Is Horseshoe Bay actually haunted? It could be. But the series’ supernatural element does add an unexpectedly delicious frisson of fear to the premiere – as well as open up many creepy paths for the show to follow in future. It’s unclear whether Nancy Drew actually wants us, as viewers, to really believe in the truth of ghosts generally or in Dead Lucy, specifically. No one can prove the so-called “Dead Lucy” is real, but everybody pretty much believes she is anyway.Īnd it’s sort of hard to argue the point when Nancy’s busy discovering creepy rhymes about the ghost scratched under the wallpaper in her house, and we’re seeing strange and terrifying apparitions appear behind her at various key points in the episode. Her disappearance back in 2000 is the stuff of legend: Kids sing songs about her vengeful spirit, and her ghost is credited with all sorts of problems around town, from lost items to infidelity.
But there’s definitely more going on than initially meets the eye in this town.Īccording to local lore, a prom queen named Lucy Sable died under mysterious circumstances on the cliffs on a rain-soaked, fog-filled night. One where the ghost might actually be the one doing all the murder.
But it’s Nancy’s parents who seem to have been keeping the biggest secrets – including a trunk full of a dead woman’s clothes.īecause Nancy Drew isn’t just a murder mystery- it’s also a ghost story. We learn that Bess isn’t as rich as she seems, that George was romantically involved with the husband of the woman who just turned up dead, that Nick has a motive for murder and that his past his even murkier than we originally thought. Read more: Inside Riverdale’s Luke Perry Tribute Episode (And that goes for everyone from Nancy to her friends to her dead mother.)
While the death of Tiffany Hudson will no doubt drive a significant portion of the season’s plot, but at the end of the day it’s just the backdrop for the series to explore the many secrets, motivations and emotional issues of its characters. Much like Riverdale before it, the mysteries at the heart of Nancy Drew largely exist not for their own sakes, necessarily, but for what they say about Nancy and her friends. And, finally, there’s Nancy’s sort-of boyfriend Nick (Tunji Kasim), a kind mechanic with a criminal past. Ace (Alex Saxon), the diner’s cook, just sort of exists on the fringes of the story here in a nondescript white guy kind of way. George (Leah Lewis) is daughter of the town drunk and the manager at The Claw, where it’s obvious her constant sass seems aimed to mask the myriad of scars she carries inside. There’s Bess (Maddison Jaizani), a rich city girl slumming it in a small town for the summer, whose attempts to teach the locals about the idea of salad forks are somehow both sad and hilarious. Read more: Riverdale Season 4 - Everything We Know When a wealthy socialite with a jerk-ish husband shows up dead outside The Claw, Nancy and the co-workers who will obviously become her BFFS are all suddenly suspects in her murder. Her reckless behavior and emotional standoffishness are especially relatable as she continues to process her mother’s death-and her father’s attempts to deal with it all by throwing himself further into his law practice and an starting an obviously inadvisable relationship with his wife’s best friend.īut just because Nancy’s vowed to give up on her former sleuthing lifestyle, that doesn’t mean that Horseshoe Bay’s mysteries won’t still find her in their own ways. Nancy (Kennedy McCann) is almost immediately likeable: Intelligent, smart-mouthed and immensely capable, but with enough flaws to make her interesting. But Nancy Drew does a more than respectable job of reinventing its titular heroine for the modern age. In our world of remakes and reboots, it’s a little surprising that no one has attempted to put a modern-day spin on this classic feminist character before.