Skip to main content

Review: Dare Me - Bullying, manipulation, and obsessiveness





Dare Me seems like one more teenage show, full of intricate plots and bullying. Yet, you’ll quickly realize that it is not exactly that. 

It is more a story about a woman who doesn’t care about the means, as long as she reaches her goals. Oh, you think I’m talking about Beth? Think again…

The Coach


From the beginning, the coach is… let’s go with shady. She is full of secrets and half-told stories. Yet, what sets the alarm to me is the fact that she immediately gets close to one of the girls. This friendship seems to be part of some sort of plan that we are never fully aware of. 

Colette gives you a little feeling of discomfort. Since the beginning, you feel that is something off there. What exactly does she want? To become a teenager again? Are the adult life pressures crashing her? Is she looking for some naive girl to cover for her? If so, to cover for what exactly?

We end the season with no clear answers. There is a lot to find out, but they give us nothing. Who is Colette? What’s her plan? How and why she does whatever she is doing? What does she want with Addy? And again, why? Is this woman a sociopath?

Addy


Addy is Coach’s favorite girl from the beginning. Why? No reason. Oh, and how about Tacy (Beth’s sister)? She looks irrelevant, and yet, Colette gives her a quite important role. Why? All to attack Beth? To prove that she is in command? Time to ask who is the adult here, right?

You’re never sure about what Colette wants from Addy, but it seems that she is only using her. Addy is a teenager. She trusts in the adult that treats her as an equal. Colette makes her believe that she is special. This way, she gains the power to keep her quiet and helpful when it’s time to clean her messes.



 

Values and Respect


This show goes a little further than showing teenage girls trying to be the better one at any cost. That behavior is mostly encouraged by the coach. And that’s when you stop and say, “What the hell?”

She mixes the hunger for victory and success, with the lack of respect for others. They can go over whoever they need to reach what they want. Obviously, that can’t be good.

The fights and jealousies produce increasingly serious accidents. Riri’s accident is an example of it, and the fact that it had no consequences for Tacy bothers me. 

Beth


Beth is one of the best characters in the show - she is complex, deep, full of anger, and yet… something is missing. We are never given real motives for most of her actions. She hates the coach, and we get it. But why? 

If the squad is her life, why to reject/attack from the first second, the person who is leading them to the next level? What’s her pleasure in destroying Colette? Why so much anger, even before she “steal” her best friend? It looks like that even before she arrived at all, Beth already hated her.

Is it vengeance because of her father’s attitude? It seems that he was the one who chose this coach, right? It doesn’t look enough for me. 

Will’s Death


Sargent Will’s death is supposed to be the greatest shock of the season, or so it seems. Well, it was… but not in the right way. It didn’t bring much more for the story. It just leaves you asking, “what exactly is happening here?” because you don’t know anymore. It meant to bring some depth to the story, but it didn’t.

We end the season without knowing who kill Will, but Colette looks pretty guilty to me. Or did Beth get into our minds? 

Colette’s husband isn’t that innocent either, is he? Are they, after all, together in all the plots?

Where are the Adults?


The show tries to present us with a complicated mystery story. Yet, it has a lot of non-sense that upsets the viewer (or maybe it was just me).

I’m tired of these stories about teenagers who do whatever they want with no consequences. The adults are many times, some sort of extras. They are the target of the kids’ frustrations, unable to say, “Enough!” Now join an adult behaving as a teenager, and you have Dare Me.

What is new about Dare Me comparing to other teenage shows? The friendship between Addy and the Coach, but it is not enough to make the story original.

And the end… What’s about those shoes? They look clean enough for me. They are trashed because Addy put them under a pile of other crap. Why would a mother of a teenage girl look so suspicious to find shoes in the wrong place? Does she know more than us?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes

This is not the sort of show which I usually talk about on this blog. However, as a psychologist, I’m usually quite curious in regards to criminals and their minds; and one of these days I started watching this documentary on Netflix . Taking into consideration the kind of thing this is, I can’t say I ‘liked’ it. I mean what you see in there is nothing to like, but I was rather terrified, which is probably the usual response. Nonetheless, it was definitely a good documentary. The eyes of a killer Everything displayed in this story was terrible. The descriptions, Bundy’s posture, everything seemed like some sort of horror show, putting into perspective what we may consider to be lucky or unlucky in this life. Before I even start watching it, I read somewhere that this was the kind of thing you shouldn’t watch alone. Sounds accurate right now. At the time, and considering my, mostly academic, experience, I didn’t think that this could actually be so upsetting.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mist (2017) - quick review

  A thick mist falls up a town, and something about it isn’t right - good premise. We would expect nothing less than good from a Stephen King’s book. Yet, as we all know, book adaptations can be quite disappointing.  It goes from good to terrible. I loved the plot and, in the beginning, I was very curious and interested - it was almost impossible to stop watching it. Yet, at some point, it started to get on my nerves, and not in the way that a good horror show should. As we got closer to the end of the season, many things stopped making sense. Some characters are simply… not believable. The explanations for whatever was happening were ridiculous and easily refutable. It all took away the feeling of “this could be real”. It killed my interest. Many changes were made to the original novel. Some of them were interesting and made the story better, yet others were… well, nonsense. Cast and production As I said before, the first episodes were good and made us want to keep watching, but I was
Post a Comment
Read more

Show Review: Emily in Paris

  It took me a long time to give Emily in Paris a shot because I thought it would be a silly, shallow comedy about some sort of influencer. Well, it is a silly, shallow comedy about some sort of influencer, but to be honest, I liked it.  Emily is a young talent in a marketing career and has the opportunity of her life: working in Paris for a year! And since her boyfriend is an idiot, she can try the full experience of being a single woman in the city of love.  Unfortunately, she is not as good at managing her personal life as she is at work. In fact, she is frankly terrible at making decisions outside work. Cultural Differences Everyone who has been in a foreign country knows that sometimes we get ourselves into awkward situations due to cultural differences. So watching someone else go through the same is quite funny. I must admit that seeing an American trying to speak French is hilarious. Of course, I’m not French (and French people who hear me trying to speak French could have a s
Post a Comment
Read more