The Nevers partially explains itself in the genre-jumping half-season finale “True”
TV Reviews The Nevers
We certainly had five episodes’ worth of clues that something was up with Amalia: seemingly brought back from the dead the day the fish spaceship Galanthi appeared in the London sky; her line to the Beggar King about her face not being her face; all that talk of her mission and confusion about what it means; her insistence that the Turned had a higher purpose, although she was unsure whether she was really fit to be their leader; and that hinted backstory with Maladie and Dr. Cousens. Did I anticipate that The Nevers would go into Dark territory, with time travel, a future world destroyed by war, and a character ending up in a reality decades away from the one in which they were born? I did not! So, to all who had “Amalia is a time traveler, duh” on your The Nevers bingo board, congratulations!
Just when I thought I had a tenuous grasp on where the series was going—the Turned fighting a widespread campaign of oppression led by Lord Massen, possibly assisted by Lavinia and Dr. Hague—screenwriter Jane Espenson and director Zetna Fuentes make my assumptions disappear as quickly as I would have eaten all of those delicious financiers. Instead, “True,” the sixth and final episode of this first half of the first season of The Nevers, connects nearly all of our questions about Amalia into one sprawling episode that shifts our genre focus from steampunk to sci-fi. Was it ambitious to load in all this backstory and exposition, use a whole-new vocabulary of terminology, and explain the horror of divisive nuclear war and the potential of the Galanthi in about 35 minutes? Absolutely. Was it messy? Also absolutely!
To be frank, I’m not sure any of this would have remotely worked if the performances of Laura Donnelly and Farscape and Stargate SG-1 veteran Claudia Black weren’t there to hold it together. Black is particularly good, delivering Chapter 1’s goofy dialogue with the cynicism, weariness, and exhaustion that so clearly defined the experienced warrior Stripe. Amid all the admittedly generic stuff about the forward time jump in Chapter 1 (that Roomba-like AI thing; the human-first prejudice of the Free Life Army; the reveal that the Galanthi are aliens who might be helpful, might be harmful), Black’s tiptoe from jadedness to optimism was our emotional through line. Sci-fi as a genre loves its spaceship gardens, from Sunshine to High Life, but even with that familiarity, I did get a little teary watching Black eat that tomato. The emotions flickering over her face in that moment were beautiful.
And then there’s Donnelly, who here is tasked with two overwhelming transformations. First is that she has to build for us the original Amalia, or, as Chapter 2 introduces her, Molly. (Nothing about Mrs. True is actually true, yuk yuk yuk.) Molly is timid, unconfident, and unsure of herself. She lets other people influence her, like the bakery owner who discourages her from accepting the affections of the hot rich guy, Varnum (Lee Armstrong); steers her toward the brutish baker, Thomas True (Daniel Hoffmann-Gill); and then eventually gives her the crap job of bakery deliveries for pennies. This Molly doesn’t react to much of anything; she keeps her eyes down; she’s desperate for a family and ashamed of her two miscarriages. We understand why this Molly would feel hopeless enough to drown herself in the Thames, and when she emerges, Donnelly plays her as an entirely different person.
In Chapter 3, “The Madwoman in the Thames,” Donnelly isn’t exactly the Mrs. True we know; she’s not fully there yet. Instead, we watch her character work through the trauma of Stripe finding herself transported from the future back into the past—my understanding here is that Molly drowned, after which Stripe, either by unintentionally hitching a ride with the Galanthi or purposefully transported by the alien, takes over her body. (No Altered Carbon mind-vs.-sleeve confusion here.) Donnelly is practically a complete opposite of who Molly was, from her gruff mimicry of Black’s cadence to the poise and explosiveness of her body language to the desperation and self-preservation she swings between while confiding in Dr. Cousens, learning how to be a proper British lady, and sacrificing Sarah-cum-Maladie to Dr. Hague.
There are still some elements of Mrs. True’s journey left unexplored: How did Lavinia get her out of the asylum if Mrs. True failed her application for release? In the three years that passed between Mrs. True and Lavinia meeting in the asylum and Mrs. True then running the orphanage, has Mrs. True been working on finding the Galanthi this whole time? Mrs. True never thought again, “Hey, what happened to Sarah, or Dr. Hague?” But I don’t want to assume The Nevers ignores these questions moving forward. For as ungraceful as some of the elements of “Hanged” and “True” have been, and for as much as I have been irritated by the villain dumps and the tonal shifts, it’s clear The Nevers is telling a very broad story. Potentially too broad! But “The Madwoman in the Thames” is the best thing this series has done so far, and Donnelly single-handedly sells it.
Let’s back up to address what happens in “True,” because there is a lot. We open on a skyscape reminiscent of the bombed-out, murdered-out aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, with a team of Planetary Defense Coalition (PDC) servicepeople parachuting out of a spaceship. It takes a while, but Chapter 1 sketches out the state of the planet. (Did we confirm this was Earth?) Humans have destroyed practically everything, 5 billion people are dead, and an alien race called the Galanthi traveled through portals, appeared unexpectedly, and dropped spores on people, imbuing them with empathetic powers. (Importantly, not powers as varied as turns.)
Are the Galanthi helpful? The PDC seems to think so, and there are humans who have put all their faith for the betterment of the planet in the potential powers of the Galanthi. But there’s also Free Life Army, a rebel group who reject the Galanthi and think that the aliens pose a threat to humanity. Somewhere in the middle of those two ideologies is Stripe, who has been fighting in this war for nearly 30 years. All that combat has taken a toll—as do the drugs she takes to stay even-keeled in these battle zones—and Stripe sometimes can’t remember where she is, or when she is.
So the PDC drops onto this planet, hoping to find the only living Galanthi and protect it. (If Stripe wasn’t part of the parachuting group, what was she already doing on this planet?) After engaging in a firefight with members of Free Life Army, the PDC and Stripe hole up in a building where they think the Galanthi is. I won’t even begin to pretend that I understood half of the stuff the PDC members were saying about their technology, or the organization of their military structure, or what Free Life Army has done. There is such a thing as making your dialogue too opaque! What matters more in Chapter 1, rather, is the conversation Stripe has with Knitter, a PDC member played by Ellora Torchia (of Ben Wheatley’s latest horror film In The Earth), who was raised by Free Life Army and switched sides. She has hope—the favorite words of The Nevers’ writers’ room!—and her unwavering belief sparks something inside Stripe. When the PDC finds the Galanthi and realize that it was being tortured by the Free Life Army, all hell breaks loose. A Free Life Army hostage the team took gets the better of them; both sides call in nuclear backup. Knitter dies in Stripe’s arms, and that loss finally seems to break the latter. If I understood the “Hey, this is radioactive!” symbols on those cans correctly, Stripe takes her own life as the outpost falls—and the Galanthi, which can make itself translucent and transparent, floats upward, engulfs her, and then transforms into the spaceship shape we saw in The Nevers premiere.
Did the Galanthi use the last remaining stable portal to travel through time? Seems like it! Chapters “Molly” and “The Madwoman in the Thames” show us who Molly was and then who Stripe becomes. Stripe’s confusion about time seems to have transformed into her turn, allowing her to glimpse into the future, while her personal body-horror experience lends her sympathy toward the Touched women alongside her at the asylum. She’s upfront with Horatio fairly quickly about who she is (“Aliens from the future gave us magic powers”), but she hasn’t quite tamped down her belief that nothing will change the future. So why does she offer up Sarah to Dr. Hague? Why not protect Sarah, too? Amalia is a quick thinker; I’m not sure she couldn’t have come up with some story to placate Dr. Hague while also shifting his attention away from the two of them. And now we understand that the Molly/Sarah dynamic is a real The Woman in White situation, with Maladie’s obsessions born out of Mrs. True’s own words. There’s no way Maladie ever gets better, is there?
And then finally we’re at Chapter 4, “True,” which shows us Amalia, Horatio, Bonfire Annie, and Augie’s attack on the Royal Military Army to try and drill through to where the Galanthi is, under the Grand Abbey (Westminster Abbey, I suppose?). I don’t recall seeing Dr. Hague and Lavinia at Maladie’s execution, but wherever they are, they’re not with the Galanthi, with which Amalia tries to communicate. This monologue is more great work from Donnelly, who lays bare all of the anxiety, fear, self-hate, and resentment running through Mrs. True. “Did my wreck of a brain cause all this shit? … It should have been someone else. Someone not broken,” she says, and perhaps it’s that honesty that finally inspires the Galanthi to answer back. And, uh, what it says is sort of ominous! “Did you think you were the only one who hitched a ride? Oh, Amalia. This is a long time from that little cave. This, I will need you to forget,” says what I assume is the Galanthi, shown as speaking through Myrtle, and excuse me while I say: What???
Who else “hitched a ride” into this time period? What happened to Stripe in “that little cave”? If the Galanthi is making her forget this conversation, what else can it wipe from her memory? At least Mrs. True remembers her name, before she was Molly, before she was Stripe: Zefa Alexis Naveen. And at least she has a true ally in Penance, who aims her tenaciousness and positivity toward the task of saving the world (“It’s work. It’s a life’s work”), and who encourages her to tell the rest of the Touched everything about “the future, the Galanthi, the fight that’s coming.” Is that the fight we already know about against the likes of Lord Massen and his cronies, or Lavinia and Dr. Hague? Or is this the fight against whomever “hitched a ride” with the Galanthi—which, I suspect, is the Beggar King? Think of what the Beggar King said to Lord Massen: Even when he had nothing, men followed him. That sounds like something a warrior would say, or a martyr. And if his fight against the Touched is something entirely different than the threat posed by Lord Massen, Lavinia, Dr. Hague, or even Hugo Swann, do we trust the second half of The Nevers to really focus on that, after the unevenness of these first six episodes? Whenever those appear, I guess we’ll see.
Stray observations
- Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked in these bullet points whether the series has really defined the term “The Nevers.” Yes, Joss Whedon spoke before the series premiered about the reasoning behind the name, but has the show itself addressed this? While rewatching the preceding five episodes for this recap, I noted this quote from Lord Massen that I believe certain commenters think serves as an explanation: “The heart of our empire brought to a shuddering halt by the caprice and ambitions of those for whom ambition was never meant. What women are appalled by today, they will accept tomorrow, and demand the day after that. And the immigrant. And the deviant.” But I’m not entirely sold on this. The show has also used “the Touched” to describe everyone affected with a turn and “the Orphans” to describe Amalia’s group, and of course, you don’t have to be a woman, an immigrant, or queer to be affected with a turn. “Never” just doesn’t seem fully reflective of who we know the Touched to be, especially now that the Galanthi’s actions don’t seem to have particularly targeted those individuals in providing powers, did they?
- So the Galanathi is a dragon, unicorn, manta ray, Cthulhu thing. Eat your heart out, Lisa Frank!
- I laughed at “I got world-class tits, but I can’t see over a chair,” and then I immediately Googled how tall Donnelly is: 5’4”. That’s my height! We are not that short!
- If all the PDC members are referred to by their jobs or responsibilities, rather than their names, what exactly does a “Stripe” do?
- Maybe I’m getting too paranoid with this, but: Is there any possibility that the reality Stripe-turned-Mrs. True ended up in isn’t real, or is some kind of figment of the Galanthi’s imagination? I only ask this because I don’t understand why that team working with the Galanthi was studying the 19th century.
- Wait, maybe: Were the artifacts from the 19th century proof of a time loop? Because if Stripe gets sent back in time to, I assume, help divert the path of the world so we don’t end up in widespread nuclear war, doesn’t the future state of the world being just like that mean that she failed? Evidence of this: that Stripe is on the planet before the PDC gets there; that she says “I wasn’t always a soldier.” I could keep theorizing, but I’m giving myself a headache. This is why I could not explain to you anything that happened in the final season of Dark, although I watched it!
- Some religious stuff sprinkled throughout the episode: The Free Life Army boasts about their piety (“We do not hide from God, like you PDC dogs”); Penance reaffirms her faith; Molly’s mantra was “God makes his plans, and here we are.” Is this something, or nothing?
- No updates on: Hugo, Mundi, Maladie, Lavinia, or Dr. Hague.
- I leave you with one last thought: Knitter described the powers given to her by the Galanthi as “one gentle question.” Is the question about whether we can, or should, hope for a better world? Or is it one step further than that: Is it a question about what we can do to build a better world?
- Thank you for reading!
126 Comments
It isn’t the world that blew up, it’s just how we see it with blown minds!
That 20-minute expositional dump with future dystopian tech-speak in the first chapter was so nauseating, eye-roll inducing and reminiscent of the worst of Dollhouse that I can’t believe I made it through just focusing on Claudia Black’s performance.
Always great to see Claudia Black, especially in a sci-fi context (going all the way back to Pitch Black).I really liked the turn to pure sci-fi and hope they integrate more of the future stuff instead of it just being “back”-story.
Wow, that was a lot to take in! Though I love TV shows that completely upend their premise many episodes along into something completely different. Or movies that morph into something completely different. But the storytelling ambition of the show seems too vast and we still have many questions. I really liked this episode by the way.The show rests on captivating Laura Donnelly, who was fantastic here. I missed Stripe doing Amalia’s hand thing in the beginning but the way Black spoke made me realize, hey, this could be Mrs. True. Very good imitative performance by the Farscape actor, whom I hadn’t seen before. She reminded me a lot of Linda Hamiliton, which is only appropriate since the show went from Victorian steampunk X-Men to The Terminator franchise plus 12 Monkeys plus The Day The Earth Stood Still. (That old time travel story cliche: it’s entirely possible Amalia causes the present day condition of the world.)
So the trapped alien in the beginning used the portal to go back in time, and somehow took Stripe’s soul or whatever with her? I thought the thing in the pilot was an alien ship but guess not. And so it uses parts of its body to infect people and give them powers? Like how we have elements of stars in us. Ok. Again, this episode explained a few things but posed far more questions! I guess you can call it a mystery box show, but it’s entertaining as a story with compelling characters and not just concerned with screwing with our heads, like Westworld S1 was.
The episode made me think perhaps the title of the show refers to Amalia’s Touched fighting so that the future world we saw never happens. I didn’t recognize the woman who told Amalia she was in a cave in her flash forward, and I don’t remember who Myrtle was because everything has been so dense. But I’m not complaining.
And I really liked the character reveal that Amalia loves Penance because the latter gives Stripe the hope that Stripe couldn’t give to her dying soldier comrade. That’s poignant.
I’ve seen some of the interviews and behind the scenes stuff. Donelly was listening to recordings of her (Donelly’s) lines done by Black for the North American accent.
Which makes sense, Black’s North American accent is largely believable, and certainly feels natural, while Donnelly’s is uhh rather less so on both counts. (I blame the posh schools U.K. actors all seem to have gone to, maybe ruined by rigorous Received Pronunciation indoctrination; whatever the cause, Australians sometimes pull it off seamlessly but I’m struggling to think of a U.K. actor’s North American accent that isn’t comical.)
…I’m struggling to think of a U.K. actor’s North American accent that isn’t comical.Watch Dominique Provost-Chalkley on Wynonna Earp. Most people are shocked when they hear her natural accent.
Ah see Dominique Provost-Chalkley is indeed not comical but for me she’s always been in a secondary “decent, but very very noticeable” category (like Claudia Black, who’s been using her ‘American’ accent long enough now that it feels natural, if idiosyncratic). That is to say, she’s indeed quite good but it’s a rather uncanny-valley thing, close enough that the slight distinction actually always sounded really off to me and I found out about her British origins by pulling on that thread rather than the other way around.Probably doesn’t help that Wynonna Earp is shot in my home province and with a ton of the actors being Western Canadian production regulars or Eastern Canadian ones illustrating the specific range of differences and similarities of accents in this country, so my ear is very tuned to that and the difference with non-native accents stands out very starkly to me on that familiar canvas.
“I’m struggling to think of a U.K. actor’s North American accent that isn’t comical.)”Really? Admittedly I don’t have a great ear for accents, but I feel like generally Brits pull of the American accent pretty seamlessly. Hugh Laurie, Christian Bale, Tom Holland, Gary Oldman, Robert Pattinson, Henry Cavill, Charlie Cox, Aaron Taylor Johnson (jeez, with the exception of Hugh I seem to be in a superhero rut as to the actors I can think of…)It’s harder for me to think of ones that stick out as awkward, Ewan McGregor in Black Hawk Down felt out of place, I’ve never been a fan of Idris Elba’s accent work, I don’t know if Danielle Radcliffe counts or if it’s more that I’m just SO accustomed to his British accent that it sticks out to me…
Ah yeah very different from my perspective, Bale and Pattinson and Cavill especially all seem very artificial, I think it actually makes them better for some of their roles especially their genre ones since there’s a sense of remove and alienness. Only one on your list that I’d entirely agree with is Hugh Laurie, and ironically I think his best accent work is in Avenue 5 where it’s actually a plot point that his American accent is fake, since he gets to kindof lean into that and finds some fun crevices there, not to mention he gets to play around with slipping between accents.
Andrew Garfield is weirdly good. He doesn’t tend to slip up.
Ohhh, yeah, that’s a good call, Garfield is one of the rare ones I didn’t actually suspect before finding it out.
Matthew Rhys, Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga, Iris Elba, Ruth Wilson.
An Irish actress doing a North American accent, playing a character who is having a difficult time trying to achieve a convincing British/London accent.
Who is also an alien.
Stripe reminded me of Jane Lynch’s character in Wreck-it-Ralph (only really fleshed out). That’s not a knock or complaint… that’s just how my poor excuse of a brain works. Also I got an “Edge of Tommorow” vibe with what’s going on.
Myrtle is the touched girl who speaks in every language but English, which turns out to be useful because she understands Mary’s song.
this rocked
So, to all who had “Amalia is a time traveler, duh” on your The Nevers bingo board, congratulations!Thanks! I thought Amalia’s “We don’t do that when I’m from” a couple episodes back was a pretty big giveaway.
Yeah it was either time-travel, dimensional travel, or alien – and she acted more out of time than anything else.
Not to mention Amalia saying to Pennance, “You’ve invented the Amplifier!” I think critics were way too dismissive of this show and should have payed attention instead of focusing on Whedon’s involvement. This stuff wasn’t subtext, it was actually IN THE TEXT! I predicted she was from the future and inhabiting Amalia’s body after episode 4.
And her mention that the others wouldn’t know any of the songs she knows, in an earlier episode.
Yep, she also said “you invented the x-ray machine” the following episode
I thought her and the ship were both aliens and she assumed human form. Half right!
“We don’t do that when I’m from” The number of people who missed that (reviewers included) is amazing. It’s lie most people watch this show while also doing 2 other things at once! lol
They’re in London the whole time. They’re only in a different when, at times, not a different where. Thus how Stripe explains that she was one of three survivers from the PDC defeat in Edinburgh, the only one who survived the long walk down.
A study by the Rand Corporation done for the government some time ago predicted that proof of the existence of an alien civilization would shake the very foundations of many of the world’s religions. Another trope is the hope that benevolent aliens would save us from destroying the planet and ourselves.It’s assumed, of course, that everyone would welcome their help, when in fact, there are some fundamentalists who assume UFOs are “Satanic” and many of the same people hold deep suspicions of science. You can bet there would be many others like Lord Massen, who abhor any disruption of the established order, and feel a certain amount of human misery and environmental destruction are both necessary and desirable. A utopia would be unacceptable, and an affront to their God, who demands suffering.If you can convince some people now that having guaranteed access to health care is “slavery”, you can imagine how easy it would be to convince members of the Free Life Army that a utopia free of hunger, disease and war would take away their “freedom”, and be an assault on their conception of God.For some, the intervention of kindly, benevolent aliens to save us is a beautiful dream. To others, especially to those of power and privilege, it’s a nightmare.
Well yeah, but to yet others it’s a dream that’s too beautiful to actually believe. Uncertainty can make for strange bedfellows. Imagine being a genuinely decent human being who simply cannot accept on faith that literal space aliens and the-powers-that-be (often embodied by people like Massen, remember) are trying to save everybody, and finding yourself forced into an alliance with the Kentucky-fried Kristian Konfederate Klub.
I got the impression that Stripe had True’s ‘ripplings’ in the future segment, and either the Galanthi in the future created both Stripes and Spores, with different abilities, or a Stripe’s abilities are unrelated to the arrival of the Galanthi and the ripplings are a side effect of the drugs this Stripe was taking, and carried over into True when she was placed in that body.I’m also gonna guess that the scientists and the Galanthi had come to the conclusion that the Galanthi had arrived too late to save humanity and for some reason decided that the tail end of the Victorian Era was some sort of inflection point where if the Galanthi had shown up it would avert the chain of events that led to the dystopian nightmare present (the 15th Century PROBABLY would’ve been a better choice, tbqh).
Stripe’s ‘ripples’ were flashbacks not forward. Although back and forward are relative to where she is in time so it *may* still be she had the power in the future but it was a lot less useful. If so it would add credence to the odds we end up with a time loop (or a ‘this is all a simulation/fantasy’ reveal both past *and* future – but I hope they don’t go that cliché).
I’m fairly sure that there’s a timeloop, she kept talking about how it always ends up the same, they always lose.
I think they all would have been immediately burned as witches in the 15th Century. The 19th was an inflection point when everything seemed possible through science.
The random super-powers are (apparently) an accident and what was supposed to be granted was ‘empathy enhancement,’ and presumably were going to be dusted over the whole world instead of just one city. Enhanced empathy at the dawn of the colonial era would do a lot more good than in the late 19th Century.
Wait Claudia Black is in this now? I’m going to have to give it another try.
I went through the exact same thing and did not regret it nearly as much as I thought I would.That said, I think knowing the “twist” ahead of time—even in rough outline form—made a lot of the elements that might have bugged me otherwise. It reminded me of my experience with The Good Place—the premise seemed too twee to even try until hearing about the “big twist” that made it a much better show.Honestly, it seems like a fairly risky gambit for TV series unless they’re all but guaranteed a second season. Too much risk of people losing interest before you get there. Guess it plays out differently with streaming.
I figured being a Stripe just meant being a career soldier. See for example… umm, the film Stripes.My first guess for the other person who hitched a ride being Massen or, more likely, his daughter, which is why he sees Galanthi as an invasion.
I don’t think it’s Massen as we saw in the flashback in the first episode that he wasn’t affected by spores, his daughter was. So it could be the daughter, although that might also be the woman who says that Amalia needs to forget all of this.The other passanger is a weird one as the easy guess would be the FreeLife dude, but he died before the Galanthi left and at that point there would be a question why that dude and not for example the healer who died soon after. If it had to be someone who was dying when the Galanthi left, then there were two other people remaining. The Crescent and the tech guy, with the latter being pretty badly wounded. So from a logistical sense it would imply it was the tech guy, but there was nothing there to imply him as an opposing force.Unless, and this is just spitballing, this is him seeing a capability to build himself a place in the past with his technological knowledge from the future.
Myrtle is the one that tells True to forget
Freelife dude was still alive afaik at the end of everything, Stripe shot him but he didn’t die. That said, Stripe was dead when the Galanthi grabbed her so it could have been anyone. My guess is Knitter
Myrtle, or at least an entity taking the form of Myrtle, is the one who says Amalia needs to forget this part.
I’m wondering if Dr. Hague ‘came through’ as well from the future. The
way he cottoned on to Sarah and Mollie so quickly after the spores began
affecting people seemed pretty quick; how did he figure it out so fast?
In the first episode where we see the Galanthi under London, Hague says
to Miss Bidlow ‘Ain’t we got fun?’ As the character had been heard
humming or singing in previous episodes, I thought it was a reference to
the popular song of the same name. However, the song debuted in 1921,
and The Nevers is set in 1897 (I think), so it’s either an
extremely subtle clue or a glaring error (or no reference to the song
was intended).
When Hague is in the mental hospital he comes across much more modern than I really cottoned to before. People in the show have probably ignored it on the basis that he’s an eccentric American, but he’s my number one candidate for being the other ‘stowaway.’ Especially if he’s building the cyborgs.
I don’t know what the strategic alignments were of the science team they found in the future segment, but maybe Dr. Hague is the scientist in the video with the Galanthi, talking about how unexpectedly playful it was?
That scientist was one of the people hanging above the Galanthi, not saying that it couldn’t happen but unlikely that he made that quantum leap with Stripes.
Yeah, I don’t know how the whole transport across time works, or if it’s a soul or what. But I thought it was made to seem like Stripe killed herself drinking whatever was in those bottles, and if she was dead already, maybe the Galanthi can move recently dead souls across time? Maybe the dead scientist IS Dr. Hague and he’s gone a but cuckoo from being brought back to life and transported back in time?
My reading was that anyone that very recently died or was dying could hitch a ride. I’m thinking that the Southern sounding guy and/or Knitter might have gone as well.The southern guy could be Hague, both American accents and I think Knitter might be Myrtle.
Theoretically, the wormhole the future segment showed could do time travel, that is one of the real-world arguments against their existence. A spacetime bridge crosses both space and time. Even if it was a wormhole that deposited you someplace else instantly, that’s still time travel since your circumventing the normal time it would take to travel that distance in normal spacetime. The actual science goes way deep into the second law of thermodynamics and is beyond the scope of this article LOL
That and no one knew her name. She said something like – Married twice and neither if them knew my name when asked what her name was. I guess more than one hitchhiker.
A Stripe is nothing more than a seventh boot, not even above the rank of Knitter in the PDC. In the Free Army, they’re known as a Whirligigotron and Knitters are called B00’shanties.
-The Book of Inane Future Slang Gibberish
I was thinking “Stripe” was specifically a sergeant or other NCO (as in “earn your stripes”), contrasted with a “Boot” (as in boot camp; as in a private, grunt or even just a rookie).
Yeah, having just watched this episode, it seemed pretty straightforward that “Stripe,” “Knitter,” and “Boot” were all ranks or roles of some sort—they mentioned a few times that your “true” name is sacred and you don’t share it with very many people, which is why we don’t learn the actual character’s name—Zephyr—until she reveals it to Penance at the very end of the episode. It’s interesting; I chose to watch the whole series in part because it mentioned Claudia Black played the pre-time jump Zephyr/Amalia True character—she plays a very similar character on Farscape, and I think it’s accurate to say that there’s a fair amount of overlap between the Farscape mythology and the future as envisioned in The Nevers—although it’s been a while since I binged the former and I don’t think it’s really all that unusual to link the tropes of an uninhabitable planet and humanity turning into a race of unsentimental super soldiers whose culture is to live in the moment because you could die at any second.
I thought Knitter was Hannah and the closed captioning had her say “H…” when she was saying her name as she died. Maybe she’s the one who hitched a ride.
There was a flash of the religious zealot villain guy during that voiceover, and they need a villain, so I’m guessing he came through at very least. I’d put good money on more than one though, classic genre schtick.
If that guy did come through, he’s probably the Beggar King, right?
Going into the show with the twist spoiled, I found everything in this episode pretty easy to follow and I’ve thought for a while that Dr. Hague seems like the most obvious suspect for a fellow time traveler. I would agree that the Free Life dude is the most likely candidate for “other passenger.”Honestly, I get that the reviewer doesn’t seem to like this show much and probably didn’t re-watch this episode/screener before writing this review, but it feels like she missed a lot.
I heard her say ‘H…’ as well, and thought she looked like the actress who plays Harriet.
Yes, I meant Harriet. Don’t know why I thought her name was Hannah.
Oh thank God I’m not the only one who thought for a long time that was the same actress…
The Nevers: Epitaph One.But on a serious note — god damn, is Laura Donnelly amazing or what. A brilliant performance.
Man, I haven’t felt so bad for a character in a long time as I did for Molly. I liked the sad little touch of the cakes she sent to Varnum’s house, how they were just sort of sad looking, mishapen with old fruit, instead of the pristine cakes that opened the segment. Throughout that segment I was thinking, well at least it gets better for her! But then the realization that she actually died and Stripe is just in her body was sort of gutting.But yeah, Donnelly was great in all the different stages. Irish actress doing an English accent, copying an Australian actresses’ North American accent, doing a pretend bad English accent, and back to her “normal” English accent.
I think the reviewer got it wrong on the Varnum storyline (although the accents are thick in that section, so maybe it was me that is). My interpretation was that the baker warned her away from Varnum because he DIDN’T have money, the butcher guy looked like he did as a tradesman (although he was massively in debt). Varnum only became wealthy after he rocketed up the chain of promotions at his job, including a move away and a move back. He was the “path not taken” because he didn’t look as good at the time financially (“He doesn’t have money to marry” I believe was the line) even though she liked him more.
Yeah, the review is definitely wrong on that account. He was like low man on the totem pole at that point so she settled for a soft landing instead waiting on Varnum.
Yes, exactly right. I think he probably didn’t offer marriage because he couldn’t afford it at the time. I really kind of wish Molly could come back somehow at some point. I got very involved in her story and would have watched a whole series about her.
‘”At least Mrs. True remembers her name, before she was Molly, before she was Stripe: Zefa Alexis Naveen.”’Actually her first name is Zephyr.Source: Subtitles for this episode.Remember how she was learning to fake an authentic British accent?
Yeah, and Zephyr has the advantage of being an existing name that sounds pretty sci-fi, so that’s what I assumed despite watching sans subtitles.
I stopped watching after the gunfight between a villain with a magic gatling gun (and insanely good aim), and an inspector who ran to him with a pea shooter… and somewhat won.
So, to all who had “Amalia is a time traveler, duh” on your The Nevers bingo board, congratulations!Well, I was close:
In fact I kinda clocked the future bit at some point before now, forget if it was before then or after, but Amalia says something about . . . phones, or something? I forget what exactly it was, just remember that it was something that gave away a knowledge of specific future technological development on Earth. I kinda hoped it *wasn’t* time-travel since just an outright alien would have been more interesting, but hey we got Claudia Black so all’s well that ends well.
There were at least two times when Penance invented something and Amalia says something like “You’ve invented the X-Ray” and “You’ve invented the amplifier.” Maybe people dismissed these as just meta jokes/anachronisms a la Zoe’s “We live in a spaceship, dear” from Firefly, but to me they didn’t make any sense unless Amalia had specific knowledge of the future.
Yeah those kinda made sense if you assume Amelia is just from a more technologically advanced alien culture, but the most obvious explanation was always time travel.
I skipped it because all of the middling reviews from critics. Now that all the episodes aired, is it worth watching?
“All the episodes” is the first 6 of (I guess) a 12-episode season; I don’t know if the split is from Covid, the Whedon stuff, or both.
I’ve enjoyed it personally, but I was just hoping for a Whedonesque somewhat disposable genre show with a bigger budget than Whedon’s previous endeavours. On that front, it doesn’t disappoint. But mind you I’ve been watching Manifest lately, so my quality control filter is clearly in need of replacement 😉
I really want to watch it again with sub-titles. I reckon I missed a ton of stuff.
Time travelling aliens. Called it! 😀
The first great episode of the show comes right as Whedon leaves, which seems like a fitting reminder of the great talent that Joss is apparently content to squander by being an asshole.
I did have the thought after the episode that Whedon had a grand, intricate vision for the show now we’ll never see, so that’ll be a loss. The new showrunners might follow what they know of Whedon’s blueprint but it won’t be the same. Of course, it’s his own damn fault.
While I did get a chuckle with Whendon deciding to cram a dystopian destroyed future in to another one of his shows, the opaqueness of the dialogue felt a lot considering how massively overstuffed the show is to begin with. Still, Black was excellent in the future part, managing to really elevate a very tropey part, and Donnelly did a terrific job in showing the change in Molly.
There were two revelations that retroactively hurt the show for me.First was the reveal what True did to Sarah. Don’t get me wrong it was an excellent scene, I legit gasped when it came clear that True was about to sacrifice the only person who had cared for her with kindness in the asylum, and I even appreciate the sense that this soldier did something horrific. The problem I had with it, though, is that it felt like such a massive emotional beat that the rest of the show hadn’t really earned before this. Yes, Maladie recognized True and wanted revenge against her, but something like this should have been treated with a lot more tenseness and increasing build towards what was this horrible thing True instead of the semi-shrug the show actually did.Second, and this drove me nuts, was the revelation that True doesn’t actually have superstrength and speed, but instead is just a soldier from the future in a baker’s body who did some push-ups. It suddenly made the physical threat she has been presented as and the ease which she handles every fight feel so masively stupid now.
I think that the shrug that the episode portrayed Molly’s betrayal of Sarah as, was deliberate. To Molly, that’s basically what it was.Amalia just being a highly trained soldier makes a lot of sense. That’s why she always loses to Maladie. Maladie has super-strength, resistance, constitution, and endurance. Amalia simply can’t overcome that.
First, I didn’t mean the shrug in that episode, I meant how that the show had shrugged off in the previous episodes something that ended up being a pretty big scene.To the second, no it absolutely does not. I am baffled by the mere suggestion that it would. Like that’s not how it works, which is why even the reviews from that start assumed Amalia had superpowers. I’m not arguing that you personally should have been bothered by it, but I cannot fathom the argument that Amalia’s fights and the damage she has taken now is completely fine as long as she is a soldier from the future.
The damage taken isn’t a factor as any non-fatal wound can be cured by Dr. Magic Hands.
I’ve mostly found this show to be boring, with too many meandering storylines without understanding much of the purpose. This was the best episode, and I think the season would have been much better if some of this weeks reveals had been introduced in the first two episodes of the show. It’s not really intriguing to watch a character’s story progress if you have no idea what their motives are.
I think the latter point, which I agree to a degree, is a fair one in this show, but rather because of who they chose as those primary protagonists. If you have mentor character or that veteran guiding an inexperienced hero, it’s common to have a mysterious background. Here it’s odd because not only does Amalia, our primary protagonist, have a mysterious mystery of a background filled with mystery, apparently all her primary relationships in the show already knew it? So it wasn’t even a mystery to any of the major character in the show, just to the viewers? Which is such a baffling approach.On the first point, that hits on something that frustrates me deeply about the show. I think it has a lot of really good ideas about characters, beats and everything of the sort. It’s just so insanely overstuffed that nothing really feels like it matters.
100% agree. The timeline jump thing has become such a trope now, the show would’ve been better if it were treatment more linear. Imagine the surprise if this show being marketed as a steampunk period piece started episode one with the dystopian future scene. I would’ve been way more into it from the start. The show has grown on me, but I would’ve been invested earlier on if that were the case.
To expand on that second criticism, as I already go the soldier defense, I think a reason this was so stupid for me is fundamentally connected to how bad the show is at filming action.Let’s use the central comparison here as an example, let’s talk about Batman. While Bruce is built like a tank, when facing superiour numbers, the focus is always on how much more skilled he is than his opponents, his use of tactics and technology to even the odds. When fighting superpowered individuals, it is more about the mental side and being the master strategist. That allows you to roll with that particular suspension of disbelief regardless of the medium.The problem with True is that her action scenes have her be a bruiser who just walks up to people hits them, doesn’t register blows and just hits the other person harder. This is how she fights superior numbers, robots and bigger men as a 5’4 petite woman on a show where people have superpowers. It also why those two Maladie fights made kind of sense, even if they were bad, as True came across as someone who just hits people. Except the moment it is revealed that she actually doesn’t have superstrength, speed or endurance, all that becomes insane as that whole approach relies on that assumption. Being a supersoldier from the future doesn’t suddenly cause your small frame to pack a bigger punch or being able to withstand being pummeled to the head by a bigger opponent. There is never a sense of skill in her action scenes that would make this feel like something you can roll with.
Giving Sarah over to the doc was very much Stripe looking out for herself. The current version of Stripe would never do that now.
While I can see why you would have that reading of the show, I’m not sure what we’ve seen entirely earns that benefit of the doubt. And it would have been nicer to see that character development chronologically, frankly.
Huh, I never read the show as saying True had superpowers; it didn’t. Her “turn” was seeing the future. She was just quite good at fighting, which we never got an explanation for how until now, but I didn’t think it was super powers. We didn’t know if she was even a person so maybe that’s where you thought she could have had superpowers, but the prevailing assumption in that case was, I believe, that she could have been an alien, not a superhero.
“While I did get a chuckle with Whendon deciding to cram a dystopian destroyed future in to another one of his shows…”I immediately thought this was Dollhouse Two. 🙂 He does like to endcap with a bleak future, right? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
sorry I should know this but when is the next episode, the second half of season 1? next week? 2.5 years from now?
From interviews, they apparently haven’t even started shooting it yet.
“How did Lavinia get her out of the asylum if Mrs. True failed her application for release?”Lavinia is crazy mad wealthy. Rules, regulations and laws mean little to her, Back then if you were rich enough you could literally hunt people for sport and nobody would take notice.
Yeah, I just assumed Lavinia offered to build them a new hospital wing or something and “suddenly” Amalia was fit for release.
Thankfully we don’t live in that kind of world anymore, where wealthy people would have their own private islands on which to do ghastly things to vulnerable people! [Touches hand to earpiece] I’m being informed that—
During that period, they didn’t even need private islands. (See the colonization of Tasmania).
Yep, Lavinia has the same superpower as Bruce Wayne
Since Stripe’s monogram is ZAN, I’m going to codename the other hitchhiker “Jayna,” and assume that some wondrous power will activate when the two are brought together. In this metaphor, the Galanthi will be referred to as a “space monkey.”
Knitter’s question is, “Why?” That question is one that conservatives/reactionaries fear the most.
Molly the baker has some serious princess diaries vibe.
I also got an Anne Hathaway vibe from her when she smiled.
I was at the end of my rope with this show going nowhere, but now interested to watch again
I’m glad the reviewer felt that Stripe was committing suicide with those drinks. I rewound that part a few times and that was my take as well. With the last Alien gone back through the portal her side didn’t have much of anyting to fight for at that point.
The artefacts were there because the team was doing research to pick a time and place to launch their intervention at. The time travel gambit was not spur of the moment, it had been in the works for a while. Not as it went down, of course, presumably the original plan was that its team would be the ones going back with it.
Anyone else check the tv and the remote to make sure you were watching the nevers when the show started? I did.
Yeah I was watching on HBO Max so I was PRETTY sure I was still watching The Nevers, but the HBO Max app SUUUUCKS so I was like 10% thinking that it just switched me to a totally different show. I was kinda hoping it DID, because this new show seemed kind of interesting.
OK, good! I’m not the only one…”Is this the right show? I know it had the right intro…” I actually looked up some reviews just to make sure lol
Yep, my wife missed the first few minutes and just assumed I decided to watch a different show.
Thank you for explaining Sarah = Maladie. We suspected so watching last night, but we just couldn’t quite tell. All great questions, Roxana. I hope they get answered in the 2nd half!!
They confirmed that Maladie used to be known as Sarah in the first or second episode, during a confrontation between her and Amalia.
Oh, I must have missed it. Thanks.
“It takes a while, but Chapter 1 sketches out the state of the planet. (Did we confirm this was Earth?)“Didn’t Stripe say she walked out of Edinburgh or something? I’m assuming she didn’t walk out of there, hop on a spaceship, and hide out in another planet.
Yeah it seemed heavily implied that it was Earth, but they kept saying “the planet” in places where they’d naturally have said “Earth” so it was kindof needlessly ambiguous despite being very obvious, which is a recurring frustration I know I’ve had with the show.
I supposed “Edinburgh” coulda been short for “Edinburgh Station” or outpost or something on another planet. I guess it depends on whether the portal carried them back through time, or time and space. Stripe was underground when the Galanthi went through, and she woke up in Molly as she was underwater, so I kinda assumed they just moved through time.
“If all the PDC members are referred to by their jobs or
responsibilities, rather than their names, what exactly does a “Stripe”
do?”I assumed “Stripe” was basically the slang term for an officer. The team that found her said she would be in command is she were “mission fit.” Also, in the US military, a stripe is given for a certain number of years of service, and Zephyr certainly seemed to be the oldest/longest serving, so maybe rank is determined by length of service? Given that a lot of the PDC were called “boot” I assume they were the privates, and “Crescent” was the equivalent of a sergeant, since the Army and Marines have that sort of rounded shape under the chevron.No idea what “Byner” meant though. Maybe some take on “byte”?
Top Sergeant seems more in line with the character. The one who sees the order is carried out rather than the one giving the order.
Two quick nit-picks:
Varnum does NOT become rich until after Molly married the oaf with the surname ‘True,’ and this: True remembers her name, before she was Molly, before she was Stripe: Zefa Alexis Naveen. I’m pretty sure Amalia said her real name is ‘Zephyr.’
I thought I was watching Raised by Wolves when the episode started.
Thank you! Could not quite remember which other sci-fi mythology having two groups of enemy humans warring over the future of an unlivable Earth where one side is defined by being religious zealots. I now feel fairly confident describing the “future” part of the plot as “half Raised by Wolves and half Farscape.”Kind of weird to have series with such similar premises premiering so close together on the same streaming service. Can’t quite decide if having Claudia Black play Zephyr—whose backstory seems extremely similar to that of her Farscape character—is lampshading or just typecasting.
I guess I’ll be the one to say I absolutley hated the (way too long) exposition, and the overall direction such hard sci-fi now takes the show. I know they’d been hinting at it, but imo the base premise with the Victorian setting was interesting enough, that it never needed all this… Extra. Most is bothersome is how the show now undermines what a great character like Amalia meant in the world she was living in. “Grumpy soldier from the future” is so indescribably silly and less interesting I’m still in awe that this idea made it past a first draft.
Yeah, I get that, since this is almost exactly “Victorian Steampunk X-Men” they had to follow the X-Men tradition and do a glimpse into a far-flung future with a soldier sent back in time to “make things right.” So. Zephyr is Cable, with a bit of Kate Pryde possessing Kitty a la Days of Futures Past. I did feel like this was where they were headed with the story, so I wasn’t too surprised, but it sure did take up a large chunk of the episode. And once I got acclimated to the setting, I actually found the “Stripe” section really entertaining. The world building was thoughtful and complex, the visuals were pretty striking, and Claudia Black has an immediate presence. I really would love to see her lead a sci-fi show like that. But… did we need it right now in the Nevers? Could it have waited til the end of the season proper? Could we maybe just focus on the cool Victorian Steampunk X-Men and less on the dystopian hard sci-fi stuff? I’m intrigued enough to see where it goes when it comes back with the new showrunner, but my patience only extends so far.
Claudia Black has an immediate presence. I really would love to see her lead a sci-fi show like that.Cool. Try Farscape. Although it is a bit goofier.
“ The Galanthi is a dragon, unicorn, manta ray, Cthulhu thing”… A featurette on this episode has the production designer stating it was “elephant, octopus and T-Rex” as requested by the producers.
I wonder if it’s possible that Wheedon will return to the show after things die down a bit? I mean he’s not Kevin Spacey evil and James Gunn seemed to rehab himself pretty well. I don’t know anything about the new show runner, something like this is just so specifically Wheedonesque that it’s really hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off.
Okay, who else thought Knitter was Harriet? I was
assiduously avoiding IMDB and any other source of spoilers, and my onboard
facial recognition software sucks, so it wasn’t “they all look alike.” When she
started to say her sacred name and began with “H….,” we went AHHHHHH. Then there was nothing to follow on it, and the credits revealed two separate actors. Total
maguffin.
Okay, who else thought Knitter was Harriet? I was
assiduously avoiding IMDB and any other source of spoilers, and my onboard
facial recognition software sucks, so it wasn’t “they all look alike.” When she
started to say her sacred name and began with “H….,” we went AHHHHHH. Total
maguffin.
Claudia Black was so good it kind of threw off the entire nexus of the show
So does Molly actually have any abilities, aside from the fact that she is in fact a woman from the future with hand to hand combat skills, or whenever she has those flashes is she just remembering the past?
I believe Amalia’s name is Zephyr, not Zefa.