CONTENT WARNING: This article contains mentions of suicide and other triggering subject matter
The Girl From Plainville tells the controversial true crime story of Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III. In any high-tension crime drama that covers such serious subject matter, there will be quotes that make viewers' stomaches drop or make them gasp at a lawyer's "I got you" moment.
And then, occasionally, the brief moments of comedic relief make audiences forget that they're even watching a show about such an egregious crime. These are the two kinds of quotes that make for excellent television, and this Hulu original series has plenty of both.
Conrad "Co" Roy II
"There's yellow tape around our son's truck."
Shooting any sort of scene where someone finds their dead loved one is tense and difficult. It makes it even more high stakes when the TV subject matter is a real death and a real family grieving.
It would be obvious for them to write that Co told Lynn, "Our son is dead" or "He's gone." Instead, the writers opted for more nuance and relied on the physical nature of the discovery. Co is seeing the yellow tape and it's what's sticking out to him the most in a moment that every parent hopes they'll never encounter.
Mrs. Carter
Michelle: "Conrad's dead."
Mrs. Carter: "Who's Conrad?"
When the show starts, viewers are hit with an alarming text exchange between Michelle and Conrad and then the discovery of his body. When Lynn finds the note to Michelle, audiences assume that the two were in a relationship.
Then viewers see Michelle's reaction to the news, and she is visibly distraught and in tears. There is a misdirect, because it's the expectation that Michelle parents will try to comfort her. Instead, they're confused and reactionless, asking who Conrad is. It's then clear to viewers that Michelle has never even mentioned Conrad, which is a red flag right away.
Michelle Carter
"'I like to sing in the car and, uhm, before Finn I used to sing alone. And this was the first song that I sang with him when we would drive around together.'"
It became apparent as time went on that Michelle had an unhealthy connection to the characters of the hit show Glee. She and many Redditors really feel that Glee captures the teen experience--however Michelle seemed to be mixing the characters' experiences up with her own.
After Conrad dies, there is a chilling scene of Michelle crying and smiling in the mirror as she recites Rachel Berry's speech about losing Finn to the rest of the characters. It's odd but seemingly genuine--until Michelle messes up a line and restarts the video. The performative effect the scene gives is enough to make viewers uneasy.
Conrad Roy III
"I'm too much trouble. It's charming, right?"
The show does a good job of showing how innocent Michelle and Conrad's relationship started. Viewers would come to have a hard time wanting Michelle to have a happy ending on the show, but the first encounters between the two characters were actually humanizing.
Conrad thought that he was alone in his struggles and that he would be the "trouble," but Michelle ended up having just as much going on as he did. It was actually a bonding point between the two. He never figured that things would go the way they did.
Cassie Wilkins
"Isn't this, like, something you should know?"
Holes start and continue to show up as more is revealed about what really happened between Michelle and Conrad. Cassie tells the detective at the baseball game that Michelle had told them Conrad had been missing for three days. In reality, he only went missing hours before he was found.
Besides being a slightly funny moment between a gruff police authority and a high schooler, this quote also shows two more people that Michelle was lying to, and it leaves the viewers wondering why.
Michelle Carter
"You said you wanted this bad. I knew you wouldn't try hard. I feel like such an idiot because you didn't even do anything."
At the end of the day, this is a story largely about technology and the harm it can cause. Much of what happened between Michelle and Conrad was over text and Facebook messaging. A creative way that the writers got around this was by staging their text conversations as real ones.
This adds movement and momentum to the story, instead of having countless texts pop up on the screen. This moment in particular was a turning point in Michelle's attitude toward Conrad from caring to callous and cruel.
Hayden Carter & Choir
"I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby."
The musical numbers are part of what defined Glee and its characters' personalities. Because of her fixation on Glee characters, Michelle had her own musical daydreams sprinkled throughout the show as well.
However, one musical number ended up turning into a nightmare when Michelle daydreamed that her sister invited her onstage during her choir performance and antagonized her with the song "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus, and the sequence--and Michelle's reaction--are haunting.
Katie Rayburn
"She knew him. She knew he had social anxiety. She knew that he was depressed. She knew his frailties. And not only that, Your Honor. She knew what it was like to feel lonely and want someone to talk to. And she did talk to him that night and she told him to get back in the truck."
One of the most troubling sequences of scenes for viewers was watching Michelle convince Conrad to follow through on his plan, even when his resolve was wavering. In a dream sequence of Michelle's, they even show her watching him get out of the truck and back in as she watches from the parking lot begging him not to listen to her.
This was the last punch that Katie Rayburn's case needed. Her closing statements, witthout a doubt, helped to cement the judge's decision to rule in the Commonwealth's favor. It not only highlighted her strength as a lawyer, it put everything involved in this case into perspective without the lens of following Michelle on a television show.
Conrad Roy III
"You can't keep hiding here. You have to face what's real."
In what almost feels like a trick ending, Michelle gets caught up in a daydream where things had gone differently and she bumps into Conrad at a bar back home from college. The two catch up before Conrad empties the bar and tells Michelle that she can't keep hiding in her fantasies.
This scene and exchange works on two levels. Michelle needs to literally stop hiding in her daydream world, but she also needs to face what she did and the consequences of her actions, which she does in the following scenes.