The Big Door Prize S2E1: The Next Stage

We’re in dangerous territory. Season one of The Big Door Prize was based on M.O. Walsh’s 2020 novel, with some significant changes. But we’ve finished the storyline in the book, and we’re on our own. As Game of Thrones fans can attest, when a book adaptation runs out of book to adapt, the TV writers aren’t always great at blazing their own trail. So whatever mysteries are in store for season two of The Big Door Prize, the biggest question is, can it stand on its own against season one?

To recap that season: a mysterious machine called Morpho appears in the small town of Deerfield, giving residents a card that tells them their hidden potential. Mild-mannered teacher Dusty (Chris O’Dowd) is skeptical, even moreso when his card simply says “teacher/whistler.” He’s exasperated as everyone around him takes the cards more seriously than he does, to the point of upending their lives based on their supposed potential. Each episode focused on a different character, and how they reacted to Morpho’s pronouncement about them. In the last episode, it was revealed that withdrawn bartender Hana (Ally Maki) had a connection to Morpho, has been following it around the country, but that even she’s surprised when the machine announces it’s ready for “the next stage.”

As high-concept Apple TV shows go, Big Door Prize is no Severance. (But what show is?) Some of the characters are subtle and well-drawn, and some are cartoonishly broad. There’s often a comedic side plot that feels like filler. And yet its questions about finding purpose and direction in one’s life are compelling, the relationships are complex and relatable, and the teenagers act like actual teenagers with actual teenage concerns, never a given on television.

While not all of the show’s modes entirely work, it still manages to juggle sci-fi headscratcher, ensemble drama, and family sitcom with a light touch, while keeping the unfolding story interesting from week to week. The show’s best trick in that regard is focusing on a different character each episode, which lets the show give everyone more depth over time, and explore everyone’s relationship to everyone else in the cast as things progress.

This is the first episode that isn’t named for one of those characters, and it’s a chance to check in with everyone after so many things came to a head last season. Except we start with the one major character we’ve never met before: Kolton. Jacob’s athletic, popular twin brother, who Dusty’s daughter Trina was dating (and cheating on with Jacob), until he was killed in a car accident a few months before the first episode.

But this is before the accident. Kolton’s borrowed his dad’s truck, driven to a neighboring town, and makes a clumsy attempt to buy a beer with an ID he swiped from his bald, 40-year-old father. The ruse obviously doesn’t work on the bartender… Hana. This is the town she was in before Deerfield, and sitting in her bar is Morpho. As we watch her playfully pretend to fall for Kolton’s ruse, we get a sinking feeling of where this is going. She sells him beer, he drives home drunk, his car runs off the road, he dies.

Except that doesn’t happen. She serves him a ginger ale, he leaves, and she’s left feeling unsettled by the Morpho cards piling up in the bar’s dumpster, and the blue dots appearing on her skin. She eventually drives to Deerfield to return Kolton’s father’s ID, but by that point, the accident has already happened.

She ends up staying in the town, gets a new bartending job, and is unnerved when one of her customers starts talking about her newfound potential. She goes to the grocery store and realizes something last season hadn’t made clear — she’s not following Morpho from town to town. Morpho’s following her.

It’s a good way to start the episode, deepening the mystery before we cut back to where we left off at the end of season one, with the main characters crowded around Morpho, trying to make sense of what “the next stage” means. Hana volunteers what she knows, which isn’t much. Just that Morpho didn’t have much of an effect in its previous location, because there wasn’t enough of a town there for people to start sharing their potentials and talking about them. And that she’s had the blue dots for years. We know Dusty has a few, and Cass reveals she has some on the bottom of her foot, but everyone else is in the clear. So far.

So what does it all mean? Even Hana can’t answer that. She’s connected to Morpho somehow, moreso than the rest of them, but she doesn’t have the slightest idea of why or how. And Morpho isn’t providing answers, no matter who bangs on the machine or yells at it.

While Hana doesn’t have more answers, she does still have more secrets. She admits to Jacob that she talked to his brother before he died. She tells him something she didn’t mention in the flashback — two blue dots on the back of Kolton’s neck. She already had dots all over her back at that point, but she worked in a bar with the machine. How Kolton got them is a mystery this episode doesn’t answer.

Which is a great hook for the episode. The mystery of Morpho just leads to more mysteries, and these characters who are trying so hard to understand themselves understand even less than they thought.

The problem is the rest of the episode, as when neither Hana nor Morpho are on screen, things slow way down. We spend some time with the broadly-drawn characters, including some post-first-date banter between inept lothario Giorgio and Cass’ friend Nat (who thus far has been a pretty minor character). The show is clearly going for cute and awkward, but most of their dialogue is just them repeating things that happened in last season’s finale to catch the audience up. 

Mayor Izzy takes up Beau’s offer to be sheriff (the potential Morpho gave him), but only because she doesn’t want to watch over comatose Mr. Johnson (who was shocked by Morpho after trying to break into the machine) and needs someone to delegate to. There’s really not much to the scene; Beau is an overeager child; Izzy is self-absorbed and dismissive; Johnson wakes up and doesn’t have much new to say about things.

It all feels like filler until we get to the end of the episode, when Hana and Jacob figure out at least one thing about Morpho that leads us into episode two. As for our biggest question, whether the show can stay on track for season two, so far it seems like the same old Big Door Prize. Philosophical, mysterious, funny, but also a little corny, with broadly-drawn characters rubbing up against some impressively complex ones. Not the perfect show, but a good one, and thus far, just as good as it was last year.

Stray potential:
• Solely to make TV reviewer’s lives more difficult, Apple TV released the first three episodes simultaneously. We’ll try our best to get caught up in the next week or two, so check Subject every day (which you should be doing anyway) for the next few episodes, and then we’ll proceed weekly..

• Following up a thread from last season’s finale, Dusty and Cass agree to separate for six weeks to mull over their life choices. Except they’re going to separate by staying in the same house, because one of them getting their own place “might cost money.”

• Of course Dusty’s suggestion for how to deal with Morpho is to “unplug it, and plug it back in,” O’Dowd’s I.T.Crowd character’s solution to every problem.

• “I wish I wasn’t high right now. Or much higher.”