Britt Baron, Alison Brie in Netflix’s “GLOW” Image via Erica Parise/Netflix
12. Justine “Scab” Biagi
Justine “Scab” Biagi is the penultimate punk chick who enters the ring as an anti-establishment anti-hero. Her dark clothes, dark makeup, funky haircut and bizarre jewelry make her a poster child for ’80s punk rock. Today, she would make an excellent model for Hot Topic, but in the context of GLOW, she is refreshingly weird. No one else in the cast has the same pseudo-goth look, nor are any of them as familiar with and appreciative of their director’s previous works as she is.
Played by Britt Baron, Scab has a youthful quality to her that makes her stand out from the rest of the women in Sam’s show. Bash’s ill-advised party at his Malibu mansion is her “first Hollywood party” and she spends the entire ride there telling Sam how much she loves all of his weird movies.
Her obsession with media violence is a nice precedent for her wrestling persona. Scab is supposedly the audience’s worst nightmare — and quiet, gore-obsessed Justine fulfills that persona perfectly. Later, she hooks up with the pizza boy after days spent agonizing over whether or not to call him, then tells him off for daring to assume that he knows more about art than she does.
I did not expect to see a character on GLOW that fit into the punk mold, though now that seems farsighted. Scab is not a main focus of the series by any means but her character is familiar in her quirkiness. She is also super relatable for those of us who went through that all-black-everything phase and quoted Quentin Tarantino movies before we figured out better, more interesting ways to be “cool”.