Gabriel and Laura Adank

Episodes one and three were definitely the episodes of all time. If I wanted to show someone how a police booking/psychiatric workup might look, I'd definitely recommend these two episodes. I actually thought episode two had a lot of promise to the overarching story, but as with the rest of the show, it tripped on its own shoelaces and fell flat, having not accomplished anything of value to the actual plot. Episode three should have capped the series, because episode four was absolutely pointless. I wasted 40 minutes of my life watching a family run an errand. No. I don't care about the "finer points" of the episode, or the "themes" or anything like that. I got duped into thinking the ending *MIGHT* have taken the plot "development" from the previous three episodes and wrapped up the story in a way that made me feel something towards these stale characters only to watch, from start to finish, every. single. detail. of a hardware store trip. I'm serious. The scenes do not cut in this series. So you're subjected to watching from the time the family got into the car until the time they pulled into the driveway coming back. You get to see, in full detail, every second of their excursion with possibly two instances of actual story progression. What is the reason behind this absolutely unnecessary bloat? No idea. But the writers owe the world an apology for episode four. Rarely have I felt cheated because the writers put a story together so poorly that I felt like my time was wasted and disrespected so much, but Adolescence proved that you can take something as popular and thrilling as trying to stitch together the inner workings of a murder and make it as boring and incoherent as day-time soap operas. And that may be giving this "show" a bit too much credit to suggest that it's in the same league as soap operas. Absolutely shameful how a series put together with duct tape and paste is so popular.