why bly manor didn't work?
14 October 2020, 13:34
Has nobody in The Haunting of Bly Manor universe heard of an exorcism?
The Haunting of Bly Manor is captivating Netflix viewers this Halloween season but it's also leaving us with many questions.
Last week (Oct 9), Netflix released the highly-anticipated second season of The Haunting anthology series. The Haunting of Bly Manor is an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Just like The Haunting of Hill House, Bly Manor is filled with ghosts, scares and wild plot twists that you won't be able to stop thinking about for weeks after you've watched it.
READ MORE: Will there be a Haunting of Bly Manor season 2? Here's what we know
The series does a pretty incredible job of tying up loose ends but there are still a few unanswered questions that fans can't stop thinking about. With that in mind, we've gathered together 19 of them. Do you know the answers to any of them?
In the final episode, Dani welcomes Viola into her body and saves Miles, Flora and everyone else in Bly Manor. Over the next few years of her life, she essentially waits for Viola's spirit to fully possess her before drowning herself in Bly Manor's lake. It seems bizarre that she and Jamie never tried to find someone to exorcise Viola's spirit out of her?
Someone get Ed and Lorraine Warren from The Conjuring on speed dial!
We get that Miles and Flora were children and can't be held accountable for everything, but a lot of deaths could have been avoided if they told Dani and the other adults in their life about the lady in the lake and the other ghosts in Bly Manor.
Had Dani known to watch out for Viola, she would have never had to welcome her into her body. Not to mention, Peter and Rebecca would probably still be alive too.
Given that Viola had the exact same routine every night, it seems like all Miles and Flora needed to do was time when she left the lake and returned. That way they could make people in Bly Manor aware of exactly when they need to avoid her path.
One of the hidden ghosts in Bly Manor is a soldier and we later learn that Henry used to have a soldier friend at Bly Manor. Was the soldier a ghost when Henry was there? Did Viola kill him?
Hannah cleaned Viola's muddy footprints almost every night and, by the size of them, it's clear that they never belonged to Miles or Flora. Why did she never question whose they were? Did she know about Viola?
On that note, Hannah lived in Bly Manor after the Wingraves died. How did she never come into contact with the lady in the lake or the other ghosts? And, if she did, why didn't she warn Rebecca and Dani about them? Likewise, how did Rebecca manage to avoid the lady in the lake? Was she aware of the ghosts before she found out Peter was a ghost?
In episode 5, we learn that Hannah is a ghost. However, Hannah doesn't realise this until Peter, possessing Miles, makes her look at her dead body in the well. How could she not clock that she was a ghost before? We even see her looking at her dead body in the well right after she dies. Was she just trying to convince herself that she was still alive?
If Hannah and Rebecca didn't know about the ghosts, surely Miles and Flora's parents did? The lady in the lake literally went into their room every night. If so, how come she never killed them? Did they sleep elsewhere? Did they discuss the ghosts and the lady in the lake with Miles and Flora? Did they do anything to make the house safer?
If the Wingraves knew about the lady in the lake, why didn't they investigate her further? If they drained the lake, they would have found the chest and could have moved it somewhere far, far away so that Viola wouldn't be able to ever return to the house.
Living in a house full of ghosts without trying to get rid of them? Couldn't be me.
The Wingraves were clearly very wealthy. Bly Manor was only their summer house after all. It seems bizarre that they chose to keep on staying in a haunted house when they could have easily sold it and moved elsewhere. Not to mention, why did Henry let Flora and Miles keep staying there after Rebecca appeared to commit suicide on the grounds?
Owen and Jamie may not have lived on the grounds but they certainly worked there long enough to come into contact with some ghosts. It seems wild that they were so oblivious to Bly Manor being haunted.
When Rebecca finds out that Peter stole money she wants nothing to do with him. However, as soon as she sees him again and learns that he's a ghost, she acts as though everything's fine between them. Something doesn't add up.
In the final episode, it's revealed that Miles and Flora have lost all memory of Bly Manor and what happened there but it's never explained why. Dani saved their lives! They should know about that!
While we see many hidden ghosts in the series and learn about some of their deaths, we never actually find out Viola's total body count. How many ghosts were trapped in Bly Manor at Viola's hands over all those years?
The series only takes place over 20 years. It opens with Jamie at a rehearsal dinner in 2007 and then it flashes back to 1987. Jamie only appears to be in her 20s when she was working as a gardener in 1987. This would make her in her 40s in 2007. Why does she look well over 60? What did Bly Manor do to her ageing process?
In episode 6, we're told that Dominic and Charlotte died in an accident travelling to India to help salvage their marriage but it's never explained what really happened. Was there a plane crash? Were supernatural forces at hand?.
After Dani drowns herself in the lake, did she get a proper funeral? We need to know if Dani got the burial she deserved.
Jamie teases in her story that you won't be able to find Bly Manor today but she doesn't explain exactly why. Has it been renamed? Has it been demolished? Is Dani still lying in the bottom of the lake?
That's partially because the source material itself is unremarkable, but the creative team behind Bly is not blameless. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is a baffling text to parse, let alone adapt for television, but we expected Mike Flanagan, creator of the mesmerizing Haunting of Hill House, to deliver something less overwhelming than the cluttered yet listless Bly.
While Netflix's take on The Haunting of Hill House looked almost nothing like the original text (indeed, wild departures are a rite of passage for Hill House adaptations), Bly and Screw have much more in common. Our central character is the new governess at Bly Manor, and her charges Miles and Flora, with their deceased parents and absent uncle. Mrs. Grose, Miss Jessel, and Peter Quint all appear in the novella, portrayed similarly on screen as they are on the page. There are a handful of other unnamed employees in the novella, which likely gave rise to characters like Owen and Jamie in the show.
It's a tough predicament to be in, with enough characters for a show to get off the ground but very little known about them. Bly tries to build out Screw's painfully flat characters with clunky backstory, which only underscores how two-dimensional they were to begin with and remain after a season's worth of writing. While the 19th-century ink-and-paper version of Miles and Flora read as appropriately precocious for their station at the time, putting their words and actions feel wildly discordant set in the 1980s and come off creepier than any ghost we see in the whole season.
The writers build out Dani, Mrs. Grose, and the children, but to what end? Is there a point to the affection between Owen and Mrs. Grose, or did we spend a whole hour on their shallow backstory only to hint that there is something supernatural at work, after six episodes of nonevents? There is no big revelation about Rebecca and Peter's relationship either, other than that they probably had amazing sex in every room of the house and the ghosts were totally chill about it.
Worst of all, the show gives the least attention to Jamie, who ends up being our narrator and the emotional anchor of the story. This is the show that gave us the magnificent Theo Crain, now returning to spit on her grave with a queer character whose only traits are being spouting working class wisdom and dedicating her entire life to Dani.
In Mashable's review of Bly Manor, entertainment reporter Ali Foreman describes the season as bloated by the weight of its premise and predecessors. And this is true, because ultimately that barrage of backstory is meaningless. We meet the Wingrave parents, but they are no more three-dimensional than anyone else, nor even sanctified with as much commitment as the mother in Season 1. None of the added detail drives Bly's characters or story. Think of Dani's flashback episode, for instance, an utter yawn and now the third instance of Pedretti playing a tragic widow in a Netflix thriller — we forget it as soon as the episode ends, and it never comes back.
Episode eight is devoted entirely to divulging the mysteries of the Manor, which are similarly incredibly mundane; the house is stalked by a Victorian ghost after some family and boy drama, and even that is somehow presented as boringly as possible. Viola is a murderous murderee seeking revenge and reunion with her daughter, but the version of her haunting the grounds actually couldn't give less of a shit! She's forgotten her life and walks around apropos of nothing, and people are getting murdered I guess. Like so much else this season, it's a storyline pulled straight from a bucket of Horror 101 tropes that Flanagan seemed to be above — and viewers certainly deserve more.
This is why Bly's finale is so deflating. Where Hill House gave us characters and story to actually invest in, Bly mucks up the pacing of its emotional beats, often leaving untapped potential. Hill House is surely less haunting with a rewatch, when you know that the ghosts can't hurt you, but Bly tries to pull the same "it's-fine-now" ending without building the same stakes. All the big reveals happen within minutes of each other; even Dani's life-saving "It's you, it's me, it's us" is woefully anticlimactic, because the phrase was introduced all of 12 minutes previously as was the villain against whom she deploys it.
Flanagan showed a flare for nonlinear storytelling in Hill House, but even that timeline wasn't always straightforward. In Bly, the jumps between the present and barely-distant past are near impossible to follow. For a time we can count on the presence of either Rebecca or Dani to tell us when we are, but even that anchor disappears eventually. Grose recites Flora and Miles' ages like they mean anything at all, as if she herself isn't untethered in time and space (the first mildly interesting revelation in the season, which occurs beyond the halfway point).
