For what it is, the premiere episode of SyFy’s Chucky was as good as a reboot can get in terms of appealing to a modern audience, providing genuine laughs, and adding just the right amount of scares to keep it entertaining. Regardless of how the rest of the season’s story pans out, this first episode will definitely tell viewers whether they will like the rest of the show or not—and chances are, they will like it.
And it is a great first episode, setting up every character to have an interesting or secretive backstory while also showcasing each character’s personality so the audience immediately gets a sense of who they are and where they are at in life. Although this can make some of the character’s actions feel predictable and stereotypical, it does allow the audience to remember each character very distinctly. In fact, there are a lot of character tropes in this first episode entitled Chucky: Death By Misadventure. Some of them include an alcoholic father, a closeted young teen, and a bully that gets away with everything because of her parents’ wealth and social status.
But it all works to help modernize the franchise and turn it into something that many people might relate to. In addition to bringing in characters that would exist in 2021, the first episode of Chucky also has a soundtrack that fans of Billie Eilish and other similar artists will love. The main protagonist is a fourteen-year-old eighth-grader named Jake. Jake lives in a town called Hackensack where crime and murder have been getting out of control recently. The show wastes no one’s time and immediately begins at a yard sale where Jake is hunting for retro dolls to use for his found object sculpture.
Jake stumbles upon the Chucky doll and buys it for $10, but when he leaves, the woman hosting the yard sale notices someone stole the butcher’s knife from the set she was selling. Jake apparently has a strange fascination with dolls, and he makes life-sized doll-shaped sculptures out of smaller doll parts. The audience finds out that Jake’s mom has been dead for some time because of a car crash. Jake’s dad, Lucas, has since taken up heavy drinking, and viewers get the sense he is ashamed of his son’s strange interests. Jake also wants to go to art camp, but the family (which consists of the dad and Jake) is struggling to pay bills, and they can’t afford the $1,000 fee.
In this episode, it is also revealed that Jake takes some kind of medication, though its purpose is not known yet. Lucas invites his brother and his wife and son over for dinner, and there is clear tension between the two families centered around the success and wealth of the twin brother, Logan. Junior is Jake’s cousin, but he also bullies him focusing on his closeted homosexuality. The aunt sneaks away from the pizza dinner to call an unknown person who appears to be someone she is having an affair with, but the viewers don’t hear if it’s a male or female on the phone. When the twin uncle’s family leaves, Jake flips them off, suggesting he really does not like them, and they don’t seem too fond of Jake and his dad either.
During dinner, Jake’s dad was getting drunk. When the other family leaves, Jake’s dad smashes the sculpture Jake had been working on for a while and tells him, “No more dolls.” But the doll—Chucky—is there for Jake when he starts crying alone in his room while the song How Villains Are Made by Madalen Duke plays. Later, Jake researches the Chucky doll and finds out it is actually worth $1,600—which would give him more than enough for art camp. Afraid his dad might take the Chucky doll away, Jake brings it to school with him the next day and gets laughed at on the bus. Jake gets bullied in almost every scene throughout the episode. On the bus, audiences meet Devon Evans (who hosts a crime podcast called Hack’n’slash), and it’s clear Jake has a crush on him. But he is friends with Devon’s cousin and enemy, Junior.
Viewers then meet one of the best but also most unlikeable characters of the episode, Lexy (Junior’s girlfriend). She creates a Go Fund Me for Jake and Chucky as a prank and gets in trouble with the biology teacher, who makes her stay behind after class. When class ends, Jake asks the teacher to hold Chucky for him since it won’t fit in his locker. The teacher tells Lexy to take down the page, and the child responds in the only way a child can—by threatening with their parents’ wealth and social status. The teacher threatens back to go get the principle, and Lexy responds by saying, “Go ahead, she and my mom are in the same Pilates class together.” The teacher leaves, but not before turning off the lights and shutting the door behind her.
Lexy crumples her detention slip and puts on lip gloss using her phone’s camera. Chucky gets up and scares her, making her drop her phone under the table. But the teacher and principal get back just in time to save the day. Lexy openly says, “Man, I gotta stop smoking so much weed before class,” to which the principal replies, “Hey, good idea.” This scene is intercut with another montage scene, in which Devon Evans does a voiceover from his podcast where he is talking about crimes that happen every day—socially acceptable crimes, silent crimes, systematic crimes, and crimes against humanity. On the screen, during the voice over, Jake sits alone at a lunch table with headphones on.
Two particular scenes make this first episode a five out of five. The first is the talent show, where Jake and Chucky humiliate Lexy by going through her phone on stage in an unplanned ventriloquist act where Chucky reveals Lexy is cheating on Junior, Junior’s mom has a secret, Lexy is into Pokémon porn, and she frequently googles why her farts smell so good. And the second is a far more dramatic and tense scene, where Jake’s father punches Jake in the face after admitting he is gay and threatens to kill him if he ever says that again. But, Chucky cuts the power, causing the dad to have to go in the basement to fix it. Chucky drinks all of the dad’s whiskey, projectile vomits on the dad and his feet, and causes him to be electrocuted to death because of the liquid from the vomit.
After Jake’s dad is killed, Jake moves in with the twin brother’s family, and they aren’t too thrilled. When they are finally alone, Jake demands that Chucky speaks to him. He throws him on the ground, and the doll gets up and says, “Hi, I’m Chucky, and I’m your friend till the end.” It seems like Chucky and Jake will team up in some kind of way to fight the bullies in their town, and Chucky reveals the next target is Lexy. The episode ends by mirroring the beginning—a woman brushes her brown hair, turns around, and gasps. She says in a relieved tone, “Oh, Charles,” and the young boy hugs who is presumably his mother while the screen says Hackensack, 1965. It looks like the Chucky reboot will give a backstory on the spirit that haunts the doll, as well as make him a vigilante of sorts.
Chucky is available to stream on SyFy.