Free Rein is a British drama that premiered on Netflix.
Zoe (Jaylen Barron) and her family spend the summer at her mother’s hometown in England. There Zoe befriends a mysterious horse called Raven.
Tropes included in this Series:
- Almost Kiss: Pin and Zoe twice.
- Alpha Bitch: Mia is the wealthy, blonde, haughty mean girl of Bright Fields.
- Betty and Veronica: Zoe (Archie) to Marcus (Betty) and Pin (Veronica)
- Big Damn Heroes: During the fire at Bright Fields, Bob uses his party trick of opening stall doors to let Raven and Firefly out of the stables.
- Broken Pedestal: In the series finale, Mia turns her father over to the police when it turns out he's been poisoning the wild horses by neglect.
- Character Development: Status Quo is not God, and while both Mia and Gaby remain Zoe's rivals in competition, their relationship with her warm up over the seasons.
- Chekhov's Lecture: Frank teaches Zoe and Aaron some basic Morse, which comes in handy when Zoe later gets in trouble and can only communicate with a beeper.
- Childhood Friend Romance: In season 1, Mia is aiming for this with Marcus. In season 3, they finally get together.
- Daddy's Girl: Mia, Rosie.
- Dead Sparks: Maggie and Huck (Zoe and Rosie’s parents) are experiencing this. It’s the reason that Maggie takes her daughters to stay with their grandfather for the summer, In between season 2 and 3 Maggie moves back to Los Angels with the implicated that her and Huck have been able to work through their marriage problems.
- December–December Romance: Between Frank and his Old Flame Wilma.
- Forgot to Pay the Bill:
- After the fire at Bright Hills, it turns out that Elliot has been having money troubles and wasn't able to pay for the insurance of the yard.
- In season 3, the wild horses, Pin and Arthur are poisonned when Elliot has his men dump their lead waste into the lake because renweing the waste disposal of the Firefly Hotel was too expensive.
- In-Series Nickname: Becky (Rebecca), Mia (Amelia), Ben (Benjamin), Susie (Susan), Ted (Edward), and of course [1] Pin (Peter).
- Horseback Heroism: Par for the course for the genre. Notably, in one of the feature-length episodes, Zoe and Raven save Callum from a WWII landmine by outruning the explosion.
- Horse Jump:
- During the climax of season 1, Raven conquers his fear of water to jump over a stream and save himself and Zoe from the horse thieves.
- Pin's riding skill is noticed by the Holloway riders when he and Elvis leap over a fence to outrun them.
- The puissance wall obstacle is at the core of Zoe and Gaby's rivalry in season 3.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Pin is blunt, rude, with a Face of a Thug and a negative talent for first impressions, but Zoe changes her mind about him when it turns out that he's the sort of bad boy that nurses sick moor foals to health.
- See also Ted, who Pin clearly takes after.
- Mia is this to an extent. She is remains bossy and snarky throughout the series, but she's before all a "Well Done Daughter" Gal who loves her hors Firefly, and has genuine Big Sister Instinct for Rosie.
- Monster Is a Mommy: Ariel is the most dangerous of the wild horses, coming close to harming several people. This is because she is in gestation.
- Moody Mount: Raven is semi-wild as the start of the series, until and even after Zoe bonds with him.
- Ariel, by virtue of actually being a wild horse. In the series finale, Gaby tearfully lets her return to the wild instead of breaking and training her for competition.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Pin. Everyone is shocked to learn that his name is actually Peter.
- Parental Abandonment: Pin’s mother walked out on him when he was five.
- Put on a Bus: Rosie and Maggie return to America between Season 2 and 3. Ben vanishes as well, for no known reason.
- Really Royalty Reveal: Pin finds out that he is a duke through his mother at the end of season 2. His father hid it from him until he was an adult so that he could grow up normally.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Meredith, Raven's legal owner. When she sees how deeply he has bonded with Zoe, she agrees to stable him at Bright Fields for her to train him. Even when Zoe fails to rise to her standards, she agrees to sell Raven to Pin for him to stay at Bright Fields.
- Played With with Mayor Wright. She's not a bad person, especially when one knows how to appeal to her, but she's obsessed with her image and becomes much less reasonable when she feels that image is threatened.
- Red Herring: A few given the mystery aspect of the show.
- During season 1 Rosie starts to suspect that her mother is cheating on their father with an old flame. While reading Maggie’s diary from her teenage years she comes across entries about someone called E and how Maggie wanted to run away with them. Rosie believes this E to be Elliot as the two have been spending time together. Turn out E was actually Emerald, Maggie’s childhood horse and her spending time with Elliot was just catching up with an old friend.
- Also in Season 1 Zoe learns Pin has been stealing horse sedatives from the medicine cabinet and jumps to the conclusion that Pin is working with the horse thief. She later learns that he had been using the sedatives to care for an injured moor horse.
- The Mayor is very self-centered and wants Ariel off the island, but this is only because she believes her to be dangerous. When she is pressured into opening a program to manage the wild horses, she does not go back on her word and lets Heather follow her new passion for riding.
- Secretly Wealthy: Pin, as part of the Really Royalty Reveal.
- Suspciously Similar Substitute: The Breakfast Club replace Rosie and Ben as the local scrappy kids.
- Upper-Class Equestrian: Mia. Her daddy is a wealthy man and she owns three horses at the beginning of the series (Firefly, Sparkles and Raven).
- "Well Done, Son" Guy:
- Mia wishes her dad would stop throwing money at her and just hang out with her for once, and hopes to achieve that by impressing him.
- Callum. His dad and all of his brothers were recruited for the -18 Olympic UK team, and he's willing to go to criminal lengths to make them proud, though not without regret.
