Anne Shirley

Episode 13

How is Anne Shirley going to adapt two novels in the span it took to adapt one? By skipping vast swathes of Anne of Avonlea, it seems. If the pace slowed down last week, this week it picked up a truly impressive degree. Essentially, this episode skips through ten chapters, barely touching on some pieces of the story, including some more Gilbert pining for more than friendship with Anne. It works, but it's also a striking change, since even the first half didn't go quite this far.

Speaking of things left out, I believe it was a mistake to cut Davy and Dora's backstory. Since I know it, it caught me off guard that reactions to Davy were so extreme. In a sort of blanket look at early 20th-century fiction, he's meant to be read as a brat rather than a sociopath, a child who doesn't know how to tell right from wrong. That's because, the book implies, he was without parental guidance before Marilla took him in, and his acting out is a combination of “because he can” and a cry for attention. He and Dora fall into Victorian gendered tropes: girls are inherently sweet and good, and boys are troublemakers and rapscallions unless they're taught otherwise. Davy wasn't, so he became a natural terror. It's admittedly awkward because L. M. Montgomery worked so hard to subvert tropes with Anne, but this story is still a product of the time it was written. All of this is to say that when Davy offers to help with the axe, it's not a sign that he's evil or enjoys killing chickens. It's him stepping up and taking on the “man's” role for his family in a time and place where, if you wanted chicken for dinner, you went out to the yard and killed a chicken. It's meant to show that he's learning.

And learning is a journey in this story! Poor Anne has another unfortunate run-in with her vanity at the worst possible moment, accidentally dabbing red dye on her freckles instead of her “freckle tonic.” This time it happens just before her friend Priscilla shows up with her famous author aunt and a wealthy New Yorker, and I like the way the episode coyly keeps us from seeing her mistake until she looks in a mirror – we see everyone's reactions and know that something's wrong, but it's not until Diana, in true best friend mode, tells her something's wrong that she figures it out. It says something about how much Anne's freckles bother her; when people stare and even lean in to look at her nose more closely, she immediately assumes that it's the freckles they're looking at. It's touches like these that make Anne such an enduring and endearing character – she's human, and that means that she makes mistakes like leaving delicate china on the stairs where a rambunctious five-year-old can destroy it.

Although not much is made of it (in part due to cuts from the first half of the series), Anne's meeting with her idol, Mrs. Morgan, is another learning experience for her. She and Diana were utterly convinced that Mrs. Morgan would be just like her heroines – willowy, perfect, and impossibly romantic. Instead, she's a little old lady with grey hair and glasses in the mold of Rachel Lynde, quashing the girls' expectations. But that shows Anne that it's possible to keep living in your imagination, because what is Mrs. Morgan doing if not writing out her romantic fantasies just like Anne used to? Mrs. Morgan is a testament that you can do whatever you dream of, no matter what you look like, making Anne's freckle disaster nothing more than fuel for a funny story.

There are only ten more chapters in Anne of Avonlea, and I don't expect Anne Shirley to take more than two episodes to wrap it up. I don't love this rushed pace, but I also suspect that if you didn't know, you wouldn't know (in which case, I'm sorry), and the upcoming storyline is so quintessentially Anne that I'm hopeful it'll be done well. If my main complaints continue to be age-inappropriate hair and skirts and the fact that no one seems to have researched what Canadian food in the 19th century looked like (biscuits are bread, not cookies), I'll be happy.

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Anne Shirley is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.