When The Nevers first introduced Lord Massen, he seemed like your standard-issue, old-white-guy fearmonger. By using societal fear of the Touched to consolidate power around himself, and labeling the Touched and their turns as threats to national security, Lord Massen has been an enemy of Mrs. True, Penance, and the other inhabitants of St. Romaulda’s Orphanage from the start. He’s clearly working with other lords to plan some kind of consolidated action against the Touched; recall the paperwork they were reading through in last week’s episode “Ignition.” He has a decades-long friendship with Lavinia Bidlow, which perhaps suggests that he knows about her experiments with Dr. Hague and those human/cyborg things. I’m not saying he’s a good guy! But… does he have a point to be a little afraid of what the Touched can do? Especially now that whatever entity responsible for their powers is trying to make contact?
The events of “Undertaking” almost make me sympathize with Lord Massen, who admittedly is terrible, and whose anti-union efforts are thoroughly gross, and who had Lucy working for him as a double agent, and who might be holding his Touched daughter in his mansion’s dungeon. Again: Not a good guy! Doesn’t the translation of Mary’s song, though, prove that some other kind of big change is coming, and it’s going to center on the Touched again—and might even be coming from them rather than happening to them? Was that message coded into Mary’s song by whoever was piloting the big fish spaceship in the sky, or was the message from the spaceship itself? I don’t think anything is out of the question here!
Okay, fine: Perhaps it’s a little silly to think that the message is coming from the vessel. But The Nevers has never really eased up on the endless intricacies of its plotting; the denseness of its premiere has only continued through “Exposure,” “Ignition,” and now “Undertaking.” The result is that there’s so much sprawl, and—I cannot say this enough—so many villains that I feel some pressure to buy whatever this story offers up through the remaining two episodes of this first half of the first season. Some of it is a little predictable, like the blackmail that Hugo Swann is holding over Mundi, and some of it is purposefully opaque, like Maladie’s whole deal. But is a sentient spaceship really that out of the question at this point? When the entirety of your series is questions, as The Nevers is, I think we’re being trained to roll with anything, for better or worse.
Whatever—or whoever—spoke through Mary (R.I.P.!) referred to Amalia True as a “lonely soldier,” warned of an upcoming “darkness,” and asked the Touched to find it “inside the city.” We know that this is what Dr. Hague is directing his lobotomized victims to dig up, with the backing of Lavinia. And we also know that they were using Mrs. True’s face—and her persona as champion of the Touched—to gather victims to themselves. But did Lavinia also know about the message being sent out to Mrs. True and the Touched before Mary sang it? And how much danger are the Touched now in because the song was broadcast throughout London—a decision that led to Mary’s murder, perhaps at the hands of Lavinia? Everything is twisted and turned so far in The Nevers, and the bonds that connect these people are all beginning to fray. Won’t be long now before they fully snap.
“Undertaking” begins with Mary’s funeral, which nearly everyone attends—the grieving Mundi, the shocked Touched, the duplicitous Lavinia. The only person not there is Mrs. True, who instead is getting drunk and causing a ruckus at a pub: fighting guys, downing pints, and cheekily saying to her next hookup partner, “Gonna need you in a minute.” As Mrs. True said to Mary in “Ignition,” these are all her weaknesses, and she finds no shame in them. Interestingly, it’s the seemingly cold Bonfire Annie, who so easily turned on Maladie, who doesn’t understand why Mrs. True was a no-show, while devoted BFF Penance comes to her aid. “I hate sentiment, and also people, and myself,” Penance jokes of Mrs. True’s motivations, but the two of them understand each other a great deal. And so it’s an agreed-upon, natural next step that the women mobilize into solving Mary’s murder, with Penance wondering if the strangely acting Augie is to blame, Bonfire Annie questioning the Beggar King’s crew, and Mrs. True paying a visit to Lord Massen, with whom she sees herself conversing in a rippling.
Each interrogation reveals a useful piece of information for the Touched. While the Penance/Augie visit plays out like another meet-cute for the pair, Penance doesn’t hold back in asking Augie, point-blank, if he thinks “your sister did the murder then?” (Augie, for his part, couldn’t be more awkwardly fumbling in telling Penance about his feelings for her, and admitting Lavinia’s warning that he stay away.) While Augie confirms that yeah, sure, his sister could be both wealthy and evil, Bonfire Annie meets thief Nimble Jack (Vinnie Heaven), who sometimes works with the Beggar King. “Someone’s putting on a show,” Nimble Jack observes of the attacks on the Touched, and this meeting also plays out with a bit of flirtatiousness! And I guess, maybe, if you squinted very, very hard, you could say that the Lord Massen/Mrs. True meeting has some kind of, I don’t know, sexual tension? Or am I just misreading Massen’s dry British smugness?
To be true, there was a slight hint earlier in the season that Massen is impressed with Mrs. True in a way that he isn’t with the rest of the Touched. But whatever slight bit of fondness Massen might hold is complicated by how he draws Mrs. True into a trap, and the reveal that Lucy has been a double agent working for him the whole time she’s been at the orphanage—all three years. Could Massen and Lavinia be working together to, say, frame Maladie for the murder of Mary, and then try and frame Mrs. True for that explosion at Massen’s ammunitions warehouse, so that it seems like the Touched are at war with each other? Would that justify the need for increased government surveillance, containment, or violence, which would give Massen more authority? Maybe!
Lavinia’s agenda is more nebulous to me, but remember how she said in a previous episode that although she and Massen are on oppositional ends ideologically, they retain a friendship—based on, I’m assuming, social status. If the Touched gained more power, who knows what they could upend? What social barriers they could shake up, or outright destroy? I think that’s what Hugo Swann is trying to head off at the pass with his sex club: get enough members of the Touched on his side so they can ensconce him from the rejection of other wealthier men like Massen, and protect him if the Touched end up wrestling some kind of dominance. But Swann has lost an ally in Mundi, who burns their bridge despite Swann’s threat of outing his sexuality. Perhaps this will come back to bite Mundi, but if he brings in Maladie, will anyone really care with whom he spends his nights?
Speaking of Maladie: She keeps talking about receiving orders from a higher power, a God who she is trying to please. Is the same voice that came through in Mary’s song speaking to Maladie, too? “You’re not alone, Mrs. True,” the orphanage inhabitants translate as the song’s message. But what if who they mean isn’t themselves, but the woman Molly left behind years ago? What if the song means … Sarah? Mrs. True admits after her falling out with Lucy that she has “no idea what anyone is going through” at the orphanage. I wonder if the orphanage is really where these characters are going to stay, though, once they realize the depth of Lavinia’s deception—and once they go in search of the voice that is asking to be found.
Stray observations
- A little more character development for the younger orphanage inhabitants this week: Myrtle and Primrose are becoming close friends, while the justice-hungry Harriet is frustrated that her boyfriend can attend law school and she can’t. She wants to reform the system from the inside to gain more equality for the Touched, but I’m not quite sure The Nevers has shown how they’re systematically prejudiced against? Disliked and mistrusted, sure. But I assumed widespread, legalized oppression was what Lord Massen was working on—not something already in place.
- Do we learn what “The Nevers” means this episode? No, we do not!
- “Motley coven” would be a sick band name.
- Lord Massen drinking a “morning sherry”—my dude definitely seems like the type.
- Also food-related: that chess game with giant blocks of cheese as the chess pieces? I would like that very much.
- Good writing in that tête-à-tête between Massen and Mrs. True, in particular his statement that Mary ended up being a “casualty of war,” and her wry “So we’re at war?” response. Laura Donnelly can really hold her own against anyone in this cast.
- “To band together when you can stand alone, I expect more courage from Englishmen,” Massen says while shaming and threatening his striking workers into standing down, and if a man ever deserved to be punched in the face, it’s this guy!
- Meanwhile, Dr. Cousens has the right idea: just because someone is a benefactor, doesn’t mean they’re a friend. How much more obvious will Lavinia’s villainy get?
- “I hope he told you what happens to spies during wartime” was a great line, but: Keeping Lucy alive means she’s definitely coming back, probably to beg the forgiveness of Mrs. True and the Touched. The only question is when.
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THE NAME OF THE SHOW WAS EXPLAINED IN THE FIRST EPISODE.
It was also explained by Joss Whedon almost three years ago. “They, themselves are not called that [The Nevers] in the show,” Whedon explained. “It’s a phrase that’s meant to evoke a sort of reaction to their oddity, to what is considered unnatural. The idea that you should never be like this, you should never have existed. Something is not the way it should be, and you don’t have the right to have whatever weird power or ability or that you have. And that idea, that some people are not of the natural order, is fascinating to me. I don’t agree with it. But to me, it’s one of those things where you take something negative, and you wear it as a badge of honor, basically. Certain things could never happen – they’re happening. And the people they’re happening to are taking their place in the world.”
Yeah at this point I think the reviewer maybe is just trolling us (though it seems obvious she doesn’t read comments, unlike some writers on here, which is… fair I guess). But argh. At least there was no mention this week about how the show should have been “brave” and made the touched affect only women exclusively.
I suppose it’s better than the Outlander reviewer, who insists on judging the show against how well it adheres to contemporary mores of queerness and wokeness…even though the show is based on romance novels from 20+ years ago, and as if hetero women over 40 aren’t in themselves an underserved demographic that is deserving of targeted media. These niche reviewers are frankly terrible.
Ha, man those Outlander reviews… “This show clearly wants us to be sympathetic towards this blind woman but she also is a slave owner, who thinks she has every right to be a slave owner, so the show is terrible for suggesting the character could be anything but completely awful.” Sigh. And yes this site has a number of reviewers who seem to be working so hard to be woke and progressive that they go after targets they shouldn’t… I remember the critic for We Are Who We Are spending several reviews complaining that the female lead was not cast with a non-binary actor, despite people pointing out from the start, that the actor in question *was* non-binary… Sigh.
I honestly think that the Outlander reviewer is part of No Child Left Behind. She basically gave Jamie a fictional lecture for apparently being ableist because he didn’t want to have his leg cut off. We’d all be upset by that in the moment! Plus he’s a warrior who’s responsible for the entire ragtag group at the Ridge, during a time when you couldn’t survive off of seated data entry work. A major part of both Young Ian and Fergus’ stories is that life was hard back then if you weren’t wealthy and, for whatever reason, didn’t have the physicality to keep yourself alive on your own. Then there was the time that the reviewer wrote about a flashback as if it was an imaginary dream sequence. It’s one thing to interpret the opaque stuff differently, but she misinterprets basic plot events. And again…these are romance novels from nearly 30 years ago. As icky as it is, r*pe fantasies are a thing in that genre. I don’t like it, I can’t defend it, and the showrunners should have made different choices in the adaptation, but I also don’t think it’s fair to hold everything to the standard of “I should be able to understand it if I haven’t read the book,” when this series was expressly made for an obsessive fanbase that has read the books.Anyway. I have to say that as The Nevers progresses, the Whedonisms fade more and more. I’m not someone who has completely disowned him or his work (come on, it’s not like Snyder is actually less problematic, and honestly I’m tired of Gen Z crapping all over everything that Millennials find joy in. I didn’t spew that kind of vitriol at Gen X) but there can be a rhythm in his work that gets cloying after a while. I don’t see that here.
I can definitely see that with Outlander (and, though I know you weren’t saying this, I think a lot of what the reviewer had issue with still was over the top and even a misreading even for the many viewers like myself who hadn’t read a page of the novels). I also remember whenever there would be a black or Native American character, that she would complain that we weren’t getting an episode devoted to their experience and story which… I mean, I know where she’s coming from but there is a point where you have to just realize that that isn’t the story being told (and in this case it shouldn’t be).
Anyway—I was thinking that about Whedon as well. He remained heavily involved as far as I know, and of course it’s sometimes hard to know where he ends and writers who made it big under him like Jane Espenson begin (and from all I’ve seen and read she was and remains one of the most involved although it’s interesting that neither she nor another Whedon team member on board, Doug Petrie, were promoted to showrunner) and you certainly still get some of that banter (the line this episode about how Penance couldn’t make an even bigger piece of jewelry or a hat in the future to dissuade True from killing Lucy—or something of that nature–comes to mind) but I see what you mean about the rhythm or lack thereof. Actually, I was on board with this episode thinking that it felt the most assured yet until the whole Lucy reveal, etc.
It’s definitely a problem that feminism has become a dumping ground for all forms of activism. We can’t have just women’s media…apparently it needs to also incorporate the stories of black and Native American male characters? How about we elevate these voices instead and give them their own platforms. And seriously, bringing a queer lens to every interaction in romance novels is more than a fool’s errand – I truly think that the reviewer has something wrong with her if she’s sincere about demanding that all of these needs be met by a Starz adaptation of a smut novel. I’ve been keeping an ear out for Jane Espenson’s writerly voice and I haven’t pegged it yet. She’s responsible for some of Buffy’s best dialogue.
I would have no problem with developing separate shows for African American and Native American characters (though diverse representation makes more sense IMO), my problem is that Outlander left Scotland (where it made sense not to deal with these stories) and went to the Caribbean and South Carolina – both areas that had significant African and Indigenous populations at that time, and then made plantation owners the good guys. And made every single Black and Indigenous character exotic, barbaric, mysterious, servile – some horrible caricature. Fuck alla that. That’s where they lost me. And I was willing to handwave the terrible r*pe fantasy stuff, I was raised on 70s-90s bodice rippers like many women but even that has reached like a really intolerable level on the show.Hard, hard disagree with everyone defending Outlander on here. I don’t buy the “man/woman of their time” argument, there were plenty of people in early America who knew slavery was fucked up and chose not to participate. I’m not watching shows about sympathetic slaveowners in 2021 (fun fact: I’m Black and my last name is Scottish b/c my dad’s family descends from folks enslaved on a plantation in, you guessed it, South Carolina!) and and I hate that they keep getting made.
this author has made negative comments about “old white guys” in all 4 reviews so far.. I mean it takes place in 1900 London, who do you think the bad guys are going to be?
At least Amalia and Penance are platonic friends. There can be a weird pressure on forward-thinking shows for every character to be pansexual and that’s just not for me.
Yeah, Roxana may just be doubling down on her Stay Observation theme/catch phrase. But to be (exceedingly) fair, the show may be reaching for some later-run double meaning. If True and the sentient ship are time travelers, and the endgame of the series is to “solve” the problems created in the premier, then one possibility would be a kind of reset of the timeline. This or the classic mind-wipe used in Legends of Tomorrow and Men in Black. At some point all these events will never have happened.
No disrespect meant to Tom Riley’s Augie, but I can’t help thinking his part was made with Andrew Scott in mind. His perfect storm of awkwardness and nervous energy seems a natural fit for Augie’s mannerisms.
Yeah, kind of like a more awkward Sean Maher from Firefly. Tom’s part doesn’t exactly work but it’s also not exactly bad.
but, as you see, young andrew scott, or young hugh grant, after they picked up the swagger it’s hard to put the stammer back
I’m glad Andrew Scott is getting more juice to his career. After seeing the promo for Oslo I wondered if HBO packaged a deal with Scott and Ruth Wilson: “Appear in His Dark Materials and we’ll give you the leads in Oslo.” Or some sort contract deal including all of the above. Augie may well have been developed with Scott in mind, and he negotiated into these other roles. Idk, I’m spit-balling but this sort of shit goes on.
I hadn’t heard of Oslo before you mentioned it but it definitely looks worth a watch. I did see he’s got an upcoming lead in a series where he plays Tom Ripley, which could be a fun role for him. I’m interested but wary as it is on Showtime in the US and this makes me afraid that 1) it’s a Dexter clone of sorts that 2) could go on for way too many years
Are we skipping over the part where Mrs. True flat out said that she was from the future or is that common knowledge?
Mrs. True is DEFINITELY from the future. Or rather, whoever is wearing her skin is. And she’s told Penance all about it. “We don’t attend funerals WHEN I’m from.”Not a sentient spaceship, a sentient, self repairing time machine. And I’m willing to bet that the cyborg dudes are being made with pieces of it.Massen’s respect for True is because he recognizes the soldier in her the same way she recognized the soldier in him.
I do feel like this episode is heavily implying that she is possessed by an alien entity. It’s not entirely clear whether the character we’ve come to know is the alien entity possessing Mrs. True’s body (probably with some access to her memories) or if it’s actually Mrs. True with powers and abilities gained through her “passenger.” I lean more towards the former based on what we’ve seen, but we don’t really have enough info yet.It does help make a little more sense of her Turn, which always seemed odd given that she had gained multiple abilities (precognition, fighting skills and reflexes) that seemed unrelated. If the skills are actually those of an alien entity residing in her body and which are simply the skills that that species possesses (or even that it’s a soldier who was trained for the fighting), that doesn’t seem as incongruous.Which then leads me to wonder about Maladie’s Turn and whether Maladie is similar – possessed rather than Touched, only her mental state has also affected the entity possessing her. Because Maladie was definitely ALIVE when she was possessed (Mrs. True had been in the process of committing suicide and very well may have succeeded), it means there’s likely more of her still present in her mind, possibly causing a battle over control. It wasn’t the human women who knew each other but the alien entities. The alien is awaiting their orders, but in Maladie’s muddled mind, she interprets it as awaiting orders from God.
My thought is that the real Mrs. True died drowning as the ship arrived, and something is using her body as a vessel because it was no longer occupied. Of course that starts gravitating towards souls and such and I don’t know if this show is doing that
That’s where I’m leaning, too, but if Maladie is also possessed (which some of what we’ve seen might suggest), why did the entity take over her body while she was still alive?Of course, I could be on the wrong track for that one. But if she IS possessed, there’s no reason not to think that there might be more Touched like them out there.
Could be some type of symbiotic / sleeper agent thing going on where some other life form is hitching a ride in people, most of who don’t notice the other mind and just have the powers, but Maladie notices because she seems to already have had something going on mentally before she got powers.
What I’m saying is, they all inhaled Yeerk spores.
“She wants to reform the system from the inside to gain more equality for the Touched”She could also mean women.
Yeah, I thought her comment was at least as much about being a woman (and not even a white woman–though we saw how that oddly introduced new female reporter character was treated).
(And there’s the point where she is speaking about her own personal inability to go to law school. Since her “turn” seems to be to blow on certain objects and make them glass, obviously is not something that would be impossible to hide, so…)
That reporter’s introduction was especially odd because she’s played by Amy Manson, the actress who plays Maladie. I don’t know if she’s Maladie in disguise or if they’re going to spring some other twist on us, but I recognized her voice right away.
Wow! I knew she seemed familiar, but thanks for catching that. Since she’s not even mentioned in the review, I think most people missed it…
Wait what really? That’s bizarre
I also think Harriet was complaining about her status as a woman blocking her access to law school, not her being touched. It seems that women could not become lawyers in the UK until 1919 (due to something called the “Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919″), so she was definitely not allowed to attend in 1899. The right to vote for all women over 30 wasn’t won in the UK until 1918. All women (married or not) couldn’t even own property without restrictions until 1882, only 7 years before “The Nevers” is supposed to take place. So women in 1899 London didn’t have many rights at all.
Did anybody else recognise the Effie Boyle journalist character as Amy Manson (Maladie) in a bad blonde wig, blue contacts, false teeth and dulling makeup? Am I seeing (and hearing, thats definitely her voice) things? IMDB lists her last as Margaret Tuttle who has no other credits and no digital footprint, I doubt they’d go to go to all that trouble if they’re not setting up for a big reveal.
Good catch! Her very obvious color contacts was distracting, but I hadn’t caught on to who she was, manly because I didn’t know the actress out of Maladie makeup, but looking her up… Effie Boyle is definitely played by the same actor, Amy Manson. So Maladie is either an act or another personality, that she can turn on and off, or has no control over… Or?
Also had to look up Nimble Jack as he was clearly not what we are presented with… He is played by non-binary actor, Vinnie Heaven. Not sure if that will be anything deeper within the show.
This show continues to be such a mixed bag for me. Every scene that didn’t feature the two main leads, to me, worked and even managed to have the characters feel engaging. There were even moments that felt genuinely clever like the Myrtle translation scene which was pretty good problem solving. Hell, even the way Mundi managed to capture Maladie was unexpected and actually logical as if Maladie gets power from pain, subduing her with a sleeper hold is a really good way to defeat her as it isn’t painful. Mundi as a character has actually really been wonderous over these past few characters.Yet then when there is a scene featuring either True or Penance, the show just grinds to an absolute halt to me as they are such baffling characters that make everything and everyone around them stupid and the storytelling lazy. Another example about the show making it absolutely clear how nothing matters is Penance’s shrugging response to Lucy’s betrayal.
As a sidenote, I was really confused by the fight between Lucy and True, to the degree that I need to check that did I miss something. So Lucy breaks everything she touches, which was seen at the start of it and was a threat before True swept her to the ground. Howeer, then True decides to mount Lucy, which was really stupid, but that’s okay as that is what everything relating to her is.However, then there is the big collapse and Lucy staggers away, but she’s able to touch things without them breaking. Did I miss or forget something about why her power just switched off?
Did she put back on her gloves? I’m not sure. To be honest, if they mentioned P giving her that brooch (and why it was so important to her) I had completely forgotten, so that all confused me.
No gloves, I even double-checked it as I was so baffled by it. Hell, they even take close-ups how Lucy is touching things with her bare hands. And, by the way, I was also completely lost at the elephant brooch. I initially thought it was a memento of her son or something, but then it became about Penance? It was really weird failure at basic storytelling, which this show does a lot.I mean, the whole ‘Lucy is the traitor’ thing was weird as I don’t know why the show assumed that it would have that level of emotional impact as I didn’t think they ever established she was that close with True or Penance. When Lucy started talking about all the times True had gone about all the wars she had forgotten, I was for a moment genuinely confused that I had I missed a scene or something.
I’m glad apparently I didn’t miss a scene about the brooch before either. And yes to the wars (also, not mentioned in the review, but in this episode did everyone—at least potential villains—all suddenly start calling True “The Widow” or did I just never notice that before??)
But you’re damn right in your last comment. It really sometimes feels like they had more scripts written, were suddenly told to move things faster and edit the number of scripts down, and when combining things they simply forgot and deleted some key scenes or even lines that would set up later plot points (or even get mentioned in later lines). I did notice last week that suddenly True was relying on Lucy a lot, but otherwise I think her reveal was a flop for the reasons you give–
The brooch scene is early on in the first episode, easy to miss as we’re still meeting all of the characters at that point.
Thanks! Obviously I didn’t notice at all, but like you said, in the first half of that episode there was a lot of quick character moments and I couldn’t for the life of me notice which of the “turned” we should be paying attention to and noting and which were just being paraded by… Do you remember what specifically they said about the brooch? Or it was just a random gift?
Yeah, they really packed a bunch of stuff in there. I don’t think there was anything special/significant about the brooch.
I noticed the widow thing, since Mrs. True’s name was always hanging out there as an unaddressed question.
True being a widow has been brought up before but few people have referred to her as such before this ep.
The significance of the brooch was established in Episode 2, in Lavinia’s party, when Lucy along with Penance, explains the whole story of the brooch being a token created by Penance as a gift to her, as a homage to Lucy’s mother being a member of the infamous (and historical) 40-elephant gang. An emotional connection between Lucy and Penance is established several times, as for instance when Lucy speaks angrily about how Augie insulted Penance and Lucy could barely contain herself. So really, the storytelling is impeccable, and it is your lack of attention to details that is the problem. No offense, but really, your comments come across as aggressive, when really they are completely baseless and not understanding what’s going on or following the plot is your issue, not the show’s.
Not to mention Lucy sifting through the rubble for the elephant pin and picking it up , all barehanded. Sigh
I would agree with that, except I did think the scene between True and Massen was genuinely well done.
I agree with the True/Massen scene, but to me it was actually more evidence of how good job they’ve done with Massey as I felt he did the heavy lifting in that scene. Although I’m still really confused that did he admit to arranging Mary’s shooting or not?I mean they treated it like he did, but just going to blow a warehouse feels like a pretty light response for it even if he is a Peer or such. And there was an odd dynamic in the interaction as well between True and Massen at that point.
Mundi started by bashing her head into the wall, I assumed that she was going to go all orange eye and beat him to death.
There was a line last week about how they used to work together, when they were looking into the fake touched boarding house.
The elephant brooch was given to Lucy by Penance early on in the first episode.
She’s able to control her ability as we can see in the “party” scene at Lavinia’s, but hasn’t touched another person in 3 years after accidentally killing her son. I assume she just doesn’t want to risk it.
I actually liked the interrogation scenes with both leads this week, but I think that was more to do with the characters they were interacting with.
This show still hasn’t given me a reason to want to keep watching. I watch because my partner watches, but I have yet to see what the point of this show is. I need a hook and this show doesn’t have one. In simply seems to be about a marginalized group of individuals that want to keep living. But it’s like 10 different story lines that get a good scene here and there without an overall cohesive desire to find out what happens next. Least bingeable show ever for a style that gives the impression it wants to be bingeable.
The True character is another iteration of the Lost and Bran (GOT) problem: due to plot contrivances, no one is all that interested in asking them any questions.
Oh see, I completely disagree. Amalia and Penance’s friendship and chemistry is what keeps me coming back. I’m not interested in most of the other characters, especially the non-Touched.
Thinking on this review, I think for me the reason why Massey works on the show is that while he is without a question a bad man, he is also one of the few characters that actually feels layered and has comprehensible motives. Thus while he does bad things, at least I get him, which causes me to almost root for him here despite that badness.Although having written that, I don’t quite understand what the plan was with the explosives switch. Like what were they trying to achieve as the Nevers would have known that it wasn’t the right place the moment they set it on fire and it didn’t explode. It didn’t seem to be a trap to attack them. And if the idea was to use this incident to paint them in a bad light, well the plant was still blown up so that cna still take place. Hell, I don’t see how Lucy wasn’t going to be revealed as the traitor here in a lot smarter way than that she knew that Massey was a hunter.
I was glad at least that apparently True knew it was a trap from the start and that’s why she thought it was instantly such a good idea–she was pretending. Because as soon as I heard Lucy suggest the idea my thought was… umm?
Straight up insurance fraud. Massey knew he had pissed off the Touched, True confronting him made sure he knew they had seen through his efforts at redirection, but he figured he could have them “Retaliate” against a worthless target, collect insurance on it, and still make his deliverables.
No mention about True and Penance’s conversation early on where it sounded like Penance knew True was placed in charge of the orphanage and then abandoned by those same people to fill out some mission she didn’t know about?
To be honest, I actually am enjoying all the world building, as the kids nowadays say, but from the end of this episode and the preview for the next, it seems like right now the focus is increasingly on aspects I find less interesting (including Maladie herself) and I’m more curious to see where they can go with it in the second batch of 6 episodes (I’m guessing and hoping that most of the current main storyline will resolve in this batch).
My read on Lavinia is that she is a commentary (on what I won’t say because it would derail my comment). Where she and Lord Massen differ is that he, representing the established patriarchy, rightly sees the Touched as a threat. He therefore wishes to destroy them. Lavinia is his opposition in the sense that she sees the Touched as a potential weapon, and the ship as an insurmountable advantage. With that power harnessed, she can gain the power she craves and usurp the patriarchy. It’s important in my view to understand that Lavinia absolutely believes in the order of society. The only change she wants is that she can reign. Being neither royal, nor a man, and in a wheelchair, has relegated her to only being able to leverage her wealth and status. She will do anything to successfully exploit the Touched to her goals.
To that end, she needs them dependent on her, and Mary’s beacon was a threat, allowing the Touched to gain a cohesion and independence that would disrupt her plans.
When Annie went to talk to the Beggar King’s men and ran into Jack, they’re talking about Odium like he’s still alive. Didn’t True kill him last week?
No, just choked him out.
learning one thing about a character, even one tragic thing, does not automatically create an emotional connection with a character. I felt this episode was functional, and I’m sticking with the show until the end of the season, but I feel it is kind of muddling along. It finds one or two nice moments per episode but it’s a hodgepodge.I think it might be interesting if Massen and Lavinia are opposed because she is the actual Nazi while he is just the moneyed interests (and their inherent bad facets), but his “assault on englishness” sounded enough like a race war that I’m taking all their signaling that he’s badbadbad as fait accompli.
I am really enjoying this show, but I also feel like The Nevers and Debris are two halves of the same coin, lol.
Every time a character confronts True I ask myself “Ok is this Buffy we’re looking at? Angel?” Whedon shuffling the Same Old Pro/An-tagonists around, testing the same old themes (‘Sky-Bully Bad’) is just viewing-drudgery.
Having a voice that is unique and immediately identifiable is the mark of a genius, as in the case of Whedon. Around a week ago, the incredible composer Jim Steinman died, and I always discussed with other fans of his work, that regardless of who sang his songs (Celine Dion, Bonnie Tyler, Air Supply or Meat Loaf), his songs were immediately recognizable, as he had such a signature style. Same goes for Whedon, and he does it always creating fresh and original stories.
Hm, I’m not getting a Buffy or Angel vibe from Amalia at all. To me, the previous Whedon character she most clearly resembles is Mal Reynolds.
Is Mrs. True one of the “aliens” left behind?
Also The Cheese Chess was amazing. I was planning what flavors for my own version before the scene was over.