don't read unless you finished season 1 or don't care about spoilers

search party spends 9 episodes building an atmosphere of mystery and general 20-something malaise and then just...doesn't pay it off. there was no conspiracy. nothing happened and chantal is fine.

after the season ended, my mind immediately went to inherent vice, the big lebowski, and foucault's pendulum: conspiracy stories about a fake conspiracy that fizzle out in an unsatisfying way. after sitting with it for a few weeks, i think walk two moons by sharon creech is a better point of comparison, so i'm gonna take a detour to talk about that instead.

sal is a 13 year old girl whose mother has disappeared. after it becomes clear that her mother isn't coming back, her father moves them to euclid, ohio, where he begins spending a lot of time with a sinister red-headed woman, while sal becomes close friends with a girl named phoebe winterbottom. soon after arriving in euclid, phoebe's mother also goes missing, and sal gets tangled up in the conspiracy behind it that seems to involve every resident of the neighborhood.

here's the thing: nothing sinister is actually going on. phoebe is just a high-strung kid with a vivid imagination that's contagious enough to suck sal into believing in a conspiracy that doesn't exist. believing that something really is happening to phoebe, that she really is the center of some nefarious plot, helps sal read meaning into the events of her own life and her own mother's disappearance, and lets her see more than what's actually there. admitting that nothing is going on with phoebe beyond some mundane coincidences means confronting reality: sal's mother is dead and that's why she isn't coming back. there is no conspiracy, there is no coverup, there is just the trauma of your own life, and trauma doesn't have meaning, it just is.

the frame narrative in walk two moons is sal telling phoebe's story to her grandparents, and her realizing that she was never telling phoebe's story at all; she was telling her own. search party isn't about chantal, it's about dory, and how dory uses chantal's disappearance to give meaning to her own life.

i don't know how to end this. i liked search party and i thought season 1 told a tight, cohesive story by itself and i have no desire to watch the next 2 seasons. i also liked that it reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, so i guess this is a secret second recommendation for walk two moons.