Main cast: Dagny Backer Johnsen (Olivia), Synnøve Macody Lund (Annelise), Henrik Rafaelsen (Alex), Simen Bostad (Marcus), Nami Kitagawa Aam (Isabel), Ingrid Tykhelle Kayser (Sarah), and Regina Tucker (Cynthia)
Director: Geir Henning Hopland
Olivia is a very privileged young lady. Her father gives her a Porsche as a birthday gift, and because she is used to being waited on hand and foot, she treats her roommates in ways that can be considered thoughtless and even selfish. Thing is, our poor dear has no idea that her behavior may rub people off the wrong way.
Her biggest problem up to that point is that her hot boyfriend’s mother hates her, but she is cheerful enough to take it all in stride.
Well, her life takes a turn for a worse when she overhears her roommates bitching about her and plotting her comeuppance. Staggered by the realization that her so-called best friends don’t like her as much as she likes them, she finds herself stumbling through a procession of first world problems that, to her, are the worst things to have ever happened to her in her entire sheltered existence.
However, character arc will have to wait when she realizes that she is actually living out a story as written by a rather creepy fellow student in her writing class. Well, she can do that too, pay him back by writing him into a bad story of her own… wait, could it be that the two of them are also starring in a story written by someone else? Writer-ception, ooh…
Bad Writer starts out a zany tale of the weird, only to become meta beyond belief. I mean, clearly the screenwriters are the ones pulling the strings of the characters in this episode, but here, they are pulling the strings of some character who is pulling the strings of another character, who is in turn pulling the strings of another character, who is in turn… well, you get the idea. Except, in this case, the whole thing ends up being someone’s weird, even psychotic fantasy in the end, so I feel like my strings are being pulled in the process as well.
The whole thing is pretty enjoyable, I’d give this episode that. I am completely taken aback by the final twist, and I really appreciate how fresh this episode feels. No tired and robotic overused tropes here, just an episode that is well put-together despite how easy it could have been for the whole thing to turn pretentious or incoherent.
My only issue here is that the entire episode ends up feeling a little too gimmicky at the expense of developing the main characters a little bit more, so that I can empathize with their situations more. All things considered, however, this is another interesting entry into what seems like a tall glass of water when it comes to modern day horror anthology series.
