Main cast: Giorgia Whigham (Shauna Shore), Pepi Sonuga (Misty Carpenter), Cameron Fuller (Aaron Hampton), Olivia Liang (Yuejin), Virginia Louise Smith (Mrs Shore), Zachary Roozen (Michael), David Carzell (Officer Dominic), and Jude Demorest (Chloe Willis)
Director: Brandon Zuck
On the surface, Crawlers is about a town invaded by aliens that bite their victims, absorb their genetic material, and assume the appearance of those victims. The aliens are presumably bug-like creatures that have, over the next 40 years, adapted and evolved to become what they are—that is, if we believe Mrs Shore.
Her daughter, Shauna, and her are both believers of alien conspiracies and the government having microchips in everything, although that doesn’t stop her and Shauna from looking like they are consoomers of the hottest fashion fads in town, and Shauna uploading her videos on a platform no doubt controlled by global billionaires that keep tabs on all the users’ personal data.
Anyway, Shauna is doing her usual business, as an unregistered pharmacist selling stuff to the college kids partying during St Patrick’s Day, when she ends up trying to stay alive and ward off the aliens together with frat boy asshole Aaron, the SJW Misty that is bewilderingly obsessed with her careless and thoughtless BFF Chloe, and Yuejin, the new girl in town that has obviously supplanted Misty in Chloe’s estimation.
Unfortunately, this show also wants the entire episode to be about rape culture in college, believe all women, and all that. I have nothing against that, but with this show being what it is, oh my goodness, the people behind this thing try so hard to include those themes in this episode in such a clumsy, hammy manner that the whole thing ends up being a hot mess. Aaron’s apology to Misty could have been taken verbatim straight from the typical apology issued by those oh so many white self-proclaimed male feminists accused of sexual assault. so much so that I can only wonder whether this show is mocking the whole online woke culture and its hypocrisy, or it’s just being lazy and stupid as usual.
Worse, the show hand waves Aaron’s association with rapist frat boys in a “Oh, he’s apologized, and he’s done community service, so he’s like, totally date-able now!” way that it really reduces the whole message down to rapist guys are, like totally date-able if they were hot and said nice things to a woman.
Also, let’s put it this way: in a show about rape culture in college, it is the female characters here that positively can’t stand one another even if they were supposed to be united against those males, and in fact, they are so down with hanging out with the hot alleged rapist once the rival female is out of the picture.
There’s good social messaging in movies and TV, and then there’s wokeness, which is the stupid kind of social messaging done by morons, and this one falls right into the latter category. In wokeness, the self-proclaimed arbiters of social values will always end up preaching and twisting the things they are trying to nag at their audience, into something that is entirely 180 from their intended messages, mostly because they are idiots and also because they don’t really believe in what they are preaching—they are only doing it because they think doing so will make them part of the cool kids. This episode is a good example of that.
Also, it falls on the tired old trope of having Shauna being this “I’m, like, wisecracking non-stop because I’m so not into people and I’m using my punchlines to keep them away, well, until I meet this totally hot jock and then all of a sudden I don’t mind embracing the mainstream appeal after all” thing lacing every scene with a sarcastic voice over that kills every momentum and tension in a scene. This is one episode that tries very hard to make sure that nothing about it is scary, thought-provoking, or profound. It just wants to be the most banal kind of greeting card with a woke message on the front. The whole thing is sort of a call for the denouncing of capitalism and patriarchy by subscribing to Hulu (owned by the totally anti-capitalist Disney) and watching shows made by a company run by a straight white millionaire dude. This is the most insincere and vacuous kind of virtue signalling that completely undermines genuine social issues affecting people today.
The tragedy here is that a fun, if clichéd, alien invasion show was severely curtailed by the show coming to a halt barely midway in to have the main characters blather about these things. Crawlers is just a dumb, empty, entertainment-free shell of a show that tries so desperately to be smarter than it is.
