Outsider (2020 series)

The Outsider is a 2020 HBO series from a novel of the same name by Stephen King.

2 out of 10 stars.  Stephen King novels are hit or miss.  They usually have a lot of innocent people dying and unsatisfying endings.  That’s what this is.  It’s science fiction with no science behind it at all.

First, let me describe the overall plot because otherwise most of the first four episodes will make no sense at all.  There is an alien walking the earth who can take the form of another person.  Each time he gets close to a person, he takes their form then kills someone whose death will create the most grief, quite often children.  He tortures them to death which makes this series rather disgusting.

A man who is walking his dog, finds a dead boy savagely beaten and cut up.  Human teeth impressions are on his body and a white van was seen in the parking lot.  A woman saw Terry Maitland, the local Little League coach, pick up the boy (who is Frankie Peterson) at a grocery store.  Frankie had a flat tire on his bike so Terry gave him a lift in his white van.  Then Terry  is seen at a local bar covered in blood.  He goes to the bathroom and washes up.  Then a cab driver picks him up at the bar and takes him to Amtrak train station.

What the cop investigating the crime discovers is that Terry has a rock solid alibi.  He was filmed at a teacher’s conference 70 miles away at the exact time that Frankie was murdered.  And he was talking and asking questions during the conference, so it’s not like he snuck in and snuck out again.  While Terry was there, he looked at a rare book which later proves he was there because it has his fingerprints on it.

The cop investigating the crime, Ralph Anderson, arrests Terry very publicly, at a Little League game, and publicly announces he’s arrested for the gruesome murder of Frankie Peterson.  His family is terrorized and their home is vandalized.  Terry is shot dead by Frankie’s brother on his way to the courthouse, which is directly Ralph’s fault.  When Ralph discovers it wasn’t Terry but someone looking like him who set out to frame him, he starts down a rabbit hole of murders across several states.  One murder leads to the next until he finally has a showdown with the murderer, who is a thing rather than a person.  He gets several friends killed, but he doesn’t publicly announce that those people who were suspected killers were actually innocent.  So Ralph is really a turd.

2 out of 10 stars.  I was angry at the end of 10 hours.  I would not recommend it.