is. we are here to “develop an understanding of his understanding” even if it’s not the truth. he gets angry with her at one point for telling the guard to leave and accosts her for being a “queen”. he has these aggressive tendencies loitered with misogyny, but we can tell that this isn’t who jamie is actually. or is it? that’s not what’s up for debate here. nothing really is. he projects these feelings of being misunderstood, feminized, and “ugly” on to the demographic that he knows he can assert dominance over. women. even if that woman is in fact a grown woman, and not a young girl his age. we see him huff and puff, towering over the doctor and jump at her in an attempt to scare her, yet later we see him begging and pleaded for her to tell him that she likes him. jamie is not a misunderstood child, he is a product of his environment and his socialization, or lack thereof. that doesn’t absolve him of ANY of his behavior, but it does attempt to explain it. 

ep. 4 is a hard watch at times. especially the ending scene with the parents accepting responsibility for their part in who jamie has become. “so if my dad made me, how did i make that?” eddie is facing the hard truth of their involvement in jamie’s development, while his wife understands that, in her own words, “it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we should’ve done” in regard to if they should’ve done more when they knew that something wasn’t right. THIS is one of the pressing points of this story. this case isn’t new. we see it all the time, but it’s rare that parents have the ability to know when it’s time to seriously intercept their children’s behavior and prevent their future behavior. in the last scene we see eddie say to jamie (although not literally nor physically” that he’s sorry. what he’s sorry for? not being a part in his conception. he’s sorry for not being there when he actually was there. 

andrew tate is a problem. incels are a problem. social media is a problem. we know all of this, yet we choose to believe that children are smart enough to make their own discernments and mitigate the symptoms of this spreading disease. we always ask “where were the parents!!!???” but the answer is more often than not, right there. 

like why are we so desensitized to these cases? what kind of world do we live in where a 13 yo boy murders a girl? as simple as that question sounds, what is the answer? that is not a simple crime. and why are we seemingly okay living in a world that amounts to whatever the answer is ?

don’t even get me started on the filming, seriously. amazing cinematography, and that’s that. 