Carrie Season 2 Can Finally Do a Stephen King TV Universe Justice

This article contains spoilers for Carrie season 1.

Carrie White does not, it turns out, burn in Hell. Whatever we were told by Sue Snell’s dream sequence at the end of the 1976 Brian De Palma movie, Amazon has different plans for its take on the poor bullied telekinetic. A second season of the Prime Video series has been greenlit, continuing creator Mike Flanagan‘s plans for a three-season series based on the 1974 Stephen King novel.

“For 50 years, audiences have known and gravitated to Carrie White’s story. From the beginning, we imagined a story that goes far beyond the prom, and I’m incredibly grateful for Stephen’s trust and support in exploring what comes next,” Flanagan said in a statement announcing Carrie season 2. If some of the Easter Eggs in season 1 are any indication, Flanagan will need the author’s support in taking Carrie beyond the prom and into a Stephen King shared universe, something that has failed miserably in other adaptations.

Right from the first episode, Carrie made it clear that Flanagan’s take would differ from the novel and previous movies. Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) tells an unseen interviewer that there was so much more to the infamous prom, where Carrie allegedly unleashed her powers and killed almost everyone in attendance. Indeed, as the episodes unfold, we learn that Sue makes this declaration to Adelaide (Kate Siegel), leader of a cult of women with psychic power.

Not only have Adelaide and her people been watching Carrie (Summer H. Howell) and looking for a way to recruit her. But they also send an emissary called Emaline (Thalia Dudek), who acts as Carrie’s close friend when high school becomes too much. In fact, in Flanagan’s telling, the carnage at the prom comes not from Carrie, but from Emaline, who takes possession over her.

The final episodes of Carrie see Adelaide and her cult making themselves known, recording testimony from Sue and other survivors, killing Carrie’s fanatical mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), who shows her own powers briefly, and then sending Emaline off to escape with Carrie.

The season ends with Emaline and Carrie on the road, a classic set up for future seasons. But the real interesting part comes in the way that Adelaide describes Carrie’s powers to Margaret. In one of the interviews, she refers to the powers as a “Shine,” speaking not just about Danny Torrance’s abilities in The Shining, but also to the various powers of the True Knot in Doctor Sleep, a book that Flanagan admirably adapted to the screen.

With that line and the set-up of the final episode, it seems that Carrie is planning to explore a larger Stephen King universe. On the one hand, that makes perfect sense. Even from the fact that most of his tales take place in Maine, King’s work has always had a shared quality, one that became explicit in the Dark Tower series. And Flanagan is aware of that quality, recently telling Den of Geek, that King “started [a multiverse] when he was 19 and he doesn’t get enough credit for that. It’s become the engine of so much of our pop culture – the connected universe, the multiverse.”

On the other hand, attempts to make a shared King universe outside of the books have all failed. Even if we discount the terrible 2017 movie The Dark Tower, there’s the lackluster Hulu show Castle Rock, which felt like little more than a series of easter eggs waiting for a narrative to hold them together.

Flanagan certainly is among the more esteemed creators in television today, so he has good will on his side. But his bold deviations from the source material have irritated some fans. Will he be able to win them back with a shared universe show befitting the Master of Horror? We’d like to guess, but we don’t have the Shine to see the future.

Carrie season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video