watched Midnight Mass and god, what a fuckin show
(i intended to write a short quick spoiler-light Broad Feelings Dump but it quickly spiraled out of control so. spoilers and rambling about religiosity ahead)
i am really averse to gore and scares so horror is a hard sell for me, but it had me tearing up at a couple points even despite the other times i was half-covering my eyes
i feel like what's really impressive is they made a show whose entire fabric was fundamentally capital-A About religion, and faith, and whether a loving god can be reconciled with a cruel world; without alienating me, a god-hating transsexual. but that i also think wouldn't be too alienating to my parents either (other than the blood/gore)
like, one of the functional protagonists is a devout priest, who repeatedly performs actions that are further and further beyond the pale - but who is also genuinely kind and understanding, who is easy to sympathize with, who has a consistent moral character and set of beliefs even as he realizes in the end that what he's done is wrong
religious devouts in stories so often veer either to being lionized and placed on a pedestal (a la God's Not Dead kinda shit), or being painted as an over-the-top villainous cariciature - and i very much do empathize with the latter, as a queer person who was raised mormon and had a lot of my life pretty fucked as a result. but as much as there is plenty of room for cathartic stories about tearing down the evil church, i think there's also room for stories engaging with religion and faith on a more nuanced level. if nothing else, because Most Humans are religious in some fashion and capacity, and being able to engage and think about it as a subject and a framework people live in is going to make it easier to engage with those people
plenty of us have a justified axe to grind, with christianity in particular; and i feel like Midnight Mass does still provide enough catharsis, enough reason to question religiosity, enough sympathetic and real-feeling representation of non-religious perspective, that it doesn't rankle to watch as someone disenfranchised by christianity. but it does also show religious people as people, humans with lives and inner worlds and relationships and who are capable of good and evil both, and neither infantilizes nor exonerates them for coming to the beliefs they have
Bev's role is i think crucial to that whole balance as well, by providing a fixed point just about everyone can point at and agree "yeah no she sucks." an obsessive, holier-than-thou zealot who will happily cause suffering and grief and death "in the name of God." a woman more fixated on trying to be god's teacher's pet, on being The Best at catholicism and memorizing the most scriptures and berating the most people so that she can be the most perfect one in heaven, rather than on trying to act in a christlike way. she's the one person who we can all look on at the end and, no matter our differences, unanimously go "well if anybody's getting into heaven, it certainly ain't her" and for that i thank her. also for being the butt of all the best needle-pricks of comedy scattered through the series
my biggest criticism of the show is probably the pacing of the last two episodes. once we lose Riley it feels a little rudderless at times as they have to split his protagonist role between Sarah and Erin - particularly during the chunks where it becomes just A Normal Zombie Movie. those bits were kinda dull and started losing me because i was there for the Religious Tension, and with the cork already popped on the "oh no what's all this freaky vampire miracle shit" and half of the christian/atheist dialogue tug-of-war gone, those parts just filled it with much more ordinary horror-movie tension - "ooh are any of the mindless hungry undead townsfolk going to find them in this house?"
there were also sections that felt unnecessary and boring like the "oh well maybe the vampirism is actually a virus and so there's a possible secular scientific explanation for the seemingly-supernatural thing" like cmon it's fine, i already feel seen enough, doing midochlorians on it isn't going to make me feel more Smugly Satisfied as an atheist. i think if the last 2 episodes had been smooshed into one 90-minute-er, and a few of the threads and reveals in those episodes spread a little more in previous eps, it probably would've alleviated a lot of my feelings of it dragging
but once we got back to the heart of it, the emotional resolutions and the ideological divide between Bev and Pruitt and all that, it still managed to finish on a great note for me. i kind of can't stand hymns after a youth of listening to a room of tone-deaf white utahns trudging through them every week, so managing to get me teary-eyed over a chorus of "nearer my god to thee" is like. honestly i feel a little betrayed by myself. they fuckin tricked me... i got got...