Family is the core and youth is the essence of Netflix’s adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’, but the loose ends tied up in Season 3 seem like a farewell to Avonlea.
WARNING: This review contains spoilers for all three seasons of Anne with an E.
Season three of Anne with an E opens with Anne’s (Amybeth McNulty) sixteenth birthday, and a fervent desire to find out who this flame-haired orphan really is. The show is praised for Moira Walley-Beckett’s championing of marginalised people and communities, and this season includes a group of Indigenous Canadian families, exposing the western imposition of Christianity and English language traditions upon native children. The plot line centralises on Ka’kwet (Kiawenti’io Tarbell), a creative and wide-eyed girl who Anne befriends in the first episode, but who is sent to boarding school with promises of educational progression, and consequently met with the reality of assimilation of native children. The season only shows us the experience of one child, though the last of these ‘schools’ only closed in the late 1990s and resulted in untold suffering for the indigenous communities of Canada.
Having already introduced LGBTQA+ characters in previous seasons and protagonists of colour in Season two, the plot expands to include Sebastian ‘Bash’ LaCroix’s new wife Mary (Cara Ricketts) and their child. Though Bash felt like a plot tool in Season two to assist Gilbert Blythe’s (Lucas Jade Zumann) coming-of-age narrative of independence, his role in this season is much more expansive and puts community at the forefront of Avonlea. The poignancy of his emotive storyline is unfortunately at the expense of Mary whose death is the uniting factor for the town in episode 3, with her newborn daughter likely to become the embodiment of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’.
The at-times irritating nature of the good-willed protagonist Anne is in her ability to reform the ingrained ignorance of the older generation, namely her adoptive mother Marilla Cuthbert (Geraldine James) and her uptight right-hand woman Rachel Lynde (Corrine Koslo). With the help of her iconic teacher Miss Stacy (Joanna Douglas), Anne’s education and insistence on subverting the patriarchal status quo stays at the forefront of her attitude to small-town life. Nevertheless, whilst she can ‘out’ an incident of sexual harassment at a local dance in her school’s paper, she can also be madly in love with her class competitor Gilbert, despite his interest elsewhere.
However, as we find out in the last episode from a book of flora and fauna that her parents once owned, her red-haired mother was a teacher, making it clear that the, at times, peculiar nature of Anne’s dreamy relationship with the natural world was in her blood all along – as was academia. The season closes with the girls setting off for college joined by Diana Barry (Dalila Bela), despite her parent’s wishes for her to fulfill her role as a housewife. We still get the happy ending, with the unconventional and self-proclaimed ‘ugly’ Anne learning that to be typically ‘beautiful’ is not the duty of a woman. As the committed audience watched her grow from a spindly, aimless girl to a loved and successful young woman, her expansive and borderless imagination allows her to keep one foot in childhood. The show’s adaptations of beloved novels such as ‘Anne of Green Gables’ offers a shot of nostalgia for older viewers, and a revelatory show for teens without the high school drama and technology that seem to dominate coming-of-age narratives.
The warm hues of the show diffuse through the screen and mimic the feeling of a warm cup of tea and a good book. Anne with an E is like a dog-eared page of a story that transports you to the safety of childhood, where you can escape into a myriad of worlds through black and white words on discoloured paper. Season three, like the two before, is a place where you can find family and friendship, as well as love within the confines of one small corner of the world and be wholly content.
Image Credit: Netflix