Prime Video's Carrie introduced several characters with "the shine" in Season 1, and one of them is an unexpected addition that retconned Stephen King's novel. King's fiction universe introduced "the shine" as a broad, inherited psychic gift. The term was name-dropped in 1977's The Shining, three years after the events of Carrie. Stephen King's world established that people who have the shine are unusually sensitive to thoughts, emotions, places, and sometimes, the future. It's worth noting that the ability is not a single fixed power, meaning it can range from telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, psychometry, and astral projection.
A few notable examples who have exhibited the shine in King's stories include Danny Torrance in The Shining and Dick Hallorann from IT: Welcome to Derry. Given that Carrie was Stephen King's first novel, the book never used the word, but many strongly believed that Carrie's telekinesis had long been read as an early version of the same phenomenon.
Every Major Character With the Shine in 2026's Carrie Show
Carrie
Mike Flanagan's Carrie series made the titular character's connection to the shine very explicit. Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) is still the isolated girl raised by a fiercely religious mother, and her gift is still telekinesis, but the show places both of them inside a wider psychic world.
Carrie's telekinesis involves moving objects and people, levitation, and related effects such as a rain of stones. While Carrie couldn't control her powers in the early part of the season, she learned to use them deliberately, with Emaline's help, as a way to channel her own emotions rather than releasing them in panic.
At the core, Carrie is a good person, but Emaline's confirmed influence in the prom disaster event suggested that the catastrophe was shaped by someone who already understood psychic gifts.
Margaret White
In Stephen King's original novel, Margaret White didn't manifest any powers related to the shine. However, Prime Video's Carrie completely changed that by confirming that Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) had a weak, mostly dormant version of the shine, suppressing it for years. Adelaide even called it "a little bit of shine" before killing her in the finale.
Margaret's powers manifested during the show's final moments when Carrie (literally) brought their house down to kill both of them. It surfaced briefly under extreme stress when she held the falling debris during the house's collapse.
Emaline West
Carrie introduced Thalia Dudek's Emaline West as Carrie's friend who understands what she has been going through. In Carrie Episode 5, it is first suggested that she was a hallucination: footage showed Carrie talking to empty space, and she began to wonder whether loneliness had invented her.
The final two episodes pulled back the curtain on who she really is. As it turned out, Emaline is an astral projector, meaning that she can send a version of herself across distance so Carrie can see and talk to her while her body is elsewhere. Carrie finally met Emaline in person in the finale, confirming that Emaline is real and that she serves as her savior, helping her escape from Adelaide's psychic group.
Adelaide
Carrie's finale finally revealed the identity of the leader of the group of psychics or girls with powers: Kate Seigel's Adelaide. The show established that she has a firm grasp of what the shine is and the ramifications of it.
As the leader of a secret society of psychic women, Adelaide is ruthless, and her powers include placing a voice in someone else's mind and making them obey it. To better unpack what happened during the devastating prom incident, Adelaide and her group posted as a documentary crew to gather up some of the survivors, including Sue Snell, Tina Blake, and Margaret White.
Adelaide completely erased Sue Snell's memory of strangers at the dance and the shadow behind Carrie. In Margaret's confession, she managed to draw out the confession that she had a dormant TK gene. Once Margaret made it clear she would hunt for Carrie, Adelaide stopped her heart and staged her death as natural causes.
Carrie's Season 1 finale positioned Adelaide as a potential big bad or protector in a potential second season, setting the stage for her bigger role in future episodes.
Maeve
Ruth Codd appeared in the Carrie TV series as Maeve, one of the members of Adelaide's psychic women's group who also had telekinesis similar to Carrie.
She appeared in the prom sequence to possibly recruit or save Carrie, but she failed to do so after the titular character's outburst, which led to countless deaths.
Sable
Alongside Ruth Codd's Maeve, Cassandra Naud's Sable also appeared in Carrie's prom sequence, unleashing her telekinetic powers to protect Carrie from Emaline's mother, who tried to kill her during the event. Still, the fact that she watched the massacre take place instead of trying to stop it suggests that she and her group have a morally grey principle in this world.
Caitlin
Carrie also introduced Delainey Hayles' Caitlin as one of the psychic women in Adelaide's secret society. Her shine includes psychic tracking, which allowed her to track and feel Carrie and later report her location to Adelaide. Her confirmation that Carrie's gift is real essentially expanded the franchise's world and changed Carrie's trajectory forever.
