LogFAQs > #950582191

I felt like the show didn't really know what it wanted to be.

The story of Elisa's death itself is obviously not something that warrants four full episodes of exploration - and the fact that it was just a tragic accident brought about by her illness makes the attempt to turn it into a documentary somewhat ghoulish - but the things they used to pad it out just fell flat and didn't really run on any internal logic.

Was it an expos on the dangers of internet mob mentality and how easy it is to be suckered in to conspiracy theories online? If so then it dropped the ball, because the show lost any moral high ground in criticising the way that that poor black metal guy's life got ruined by the accusations when the show itself ended the previous episode with close-ups of him played over sinister music as some form of cliffhanger that screamed "LOOK AT THIS SCARY BASTARD!"; and it's similarly hard to buy that the show was trying to make a point about the dangers of people being suckered into wild theories when the show itself deliberately left out so many major facts about the story until the back half of the last episode, effectively perpetrating the sort of crazy paranoia that it was supposed to be decrying. It's one thing to try and make a point about how easily people can get suckered into false narratives online (and honestly that would be a very pertinent subject for exploration as of late), but it's another thing to present those same false narratives without counterpoint for several hours. It's like... I'm sure we were supposed to find it disturbing that the weird part of the internet was descending on the roof of the hotel with videocameras to have a look around, but the point is very much lost when presented as part of a documentary that was...well... doing exactly that.

But then, as well as that, was it aspiring to be an exploration of skid row, or the history of the hotel itself? Because a few random scenes - completely orphaned for the rest of the scenes around them - of "Skid Row historians" talking over poverty-porn shots of people on the streets, or people gleefully saying that Richard Ramirez went to the hotel once wasn't really the way to do it - if anything it was like they had some unused footage from their Night Stalker documentary that they didn't know what else to do with.

But take out those aspects of the show that fell flat and all you're left with is a disturbingly detailed account of a young lady drowning. And it was just uncomfortable to watch, really. Sure, serial killer documentaries are morbid as fuck, too, but with them the fascination and focus is firmly on the perpetrators, the motives, the psychology etc. They don't focus too much on the victims because anything that reminds you too much that real people have died in these events just reminds you that actually this is something really horrible. But there's no serial killer in Elisa's story, no villain or enemy - it's just us watching in salacious detail the story of a poor girl who forgot to take her medicine, had an episode because of it and in her terror accidentally drowned. That's not entertainment, that's not even news, really. It's just desperately sad.

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https://imgur.com/6eF0W