Shining Girls Review: Offset (Season 1 Episode 7)

Shining Girls Season 1 Episode 7, “Offset,” is the penultimate episode of the series, but despite some big, important twists in this hour—Dan and Kirby figure out that Harper is from the 1920s, Dan is murdered, Jinny’s reality shifts dramatically after she seemingly survives her preordained death — it’s hard to fathom exactly how the show is going to wrap things up satisfactorily with just one episode to go.

Perhaps the biggest revelation of the hour is that, despite the fact that we essentially saw Jinny die in the series’ pilot, that may no longer be the case. (Fingers crossed!)

The Jinny we’ve been watching (the one who clearly exists at the same moment as Kirby does, and who had been doing a lot of the things we saw the version of her that was attacked do) survives the night of her big observatory event.

And suddenly, like Kirby, her entire reality changes. Her former assistant is now doing her breakthrough research presentation and no one at the observatory seems to know who she is.

Is this the secret, then—that if these girls survive Harper, the universe does its level best to erase them anyway? I wish Shining Girls were more clear and deliberate about what the fact that they’re being targeted means (more on that below) and how the unlikely event of their survival is also apparently just another kind of death. At least, the death of who they were before.

I mean, I’m kind of okay with that if it means that Jinny somehow gets to live and the death we saw before is essentially erased or rewritten. I really like her prickly friendship with Kirby, and I love the idea that there’s at least one person in the world that can relate to what she’s going through and knows she’s not crazy when she talks about reality shifting around her.

But did anyone else find it wild that Kirby casually mentions that Harper has probably already killed Jinny in the future and it just hasn’t happened for them yet, and like no one reacts, not even Jinny herself? 

There are just so many answers that I desperately want and feel like I should prepare myself to not get. I would love to know more about why this happens. Why Harper suddenly became driven to kill all these women in the first place, why he took all the objects from different times back to his victims (we see a shot of Kirby grabbing the carved horse she was given as a child) and how this all ties back to the house—or if it even does.

Whew, the list of things the finale needs to deal with is not small is what I’m saying.

“Offset” is full of dark and fascinating visuals, particularly Dan and Kirby’s discovery of Teenie’s meatpacking plant, the location where both Harper and Klara likely worked some 70 years earlier. Given everything that’s happened on this show so far, it’s a little weird that everyone is so mentally resistant to the idea of Harper as a man out of time. I mean, Kirby just described how her reality literally changes around her?

Part of the problem is that for me, as a viewer, the show essentially revealed the truth of what was happening well before it did an entire flashback episode dedicated to Harper bouncing through time. So it’s really hard not to judge these characters for not understanding what we already know, and for coming right up to the edge of the truth and then shying away from it.

And this has been going on for multiple episodes now! I know the characters on our screens can’t help what they don’t know, but it makes the storytelling experience so frustrating to watch when so much of it requires them to be ignorant of what we’ve already figured out. 

It’s why it feels like these past few episodes haven’t made a ton of forward narrative progress despite all the information revealed in them. We all figured out Harper was traveling through time like four episodes ago! 

How in the world can this show possibly wrap up all its outstanding plot points, explain how it all worked, grieve Dan’s death, and allow both Kirby and Jinny to have a triumphant final face-off with Harper all in one episode? Why did we waste so much time in the middle of the story?

I also wish I felt…well basically anything at all about Dan’s death. Yes, there’s something tragic about the fact that he’s killed just as he finds the receipt and the poster that proves Klara visited a bar out of her own time, but also Dan, as a character, has been relatively terrible and I’d rather the show spend its last episode on Kirby and Jinny, not a man who keeps failing upward no matter how many times he shows up blackout drunk to work.

Admittedly, I was terrified that Harper was also going to kill Dan’s son, and I’m extremely relieved that at least that didn’t happen. Small mercies!

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• One of the things that the original The Shining Girls novel makes a lot more clear than this series does is the why of how these girls were targeted. Kirby sort of stumbles upon the answer when she figures out where Jinny is most likely to be attacked, that the “shining girls” are the ones Harper kills at the moment of their greatest potential, when they’re about to do something monumental or achieve the first step to their larger dreams. (It’s why Kirby’s attack happened right after she got her first solo byline.) I wish the show did a better job of conveying this because I think it’s really important.
• I also wish the show explained what’s going on with the radium! Was Klara’s body paint made of radium? Was she accidentally a Radium Girl? Did I miss that? Does that explain why Harper’s bed still glows? (Radium has a ridiculous shelf life, IIRC.) Was the whole idea of a “Shining Girl” literal at one point?
• Oh Marcus. I guess I understand freaking out over your wife telling you that she doesn’t remember marrying you or anything beyond you being a kind of nice coworker, but you did Kirby dirty my man.
• Truly, the tragedy of this show is that absolutely no one wants to believe women, no matter how much evidence or truth they might have.
• I’m not sure that I actually need to see Kirby’s attack. I already believed her, and watching the poor girl drag herself (through sand!!) knowing she had a gaping chest wound was horrific. 
• I really wonder if this show is ever really going to explain the rules of the time travel house and Harper’s murder spree and I just don’t know if it’s got time to really get into that anymore?

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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