1899 review
Nov. 23rd, 2022 02:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayNetflix's recommendations pushed this series at me, probably because I watched all 3 seasons of Dark, an earlier show by the same creators. That was an extremely twisty time-travel epic that mostly held together and made sense, no mean feat. It was, as you might guess from the title, quite grim and not for everyone, but I liked it a lot. So Kes and I checked out 1899 together. (Very minor spoilers.)
Early impressions were: "Lost on a period steamship." This was not promising, as I loathe Abrams-style mystery boxes. But the goodwill from Dark left me confident that this was not such a box. And at any rate, the characters and setting were interesting, and the weird elements were tantalizing, so it held our interest.
By midway through the season, I was half-convinced that we were watching some kind of LARP. The character types and relationships seemed liked ones I've written and played. Most of the characters turn out to posess mysterious envelopes that reminded me of character packets. Plus, it started looking like there were some obvious NPCs moving around the edges of the story, doing the GM's bidding. That guess was not exactly right, but it was a fun lens to view through.
Sadly, the last episode was very disappointing. It had seemed like this might be a done-in-one novel, but it turns out to be season 1 of N. And while the final scene was everything one might ask for in terms of opening up the scope and increasing the stakes, the bulk of the episode leading up to it was perplexingly dull. And while it is still quite possible that the show-runners have a carefully-worked-out mythology, it's not evident as of the end of season 1.
In Dark, by the end of the first season, the viewer had a reasonable knowledge of how the story-world worked, and what the various characters wanted to achieve. A lot of this "knowledge" was revealed in later seasons to be incomplete, mistaken, or lies, but it was a coherent structure that the viewer could work with.
By the end of 1899 season 1, we don't have anything like as coherent a structure. We do not know the actual nature of the cosmology, just that it's clearly complicated. Much worse from a story standpoint, we don't know what any of these characters actually wants. There are strong hints of how a lot of the weirdness was accomplished, but nothing really to suggest why someone made it all happen. The putative bad guy has only rarely taken any obvious action; when he does, his abilities and power level are inconsistent. Late in the season, that bad guy claims that one of the central protagonists is actually "behind" all the weirdness -- but that protagonist's memories have been altered, and neither they nor the viewer knows what they might have been doing or why. And in the last act of the last episode, an entirely new antagonist is introduced, who is yet more mysterious. There are lots of scenes where people scream that they want answers, but no one who has any of those answers is willing to share them (again, for no apparent reason).
But all this "main arc" business takes up less than half of the finale. The bulk of the running time (pun intended) is literally supporting cast members running down corridors. They're higher-budget corridors than Doctor Who, but it's the same pointless narrative padding. They are running from poorly understood threats, with no plan of escape. Which is the sort of thing that can be super-compelling in a videogame, or even to watch in a story that is closely following one character. But this story keeps splitting them up, cutting between them, having them reunite... it leaves all those side characters feeling entirely without agency.
One of the supporting cast knows more than the others about what is going on, and is taking active steps to accomplish a goal. But the viewer is not told what that goal is ahead of time. What we see is them looking terribly anxious as they intricately fiddle with an unidentified McGuffin over the course of several scenes interspersed with other folks running down corridors. We don't know what their goal is. We don't know what obstacles they are grappling with. Hell, we don't even know if they are really on the side of the protagonist (which they claim to be, but there is serious reason for doubt), so we don't even know if we should be rooting for them to succeed!
I started with a Lost comparison, and I'll end with one. Kes and I stopped watching Lost because they didn't "give us cookies" frequently enough. Season 1 of 1899 left us feeling similarly unsatisfied. If season 2 happens and I hear good buzz, I might check it out... but as of now, it's a thumbs-down.
Early impressions were: "Lost on a period steamship." This was not promising, as I loathe Abrams-style mystery boxes. But the goodwill from Dark left me confident that this was not such a box. And at any rate, the characters and setting were interesting, and the weird elements were tantalizing, so it held our interest.
By midway through the season, I was half-convinced that we were watching some kind of LARP. The character types and relationships seemed liked ones I've written and played. Most of the characters turn out to posess mysterious envelopes that reminded me of character packets. Plus, it started looking like there were some obvious NPCs moving around the edges of the story, doing the GM's bidding. That guess was not exactly right, but it was a fun lens to view through.
Sadly, the last episode was very disappointing. It had seemed like this might be a done-in-one novel, but it turns out to be season 1 of N. And while the final scene was everything one might ask for in terms of opening up the scope and increasing the stakes, the bulk of the episode leading up to it was perplexingly dull. And while it is still quite possible that the show-runners have a carefully-worked-out mythology, it's not evident as of the end of season 1.
In Dark, by the end of the first season, the viewer had a reasonable knowledge of how the story-world worked, and what the various characters wanted to achieve. A lot of this "knowledge" was revealed in later seasons to be incomplete, mistaken, or lies, but it was a coherent structure that the viewer could work with.
By the end of 1899 season 1, we don't have anything like as coherent a structure. We do not know the actual nature of the cosmology, just that it's clearly complicated. Much worse from a story standpoint, we don't know what any of these characters actually wants. There are strong hints of how a lot of the weirdness was accomplished, but nothing really to suggest why someone made it all happen. The putative bad guy has only rarely taken any obvious action; when he does, his abilities and power level are inconsistent. Late in the season, that bad guy claims that one of the central protagonists is actually "behind" all the weirdness -- but that protagonist's memories have been altered, and neither they nor the viewer knows what they might have been doing or why. And in the last act of the last episode, an entirely new antagonist is introduced, who is yet more mysterious. There are lots of scenes where people scream that they want answers, but no one who has any of those answers is willing to share them (again, for no apparent reason).
But all this "main arc" business takes up less than half of the finale. The bulk of the running time (pun intended) is literally supporting cast members running down corridors. They're higher-budget corridors than Doctor Who, but it's the same pointless narrative padding. They are running from poorly understood threats, with no plan of escape. Which is the sort of thing that can be super-compelling in a videogame, or even to watch in a story that is closely following one character. But this story keeps splitting them up, cutting between them, having them reunite... it leaves all those side characters feeling entirely without agency.
One of the supporting cast knows more than the others about what is going on, and is taking active steps to accomplish a goal. But the viewer is not told what that goal is ahead of time. What we see is them looking terribly anxious as they intricately fiddle with an unidentified McGuffin over the course of several scenes interspersed with other folks running down corridors. We don't know what their goal is. We don't know what obstacles they are grappling with. Hell, we don't even know if they are really on the side of the protagonist (which they claim to be, but there is serious reason for doubt), so we don't even know if we should be rooting for them to succeed!
I started with a Lost comparison, and I'll end with one. Kes and I stopped watching Lost because they didn't "give us cookies" frequently enough. Season 1 of 1899 left us feeling similarly unsatisfied. If season 2 happens and I hear good buzz, I might check it out... but as of now, it's a thumbs-down.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-23 12:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-23 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-30 06:44 pm (UTC)To be fair, I have the "this feels like a LARP" reaction to an awful lot of series.
But yeah -- it's helpful to have this perspective. I'm going to leave it on my list for now, but may not pull the trigger on watching it until I hear whether s2 moves things along well...