(VERY VERY MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

Watching Girl From Nowhere is a pretty bizarre experience. Like I do like this show, a lot actually, I think many things about it are quite phenomenal but if someone asked me, if this drama is actually any good, I wouldn’t know how to answer.
How do I go about rating something like this? Since every single episode, functions as its own little story, you never know what you’re getting into. When it’s good, it’s really good. When it’s bad, oh boy, it is bad.

Okay let’s give this ramble some structure, what do I like about this show:
I think this is such a great and fun premise. I love the idea of a vengeful demon in the body of a schoolgirl who has made it its mission to expose everyone’s dark side. I think that setting has a lot of offer and most of the time this drama does, at least very original things with it.
I think the fact that this show consists of many different stories, works to its advantage and makes this drama quite addicting. You can’t really get tired of any characters, and if you really really really hate an episode, you can just skip it (which I have not done so far).
The general ambiance is probably the show’s greatest strength. I love the eerie vibe it has going on. Even when the show got ridiculous (which it does a lot), the spooky atmosphere still almost always kind of worked. Sometimes it was the plot, sometimes the cinematography, sometimes it was just Nannos cold laugh, but Girl From Nowhere managed to keep its creepy ambiance going.
The cinematography also varied in quality from episode to episode, but it definitely had its moments. In the first season, you can tell occasionally, that the production team didn’t have a lot of budget to work with, but they always were creative with it and didn’t always go with the most obvious ways of showing or conveying something, which I appreciate. I especially liked the way this show was lit, which I think contributed to the show's dark feel the most.
I enjoyed that while this show at its core, is just about people getting exposed and punished by Nanno, Nanno wasn’t presented as a force of good. In fact, I would rather compare her with the biblical devil as her main function seems to be to tempt people to do bad things. And when she does expose and punish people, she usually does it through rather unconventional or straight-up diabolical means. I thought that was a really interesting concept and blurred the lines between good and evil even more.
I like Nannos actress. It’s really difficult to say something about the other performances because of the show’s nature but at least I can confidently say that the lead actress, pretty much the show’s only constant, was pretty great, and that’s what matters I guess.

On to the show’s weaknesses:
Even in its best episodes, I never got over how God damn preachy it was. I fully get wanting to include life lessons or at least some kind of message in your material, but good god, does it always have to be so damn obvious. Do we really need characters saying out loud what the writers think? It occasionally made the whole show feel like an after-school special. Like an abundance of strict PSAs. Like at some points I was expecting Nanno to look straight into the camera and go: “And remember kids, don’t do drugs and stay in school!”
I also think that the importance of the messages this drama included also varied a lot, which sometimes gave the show an accidentally comedic feel. The premise of this show is that in every episode a new character is introduced that needs to be taught a lesson. In the very first episode, we have a pedophilic teacher who literally r*pes and threatens his female students. Basically, the worst guy ever, and watching this episode you obviously want this guy to get what he deserves. The second episode (which I actually consider to be the best one of the show) again deals with sexual assault and literal murder this time and again you feel great joy in watching Nanno screw up the perpetrator's life. And then?? The third?? Episode?? Deals?? With?? Art theft??? And you can’t help but go: Huh??? Didn’t we just take a huge step back?? Like I am not endorsing art theft here, but come on. How did we start off with characters getting punished for capital crimes only to arrive at a story about a girl lying about something pretty trivial for some extra school credit?
And then the next episode is just about a guy who has to lie about his family’s wealth to keep his social status and I was just left confused how he was depicted as the episode’s bad guy that needed to be taught a lesson when he’s really just a teenager worried about what his friends think of him. I wouldn’t have minded this so much, if some of the other episodes didn’t depict such gruesome violent themes, that made other episodes' problems in turn seem insignificant.

I have to mention episode four, Social Love, which was the first episode that I enjoyed, fully because it was just so bad. For those not familiar, this episode was about a guy who, after a cute clip of them together goes viral, gets shipped with Nanno by the entire school. To please the growing demographic of shippers, he lies about being in a relationship with Nanno despite actually having a girlfriend, who has to face more and more harassment, coming from the Nanno x main guy fanbase of the school.
This episode, I believe, was supposed to be a critique of toxic fan culture, parasocial relationships, and shipping-wars that I have actually witnessed in the Thai BL community, where actors will straight-up pretend to date for cloud. But this episode is just, and I apologize because there really is no way around it: SO DUMB. Because stuff like this simply doesn’t happen. Not on this scale.
Like I am not Thai. I have never been to a school in Thailand, so maybe this is a cultural difference (though I very much doubt that) but in my high school days, printing masks of the Highschool-sweethearts and wearing their morphed faces during all times, was not really something that just casually happened. In fact, the most common reaction towards couples being cute in school hallways together was just general annoyance and disdain, maybe mixed with a tiny bit of jealousy. As I watched this episode, and witnessed how other students straight up started selling merch of Nanno and the main guy together, I couldn’t help but go: This isn’t a real problem, right? Like this isn’t an actual issue regular high schoolers have to deal with? There, very likely, is not a growing epidemic of mindless superfans in Thai schools that worship other random high school students, right? (Again, correct me if I am wrong, those are just my presumptions). Then, when there were multiple scenes of the shippers (who again, wear masks of Nanno's and main guy's morphed faces at all times) attacking the main guy's actual girlfriend, in an angry-town-mob fashion that I can only compare to the classic novel Frankenstein’s monster, the episode started to feel even more like a fever dream. In the last fifteen minutes, I just felt like laughing uncontrollably, not because what was happening was like funny on purpose, but because I straight up felt like I was losing my mind.
I am fully willing to suspend my disbelief for entertainment. This isn’t Cinema Sins, I am not going to criticize a story everytime it includes unrealistic story beats, but again, considering the scale of problems in some other episodes, which included painfully realistic themes as r*pe culture, this almost felt insulting. As mentioned, I think this was supposed to be about mindless mob mentality and toxic fan culture, two real problems, but the setting in which this took place just didn’t fit at all and made the entire episode feel quite ridiculous.

But I still love Girl From Nowhere. The episode I just mentioned, which I think might be one of the most absurd stories I have seen on screen in the past three years, is one of my favorite episodes of this show. Because it’s so fun. It’s just straight-up insanity and it's completely sincere and unapologetic. It contains zero subtlety, it’s just straight from the heart. Whoever wrote this really felt like this was a genuine problem that needed to be addressed. And that just has a certain comedic value to me.
Still, how do I go about recommending Girl From Nowhere? “Hey, do you want to watch a show that is only sort of good, sometimes?” Because this doesn’t do this drama any justice. It’s not particularly bad, it’s not like I was disappointed by it, oftentimes it did exceed my expectations, but there’s just a certain immaturity about it, that is kind of hard to explain. Its lean towards anarchy. The very idea that justice can be served in only 40 minutes. But that might be where the charm of this show lies. Still, oftentimes the justice that Nanno serves feels hollow and that leaves the drama feeling a bit hollow as well.
Maybe a better question than “Is Girl From Nowhere any good?” would be “Is Girl From Nowhere entertaining?” To that, I could say: yes very much so. When the plot does go off the rails, which happens quite a lot, it’s almost always so bad that it’s good. Like, I was often confused but very rarely bored.

I guess that is all there is left to say. Should you watch this show? Yes, definitely, if you’re okay with the darker subject matters it explores. Many of the drama’s morals will not align with Western ideas. This is a very unapologetically Thai show, which I found charming but might be the reason why this hasn’t found mainstream success yet, so just be aware of that as you watch this.
Don’t expect this drama to change your life. This is a very ambitious series but it’s heavily, heavily flawed. Often times it felt too ambitious for its own good. Still, I guarantee that many of Nanno's tales will resonate with you and most very likely haunt you when you’re trying to sleep at night.