It's damning with faint praise a little bit, but this is comfortably the best episode of the second season so far, and probably one of the best the rebooted series has offered.
At an all-girl boarding school, queen bee Madison (Abbie Hern) and her clique delight in picking on the new girl, Irene (Sophia Macy). Irene's interest in the occult manifests in a science experiment into ESP, during which Irene comes to believe that Madison has various psychic abilities. As they try to enhance her powers, the pair become friendlier and Madison alienates the rest of her social circle, until a night-time roof top drinking session has deadly consequences.
It's nothing revolutionary, don't get me wrong, but for an episode of this series to have an actual story, rather than just a premise is rare. More unusual still, is that it takes what would have been the obvious twist of the ending and circumvents it somewhat into a much more interesting double twist and then a sad little postscript. I'd put the credit at the door of writer Heather Anne Campbell then. In the first season she provided the patchy but solid "Not All Men" and the frankly dreadful "Six Degrees of Freedom" so there's evidence that her scripts are improving as she continues with the series.
The director is Tayarisha Poe, who directed the similarly set movie "Selah and the Spades" in 2019. She does a fine job here and is ably supported by whomever did the set dressing for the episode, the abandoned toilet is a particularly fine location. The performances from the two leads are good, but the rest of the girls and the teachers blend together a bit. If I'm nit picking, perhaps one more scene of Madison using her powers might have helped sell the story a little more and the idea that the faculty would let other students put up 'that' diorama doesn't ring true.
But - in and of itself and (especially) relative to the rest of the episodes, this was strong stuff.
