Shining Girls Review: Attribution (Season 1 Episode 4)

After an introductory trio of episodes that, in all honesty, didn’t always make a ton of sense, Shining Girls Season 1 Episode 4, “Attribution,” is a much more propulsive, linear, and all-around interesting hour. (And it’s one I hope the viewers who may have felt lost during the show’s opening salvo of episodes stuck around to see.)

Part of the reason for that is this is the first installment that actually feels like it might be giving us some real answers, rather than playing with ideas of disorientation and questioning whose truth we ought to be believing.

Granted, those real answers basically boil down to the idea that Kirby and the series’ other women are somehow being stalked by a time-traveling serial killer, but I guess we have to start somewhere.

Your mileage may vary on whether you feel it is a smart decision for Shining Girls to essentially withhold key facts about the kind of show it is and the sort of story it’s telling all the way until practically the end of its fourth episode, if only because “final girl hunts time-traveling serial killer” is a very different narrative prospect than “traumatized assault victim is repeatedly gaslit into questioning her own reality” and viewers deserve to know that going in.

But I can’t deny that this episode is very compelling television, and absolutely made me want to know what happens next.

The thing is, “Attribution” manages to build up to the revelations of its final few minutes—and Kirby’s first face-off with Harper—in a fairly straightforward way. (A fairly surprising twist given everything that’s come before.)

Dan actually does the journalistic legwork to identify the thing that connects Kirby and the other dead women: the answer is actually nothing, and the truth is the killer is making his own meaning by both stealing and leaving specific items with each of his victims. 

But the methodical way Dan and Kirby ultimately come up with this connection is the best sort of basic investigative detective work, and oddly really helps to ground some of the more outlandish and/or out-of-time moments in this episode.

The show certainly takes its time building up to the revelation that these murders are connected across time because someone is traveling through time, but now that it has, some of its more bizarre elements seem to suddenly make a lot more sense. (Well, as much as anything on this show makes sense right now.)

“Attribution’s” opening sequence, which cycles through the crime scenes of Harper’s early victims, aren’t just a visual aid to help us see the similarities between the dead women, it’s a clue that he is actually revisiting their deaths, trying to determine which of them survived his attack.

The scene in the hospital in the aftermath of Sharon/Kirby’s attack isn’t a flashback, it’s Harper trying to finish the job. (After all, he couldn’t have known, at the time this happened, that she wasn’t dead, and seems to take it as something of a personal affront when he discovers she’s alive.)

And the phone calls aren’t just creepy deep fake recordings, they’re literally from across time, because Harper’s apparently somehow visiting all these girls at different points in their lives before returning to kill them. 

This is not to say that Shining Girls explains how any of this is possible. Of course, it doesn’t. 

It doesn’t tell us how, precisely, Harper is hopping through time or what is causing Kirby’s reality to shift so drastically around her. And these are pretty big, fairly crucial unknowns! 

Are those things connected? Has Kirby traveled through time or is she simply seeing the future in which the Be Better bar exists? One has to assume that’s probably the case, but it all sounds so bizarre on paper that it’s difficult to see how that might be possible. (And because Shining Girls itself doesn’t appear to be in any rush to tell us.) This hour was so good it has bought back a lot of my patience, but it’s not infinite, is what I’m saying. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Perhaps this makes me a bad person but I’m deeply uninterested in Dan’s struggle with alcoholism and his apparent failing upward in spite of it. As far as I’m concerned he essentially exists to be an accessory to Kirby and every time the show shifts to focus on his issues instead of the stories of Kirby and the other women I get annoyed.
• The fact that we don’t know where the matchbook that was found inside Kirby came from means there has to be at least one more victim we didn’t know about yet. (And it’s not Jin-Sook, whose lost locker keys—that can only have been made after the Hubble anniversary—were found in a woman in 1974.)
• Harper’s gross sense of entitlement is truly terrifying, as though he’s somehow owed Kirby’s life simply because she survived him. A true metaphor in so many uncomfortable and sadly timely ways. 
• It’s possible that I’m just exhausted by TV shows that feel the need to pull the “surprise! you thought you were watching a story that was taking place in a linear order but guess what you’re not” thing that seems to be everywhere right now, but it’s truly exhausting. (For example, since we only see Jin-Sook buy the red umbrella she has in the series’ first episode at the end of its third, we know her attack hasn’t happened yet at Kirby’s point in the timeline. Ugh. My head.)

What did you think of this episode of Shining Girls? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of Shining Girls stream Fridays on Apple TV+. 

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