So this is the third of Netflix’s “movie” trilogy; I mentioned in my review of the second that it felt more like a TV show than a movie in some ways. That’s a feeling that comes in extremely strongly here.

First, and most obviously, is because of the structure. They start off the movie in 1666, as the title alludes to; but of course, this is a trilogy and we need to wrap up what happens to the overall modern-day plot, so I don’t even count it a spoiler to say that they then switch back to 1994 at some point. It’s necessary, it needs to happen, but it means that this movie in no way feels even remotely standalone. It’s very clearly and explicitly the season finale of this mini-season. It’s impossible to imagine a world in which this alleged “movie” is released in a theater and people buy tickets to it.

But the other reason it feels like a TV show is just that it’s cheap and lazy. In the first two episodes, this was fine — horror is often low-budget, and being lazy didn’t hurt too bad. But this is a period piece set in 1666. If you’re going to do old-timey horror, you need to work hard to establish a cinematic vision and feel and setting and all that. But this… didn’t. The sloppy not-really-a-period-piece feel of the first two really bites hard here, because you can’t just use year-appropriate music to mask your failings. So what they end up making is something that feels like… well, a throwback episode of a TV show, like when Angel goes back to the 19th century or something. At best it’s like a school production of The Crucible.

So okay, this would be a shitty movie. But as a Netflix thing that serves as a capstone to a trilogy, it was actually pretty good. It took all the plot hooks and did solid things with them, and while I have some quibbles in the spoilers section, they’re mostly quibbles. The story works and the trilogy ends up being a satisfying watch — yeah, it’s six hours, but ironically because it’s more episodic than a six hour “TV show” like Loki, it goes by more pleasantly. I’m not going to recommend it hard or anything, but as something that’s aiming for “serviceable and inoffensive timekiller,” it clears the bar handily.

Okay, so now the spoilers.

Spoilers

So the good thing first: Throughout this series, I’ve been saying, “this witch thing must be a mislead, there’s something going on that’s causing the Sunnyvale people to steal the life force from the Shadysiders or something.” Like, it was just super obvious that it wasn’t just a curse, it was an explicit transfer. And so obviously I was right, but their execution worked better than whatever I was thinking, and really tied together a lot of things across the movies, in ways that worked on both a story and character level. Good job, writers!

On the negative side, the finale of this story was annoying in that it had two parallel fights going on, but one of them was completely unnecessary. The people fighting it could have just sat back and relaxed (an idea even brought up by one of them). They thought that it would be necessary to prevent the monsters from getting to the heroine, but were wrong, because the cop was way ahead of the monsters, and was going to have his fight with her before any of them got there.

It’s not like a plot hole — it was reasonable of them to think they needed to buy her the time — but it made it hard to cheer for them to do anything other than not die pointlessly (which fortunately they avoided).

The last negative point is an extreme nitpick: At the end, the geek girl sees the desktop-computer-sized proto-iPod, and is like “you need an SSD to make it smaller,” and it’s a sign of how lazy the writing in this show is that they never even attempted to run that by a single technical person as a sanity check. Like, okay, yes, fine technobabble, I guess, but literally the first iPods used a spinny disk. In 1994, what they really needed was just to miniaturize literally every component a decent amount. Or better yet, a source of MP3s (which had been invented a year before). Given that the internet barely existed, a better way for her to establish her ultra-geek cred would be like “you need a better way to compress your music, look me up and I can tell you about MP3s” or something. Still makes her a technowizard, but at least solves one of their real problems in a historically semi-accurate way. Yeah, yeah, nobody cares and it’s not the point. Well, I care, and it would have been so easy to fix.