Television series pilots are a tough gig no matter what the genre. The idea is to showcase a theme in the extremely limited amount of time of one episode. It’s even tougher for a series whose story aims to track a mystery through at least a full season. How do you showcase a story when the ending is nowhere in sight? That is the question that the pilot for Mystic attempts to answer.
The synopsis of Mystic is as follows:
This murder mystery takes place in Mystic, Connecticut and tells the story of an Irish-American family that has been living in this sleepy New England community for generations with a very dark secret. After the murder of a prominent member of this family, everyone in the town is a suspect to her untimely death.
What we know in terms of plot is that a woman named Bridget Ashling died on a boat, seemingly burned alive. Her daughter ends up in the psychiatric wing of the hospital due to the event, and is taken home by her mother’s sister, Flana. Oh, and she’s visited by her mother’s charred ghost as well. Meanwhile, the town’s priest seems to be overzealous, there’s a crazy woman wandering around, an old-fashioned figure likes to walk around at night with an oil lantern, and everyone else seems to be going about their own, shady lives.
The pilot episode of Mystic achieves two obvious things, and one assumed idea. The obvious things are character placement and general aim. There isn’t much character development, but we get the idea of who we’ll be seeing a lot of and who may have some real subplots. We also have an end-game: the answer to, “Who killed Bridget Ashling?” But more than that, we have a supernatural theme that may make that only part of the story of Mystic.
The most exciting thing about Mystic isn’t even on the screen. It is the potential of the story. The town of Mystic, Connecticut has a deep, bloody history. In colonial times, settlers and the Pequot tribe were involved in a war that deprived the tribe of its basic right to a name. It can also be assumed that witch-burnings and bootlegging operations were a regular occurrence in Mystic. with a history like that, the Mystic series has any number of directions to go. Let’s see what becomes of it.