Harlan Coben’s Shelter
Season 1, Episode 8: “Found”
What do I know about this series going into it?
I know that Harlan Coben is a mystery author, but I’ve never read his books and hadn’t heard of the show. While clicking through, I notice that this is based on a book series he wrote, rather than an original made-for-TV property written by him or in his name.
The Previously
A blonde woman tells her daughter Shira not to go away again. A teenager admits she was paid to dig up dirt on another teenager. An old woman is being haunted by the ghost of someone named Brad. A woman cries “Mickey” in anguish at a body lying on a beach. A group of women break into a nightclub and are captured. A teenager is shot. The old woman is stabbed. A room full of pictures of kids is lit on fire with a teenager trapped inside.
Recap
We open in the room with the pictures of kids and the fire blazing throughout the house. The teenager, identified in captions as Mickey, picks up the stabbed old woman, kicks open the door, and tries to flee the house – but a falling, blazing wooden beam falls on top of him.
Mickey wakes up. He’s a few feet away from where he was a moment ago. The house is still on fire, and now so is the old woman, on the ground where he was when the beam hit him. He tries to get up but collapses coughing again. Opening credits.
It’s later. Mickey somehow escaped the house and is meeting with three other teenagers: goth girl, gold earrings girl, and geek guy. Geek guy is listening to a police radio and says they haven’t found bodies in the house yet. They also establish that there is no sign of “Luther”, a guy with a scar on his cheek. Goth girl thinks the “bat lady” started the fire – apparently what she calls the old woman – but Mickey says no way. He’s upset, because the old woman was going to tell him something about his father before she died and now he’ll never know what it was. Gold earrings girl, named Ricky, leaves to go find “Troy”, whose mom is looking for him and texting her. The other three agree they should just go home now, under the belief that whatever adventure they’ve been involved in is over.
Ricky arrives at a house party. She’s accosted by a girl named Whitney about something I don’t understand. Then she finds Troy, who is drunk off his ass and refuses to leave the party. He dumps her for rejecting his drunken advances, then has sex with Whitney.
The next morning, Mickey is lying in bed. He flashes back to a secret tunnel he found, and sits up with a realization. He calls his friends to the burnt-out house. The police and fire marshals apparently have no problem with them just walking past into the crime scene.
They find the tunnel entrance hidden inside the garage, which is apparently where the bat lady came out. Ricky, whose name is suddenly Rachel, hands out stun guns. I learn from captions that the goth-emo girl’s name is Ema (how original) while the geek guy’s name is Spoon (what?).
The tunnel is an old fallout shelter. There is fresh blood on the floor. While exploring, the quartet come upon a room filled with old film projectors and canned food. “There’s film in here,” says Mickey, who is the only person under 25 who knows what a film projector is.
And apparently how to use it: they load film from 1960 and see footage of kids in the shelter, including a young Luther. Luther is bleeding from his cheek and complaining that there was “a nail on the windowsill”, which is how he got his scar. An unseen woman tells an unseen teenager to get the kids into the soundproof shelter, as the police are coming. The teenager comes into view of the camera and Mickey recognizes him: it’s his dad.
The quartet return home and are sitting around on their phones. One of them gets an alert about a video Whitney posted on social media. In the video Whitney confesses three things: she bought social media followers, something else I couldn’t understand, and she had sex with Troy (though she doesn’t name him).
It’s the next morning. Mickey leaves school and is picked up by a government agent in an official-looking vehicle. “How did you get my number?” he asks. “She’s waiting”, answers the agent.
Inside school, Ema asks Spoon if he’s okay with “the Candy thing”. Candy is Spoon’s girlfriend, who died saving his life earlier in the series and whose body then disappeared. Spoon is clearly not okay.
But the conversation is cut short, because it’s time for a basketball game between the Kasselton Camels (the home team) and the Westbridge Westies. We waste an enormous amount of screentime listening to a song and watching a montage of faces of extras and minor characters who don’t matter. Finally the game begins, and it’s going badly:
Mickey was supposed to play but isn’t allowed because of the coma he was in the day before (we saw him washed up on the beach in the Previously). That’s why he felt free to leave with the government agent.
Troy is distracted and playing badly, due to the breakup or Whitney or both.
Spoon, who is doing the play-by-play into the microphone, talks about death and what Troy did to Rachel instead of actually doing his job.
At halftime, we waste another enormous amount of time listening to Hollaback Girl and watching a cheerleading routine. What happened to the mystery story this show was supposed to be about?
Suddenly, Troy flees the stadium. His mother follows him. He says he knows about his mother and “Bolitar’s aunt”. His father, who is the chief of police, comes outside, and immediately Troy returns to the game. Troy’s mother tells her husband she needs to confess something.
Spoon has moved on from talking about death and people’s private sex lives, and by the end of the game he and his co-host Jim are actively rooting for the opposition. The Camels lose 72-33, but Spoon seems desperate to get in some kind of trouble, announcing that he had been suspended from school and nobody noticed or cared that he showed up anyway and has been talking to them for the last couple of hours. This finally awakens the principal from whatever coma he was in. He approaches the announcers’ desk angrily and Spoon runs off, flipping him the bird.
After the game, Rachel tells Spoon she wants to remove a butterfly tattoo she has on her arm because the group that it belongs to is apparently evil. There’s a debate over whether said group is rescuing kids or doing something horrible to them; I’m guessing that group includes the bat lady from the opening. Spoon goes to the tattoo parlor as well and gets a heart tattoo on his shoulder with “Candy” written in it.
In the meantime, Mickey meets up with the bat lady. She is somehow not only alive but doesn’t even look injured.
She says “Dylan” saved her from the fire. But she has a more important message for Mickey: you completely misunderstood the film you saw, and you should know the rest of the story. Apparently she and Mickey’s father had rescued the children from an abusive foster home by sneaking them out through a window, which was how Luther got the gash in his cheek. The abusive foster father called the police to get the kids back, so the woman hid the kids in a soundproof room in the shelter. But Luther’s younger brother Ricky had an asthma attack while the woman was getting rid of the police. Without his inhaler, and with nobody able to hear Luther’s cries for help, Ricky died. Luther declared revenge on everyone involved, which is why he killed Mickey’s father – whose name is Brad, and who is therefore the ghost mentioned in the Previously. There is a flashback to Luther stealing an ambulance, dressing as a paramedic, and hiring somebody to crash into Brad’s car so he could approach under medical guise and kill him. Because shooting him would be too simple.
The bat lady also babbles something called Abeona, which is accompanied by an image of kids in Holocaust uniforms chasing blue butterflies in a black-and-white forest.
Mickey arrives home, where his mother is preparing for a party to which she invited all his friends. He breaks down as he finally understands his father is really dead.
When the others arrive at the party, we are treated to yet another pointless musical montage. At one point Shira goes down to Mickey’s basement singing Hollaback Girl. Mickey hears her voice resonating through the pipe in the kitchen sink, which reminds him of when Spoon said something similar about voices resonating through pipes in a previous episode. He has a realization: the bat lady wasn’t being haunted by Brad’s ghost, she was hearing him through the plumbing! Luther didn’t actually kill Brad, but rather trapped him in the long-unused soundproof room to make him suffer like Ricky did! (This Mickey and Ricky nonsense is confusing, and my mistake earlier thinking Rachel’s name was Ricky doesn’t help.)
So the quartet rush off to the fallout shelter.
Mickey’s mother is surprised to discover that all of the party guests have left (which makes no sense, as only the four main characters should have left – where is Shira and everyone else?). But no time to think about that, as she gets a call – they’ve dug up Brad’s casket. She goes to the morgue and opens it. “Holy shit,” she says. Is it him or not?
The teenagers get hammers and crowbars and pry the door open. They go inside. A man comes out of the shadows: it’s Mickey’s dad.
Unresolved questions
Who is Dylan, and how did he save the bat lady when she was actively on fire and bleeding to death? How did she look thoroughly neither-burned-nor-stabbed only two days later?
How did Mickey teleport when the burning plank of wood hit him? How did he escape the house after he collapsed?
Considering that I have heard voices coming out of my sink in precisely 0 of the 11 buildings I’ve lived in in my life, what bizarre material does this town build their pipes out of?
Brad grew up knowing that the soundproof room was completely soundproof. So why did he waste his energy calling for help, not just once, but for long enough that the bat lady thought he was haunting her for an extended period of time? (Incidentally, there’s a plot hole: she says “I hear him in the night”, present tense, but this is already three days after her house burned down and she’s presumably living elsewhere. Unless the plumbing in this town is really bizarre.)
If Mickey’s mother was certain that Brad was dead, why did she have the casket exhumed? How did they not notice Brad wasn’t in it when they buried him in the first place?
How did the bat lady know not only which specific film Mickey saw, but what conclusions he jumped to based on said film? Why were the films made in the first place?
If Brad was a teenager in the 60s, shouldn’t he be over 70 years old?
What is Abeona?
Was Spoon really suspended from school or did he just say that because none of the other outrageous things he was doing got attention? Are the school authorities so lax that it took them an entire basketball game to notice? Why did nobody take him aside to tell him discussing people’s love lives on loudspeaker is completely inappropriate?
What was going on with Troy’s parents? Who is Bolitar and who is Bolitar’s aunt?
How the hell did I get the impression Rachel’s name was Ricky? After writing this post, I rewatched the early scenes twice and still can’t figure it out.
Ratings
Story: 3/10. The only thing of value was the double twist about Mickey’s father’s fate. The basketball game was entirely unimportant and all of the teenage drama went nowhere. There was way too much filler – fully a fifth of the episode was taken up by pointless song montages.
Writing: 2/10. Terrible. Spoon’s play-by-play stands out as being particularly idiotic and ham-handed. The bat lady’s speech didn’t do her any favors either. The scene of Mickey’s mother opening the casket was written to preserve a reveal for ten seconds later, which is the worst and most pointless kind of suspense. And for some reason the writers really needed us to be told, over and over again, that Rachel’s cheerleading dance was the danciest dance in the history of dance.
Production: 6/10. Good set design. Decent score. Decent acting.
Characterization: 2/10. None of the characters had personalities.
Clarity: 6/10. By the end I at least understood the central thrust of the main plot. Less so the surrounding aspects, like what Abeona is and who the butterfly tattoo people are. I don’t know what was happening with Troy’s parents or why he was even in this series.
Closure: 6/10. The main story, about Mickey’s dad and the mystery of the hiding kids, was resolved. Secondary aspects of the main story were not resolved: The bat lady warned Mickey that Luther wasn’t done with him, but Luther never showed up again (I kept waiting for him to attack the party serial-killer-style, or slam the soundproof door shut behind the teenagers as soon as they entered). She also warned Mickey he’d have to protect “Abeona”, and nothing came of that either.
The teenage angst dramas weren’t resolved either, just stopped in the middle. And was Spoon giving the principal the finger supposed to be the end of a character arc?