Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Third Day’ On HBO, Where Jude Law And Naomie Harris Find Themselves On An Island With Lots Of Odd Stuff Going On

The Third Day is created by Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly, and it’s actually two three-part stories that revolve around the island of Osea; “Summer,” the first three episodes, star Jude Law and Katherine Waterson. Both will be featured in “Fall,” a “theatrical event” online that’s supposed to take place in real time over one day, with supposedly events being filmed “live and in one continuous take.” Then, the final three episodes, entitled “Winter”, will feature Naomie Harris in a new but related story. Get all that? No? Read on for more.

THE THIRD DAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a country road from the sky. Then we see a car, and hear a distraught man outside the car frantically talking on the phone about a burglary.

The Gist: Sam (Jude Law) is the man on the phone; apparently, the office at the garden center he owns with his wife back in London has been burgled, and he’s worried about one thing in particular: £40,000 in cash. He’s far away from home on that country road for a reason, though: He’s there to go by a stream and release a symbol of someone he lost. As we see him crying then getting control of himself, he releases a small boy’s striped shirt and watches as it floats down the stream.

As he walks back to his car, he sees a girl on a ledge and hears a boy pulling on a rope. The teen girl kicks herself off the ledge and hangs herself. Sam runs down and rescues the girl, but the boy (Stanley Auckland) is nowhere to be found. He finds out that the girl’s name is Epona (Jessie Ross) and she lives on an island called Osea. Sam, who used to work with troubled teens, volunteers to drive her back and also tries to get her to open up. But when the causeway to the island is under water, Sam turns back to his phone to frantically find out what happened to the money.

When the tide subsides and the causeway is passable, they go onto the island and Sam finds out that the population there is gearing up for a big festival celebrating the island’s religious and mystical history. For some reason, Sam finds the island very familiar, though he swears he’s never been there. Epona asks to be dropped at the pub, where the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Martin (Paddy Considine, Emily Watson) have been like a second set of parents for her — her father, a local farmer named Jason (Mark Lewis Jones) is what Mr. Martin calls “rough around the edges, but a good man.”

Sam desperately tries to get in contact with Aday, a planning board member that was to vote for an expansion of Sam’s business, but only after receiving a bribe; that’s what the cash was for. Sam gets just enough service to get a text from his wife saying the money is the only thing gone. Mr. Martin convinces him that Aday is the one who likely stole it. Later, Mrs. Martin tells Sam that he recognizes his from his televised appeals to find the son that he lost; to her, he may not have thought that immigrants were the ones who killed Sam’s son, but in the back of his mind he did.

When he tries to get to the causeway before it closes for the night, he doesn’t make it. But he sees the same kid he saw with Epona; he chases the kid, but doesn’t catch up to him. He also hides in the brush and hears Jason complaining to another local named Larry (John Dagleish) about Epona and Sam’s inteference.  Back at the pub, in the room Mr. Martin gave him, he runs into an American woman named Jess (Katherine Waterson), who studies ancient traditions like the festival on Osea. Knowing that the he’ll be staying the night, he and Jess get drunk, but Sam finds himself back out by the beach again, perhaps in his mind, chasing the boy.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Despite the interesting format of The Third Day, which we detailed at the top of the review, the gist of it is reminiscent of shows like The Woods, where the main character has a mysterious link to a particular location, but what that link is is sometimes a mystery to even the main character.

Our Take: We read about The Third Day‘s format after seeing the first episode, which was at turns riveting and compelling and at others confusing and confounding. Director Marc Munden sets the stage for the miniseries’ mystery with lush distanced shots and extreme closeups. The idea is to keep the viewer unsettled throughout Sam’s time on Osea, and the sometimes low angles and distant style do just that. Sam is desperate to get to the mainland but somehow always misses his window to get off the island, and the goings on there seem to haunt him.

But what exactly haunts him is unclear. Does he have a past on the island that he’s forgotten? Or one that he just doesn’t want anyone to know about? There’s symbolism he sees throughout his initial days on the island; gutted insects and rats, that lead up to a vision of gutted people in an abandoned lighthouse that the boy led him to. What is that vision? Is it real or not?

The whole idea of “things are not what they seem” is usually code for “we’re not going to tell you everything, even though it’s going on right out in the open, supposedly.” Here, the conceit is executed well; we don’t feel manipulated by Barrett, Kelly and their writers deliberately hiding things or throwing us red herrings. But we’re not 100 percent engaged by Sam’s story, either; he meets Jess very late in the episode, so we don’t know what they’re going to be to each other at this point, and we’re not sure how Sam’s dilemma on the mainland plays into his time on Osea.

The performances of Law and Waterson, as well as the chemistry between Watson and Considine as the weirdly gruff and cheery Martins are keeping us interested. And what we do know is that, at the end we’re given a twist that throws us off a bit. We definitely want to find out more.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: Sam wakes up in his car, still drunk from the night at the pub. He reaches into his trunk and gets a backpack, but also finds a bag with rolls of cash in it. What is that doing there? He thinks. He scrapes the cash back into the bag and walks back to the pub.

Sleeper Star: As we talked about above, Considine and Watson steal the show as the Martins. Mr. Martin is cheery to a fault, and Mrs. Martin swears at him and insults him, but he claims “her bark is worse than her bite.” They’re both pretty damned creepy.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Sam finally gets in touch with Aday (with Jess’ phone) and threatens him word for word in the way that Mr. Martin told him to, you start to cringe because you know that this isn’t going to end well.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The performances on The Third Day save it, but the confusing premise almost ends up sinking the show under its weight.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Third Day On HBO Max