NOS4A2 Review: The Gas Mask Man (Season 1 Episode 3)
After taking the time to set up some of the pieces necessary to make this series work, NOS4A2 Season 1 Episode 3, “The Gas Mask Man,” seems to be just on the verge of jumping into the meat of this season.
The biggest hang-up that NOS4A2 has is its inability on a purely narrative level to delay any kind of confrontation between Vic and Charlie Manx. It can’t simply jump into that because that natural antagonism is, more or less, the entire crux of this story. You can’t blow that too early or else you have nowhere else to take the series.
As a result, what we have to deal with in these early episodes is a kind of gradual escalation to get to that point. What that leaves us with is a lot of ancillary character interactions where the mileage varies considerably.
The main problem currently is that the most well-drawn characters NOS4A2 has to offer are Vic, Charlie Manx, Bing Partridge, and Maggie, and the opportunities they have to overlap with one another are few and far between. The rest of the characters, at this point, feel like little more than window dressing.
Practically without exception, the peripheral characters are just that. They are narrative constructs without any real weight to them. There’s no sense that there will be any consequence to them and, as a result, it leaves you feeling void as far as any investment with them goes.
It would be one thing if these were mere ciphers to buy time until the story truly gets moving. But these are people that you are supposed to have some level of attachment to in these scenes that are supposed to establish Vic in her current setting.
We understand her parents as being little more than terrible people, and the show doesn’t seem to be compelled to deepen that. Her friends are people we don’t really have connections with either. They largely rest on being rote, broad caricatures without any real substance. There’s a definite feeling in every interaction that these are people the show will cast off at the first sign of convenience.
Even the little girl, Haley, clearly only exists on the show to be taken by Charlie Manx and to give Vic a catalyst to listen to Maggie and get involved in her inevitable showdown with The Wraith. It’s narrative efficiency at the expense of any kind of emotional power at its disposal, to which it has very little.
To the show’s credit, however, the next episode is the exact right point at which to really start getting the juices going for this story. If that is the case, then the series has a decent understanding of how long it can be static for before it needs to switch things up. Not every show has that self-awareness.
In the end, it’s dreadfully difficult to place judgment on a show that is so insistent on holding back on what it is truly capable of, which more and more feels to be the case with “The Gas Mask Man.” The fourth episode may well mark a change in that and will be very welcome.
What did you think of this episode of NOS4A2? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.