Girl From Nowhere: If I have to choose my top 5 favourite stories (+ 2 honorary mentions)
It was agonizing to pick just 5. *Not ranked in order and yes, they are filled with spoilers. Continue reading at your own risk.
Season 1:
- Episode 4 — Hi-So
Plot Summary: Dino is just one of the many affluent students at Nanno’s new school. He has a secret, which Nanno can help him keep, but there’s a cost.
What I liked: The relationship people have with money and its associated status. Its horrific but realistic ending.
The first 3 episodes before this were good but it was Hi-So that gave me such a strong impression that I had the chills. It started off pretty standard, like I was not actually all that impressed because the plot is about a dude trying to act like he is rich just to enjoy a better school life. While I get him for him wanting to conceal his actual family’s financial status, he went overboard by ending up as the school’s richest kid to everyone’s knowledge.
The evil trap that Nanno set out for Dino had me forgetting how to breathe for a second. She actually recruited his parents to be his butler and maid in a ruse to deceive his school friends, with a house he rented for a day with money he stole from his parents. This toxic cycle finally takes a toll on their once-happy relationship and the ending scene’s dialogue is so harrowing that I could not help myself but to rewatch it multiple times.
Dino. If you’re going to another session of Dhamma Camp, don’t forget to tell us.
In the end, everybody bows down to money.
- Episode 10 — Thank You Teacher
Plot Summary: A strict teacher is told to change her teaching style, but stress from her past pushes her past her breaking point.
What I liked: Her breaking down, the actual truth and magnitude of her despair shown through a playback format for us to see it for ourselves instead of verbally revealing it through a dialogue with past flashbacks inserted in between.
T is for teachers who teach ethics to others.
There is nothing much to unpack as it is mostly straightforward with its themes of ethics, regret, and memories. Overcompensation works in many ways, which the teacher sure did in various alarming degrees. Policing her students and her own son while being unable to contain her anger at being cheated on by her husband with a much younger student at the school he is teaching, she never came to terms with the betrayal. The fact that he got little repercussions while she is forced (I don’t know if it’s self-imposed) to hide because the scandal affects her negatively too.
I’ve already made this clear to you. He has no part in my life anymore. My child and I are doing just fine.
While her anger issues definitely shot through the rooftop, the grand reveal to her actual extent of despair and the key root event concerning her son that spirals her out of control were perfect, to say the very least. I am a big fan of the whole sequence.
It is shocking but also really depressing how loud her demons are to herself in contrast to the mundane environment around her in real life. I quite liked the teacher’s acting here during her arrival at her breaking point where all hell breaks loose. Her coping mechanism no longer works, her imagination ceases to protect her from shutting out the fact that she is out of control.
Season 2:
- Episode 2 — True Love
Plot Summary: An elite girls’ school transitions to becoming a co-ed school. Nanno pushes against the strict gender segregating rules because of a teacher’s past traumatic experience.
What I liked: The argument of fear and generalisation.
Not all men.
A sentence that is always clowned at, despite its truth. Because while it is true that we should never punish the whole sex population by a group’s actions, how are women supposed to know and sieve out the good ones from the bad? Impending danger is a constant alarm waiting to go off in women’s heads and that is one permanent and tiring chore. Despite that, we got to remind ourselves to stay away from radicalism tendencies due to fear. Something that the teacher here is clearly incapable of.
Here, we have this teacher taking gender segregation to the extreme. She is all about “virtue”, whatever that means to her, to her students’ dismay. The school only just turned co-ed and students of both sexes had only started to be friends when the teacher punished them for something that has not even begin to happen. This woman has a wild imagination to interpret everything extreme too.
One thing I did not quite catch is the random love confession at the end between the teachers. My interpretation is that the teacher probably had a crush on her school friend in the past, which made her hate the male gender even more with her school friend’s tragic end. So her fellow colleague confessing to her in the midst of the students rightfully calling her out for her injustice and inability to let go of the past was providing some kind of closure should she accept and enter this relationship. It still just felt really abrupt to me though. Plus most episodes’ revenge end up bitter or horrific but this, to me, just seems like a happy ending and a closure so I am a tad bit unused to this.
- Episode 6 — Liberation
Plot Summary: Students are expected to strictly obey the educators’ rules in Pantanawittaya without question, but Nanno relishes in breaking as many as she can. Without any surprise, the educators are the pieces of shit in this story.
What I liked: The play with colours + cinematography + resemblances to fiction and real life.
Big Brother is watching you.
To be clear, that’s not an actual quote that appeared in the episode, but the background and certain scenes of the episode strike resemblance to 1984. I adore the cinematography in this episode. The opening had me sold right from its first few seconds when the screen’s aspect ratio moved right after Nanno entered the school gates and the colours faded away from the screen to present the greyscale world, setting a darn strong premise for the story.
Look at how they used the colours!!! I feel like I’m geeking out just with how it pops out really well with the greyscale setting that caused the wrath of the teachers. And adding to the topic on colours, we have another two characters with colours joining Nanno.
Once again, Yuri comes out to play. Only this time, she is coming back to one-up Nanno. Yuri’s red ribbon is the equivalent icon to Nanno’s hairstyle for me. This was one of the episodes that Yuri is gearing up strong to attempt to beat Nanno to her game after only observing or attempting a few small tricks in the previous episodes.
And this is just completely my opinion. But I thought this episode paralleled the political unrest with its Military force in Thailand, especially with the events in 2020. In this case, the Principal represents the Military, with the students being the civilians. While it appeared to be somewhat like True Love in the first half with its premise of breaking the rigid school system, the student population here actually took a bigger part in wanting to fight back and take control for themselves. It was as though I could felt their helplessness and frustration when they felt “free” for the first time and did not know where to stop and when they are allowed to finally leave.
We were showed the power of civilians but while the aspect ratio changes when they stepped beyond the school gates, the colours did not return to them. What happens next? Perhaps there is no true victory that people can truly achieve with just the tyrant’s fall. More needs to be done and the frightening fact that greyscale will always be a part of their lives.
- Episode 7 “Jenny X”
Plot Summary: Popular influencer JennyX’s parents pressure her to maintain her image to keep the profits rolling in, but things change when she meets Nanno.
What I liked: Who are the actual villains here in this episode.
It’s because my parents don’t know how to earn money themselves. They use me to make money for them.
It’s fine to eat like this once in a while. Everyone needs to do what they want sometimes without having to worry about anything. You don’t have to be perfect all the time.
Here we also have both Nanno and Yuri trying to be Jane/JennyX/Rosie’s best friend who only thinks for her sake. Yuri outright drives a wedge between Jane and Nanno but Nanno seemed to already have expected it. How does she always have the upper hand? Kudos to the part where Nanno watches the news of Yuri, suddenly claiming to be Jane’s best friend when Jane has never even seen her before, and smiles back at the television screen as Yuri smirked at the end. That exchange was brilliant.
We put her on a strict diet to avoid triggering her allergies, put a tracker on her to make sure she doesn’t fall with the wrong crowds. It’s actually Jane’s dream all along: “I want to be famous, can you help me make my dream come true?”
I love, love, love the transition from Jenny’s Imposter syndrome to a true Imposter at the end. The twist came to me as a surprise as I genuinely thought the villains were the parents.
If you can’t even remember what you said and what you did, how can anyone remember you?
An addition plus point in this episode is on how they touched on the ever fragile social media that provides a quick alternative life online but also the simple mistake of thinking you have the right to others’ privacy and life in general due to its connectivity.
Not going to lie, the gist from the first half of the episode reminds me of the hot news recently about Britney Spears’ disgusting conservatorship that she was forced to abide to for years. Something that you would have thought it is so unheard of especially in today’s day and age. Yet it exists and it is so real. I am really appalled and angry. #FreeBritney has been happening for years and it constantly bounces between a legitimate movement and a meme. I am just glad the court is forced to review her case more seriously and that she is given a voice to speak on this matter truthfully.
-> Honorary Mentions <-
Season 1 — Ep 9: “Trapped”
While the plot has nothing to scream about, I liked how it repeatedly proves the downside of human nature. A group of students turn on one another while hiding from an escaped murderer in their school. Who is the murderer and what is their story is none of our concern. What matters now is what do the trapped characters do to ensure their survival?
There are no saints in this world. It is not necessarily a bad thing as we are only humans. When danger strikes, we are on autopilot mode that makes us think of our priorities. We will do anything to protect what is important to us. In most cases, that is ourselves. We can pretend that it isn’t so but that is the truth. In extraordinary circumstances, we can park our excuse for our behaviour as forced under duress. But when it is revealed that the murderer has long been arrested, who is responsible for the murder that happened in front of them? And can duress be used to explain and even excuse this murder? Even a child as young as her ended up slipping into the grey area of covering up. Human nature truly shines strongly in this one.
Season 1 — Ep 12,13: “BFF, Part 1” & “BFF, Part 2”
It kind of reminds me of this Korean horror movie called Bloody Reunion. I liked the concept of how everybody grows up thinking they got away with it but karma gets to them with heavier consequences now that they are no longer allowed to hide behind the oh-so-used “we are young” excuse.
What’s maybe not so cool is when Nanno goes around exposing their misdeeds that they desperately want to hide, Fong got outed as suffering with depression and self-cut her arm while others were legitimately doing crimes. I have to agree that the sequence was a good gateway to reveal how and who “Tan” really is, but Fong’s reveal was actually really uncool on the team’s part.
