Requested By
CAMILA in the comments
What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it. Netflix says it’s scifi.
Recap
Four teenagers run onto the roof of a building. “The world was divided in two sides,” says a translated caption from a language I don’t recognize. Groups of people descend a staircase, and one of the women has a strangely-shaped wound on her arm. She embraces her mother in an outdoor marketplace. “Not anymore,” says the caption. I think the language might be Spanish or Portuguese.
Elsewhere, another woman is taking paintings off a wall while her friend or servant gives a sinister smile.
The people walking through the market, all of whom have that same wound on their arm, are welcomed with a standing ovation by the people in the market, who are desperate for the newcomers to take them to the “Offshore”. But then there is a sudden explosion: Molotov cocktails are being thrown into the market. This attracts the attention of the teenagers on the roof, who watch as people with guns swarm the market.
The opening credits give me a little bit of time to focus on the language without having to take notes. It’s definitely not Spanish; the word endings look like they’re Portuguese.
Elsewhere, in a conference room, the chairwoman of a meeting discusses how to deal with the riot, through which I get some information about the world. The people in the meeting are called “The Founders”, in charge of a group called “The Offshore”. The rioters are from the other group, “The Inland”. They are made up of people who were eliminated in “The Process” to protect “the Offshore”.
One of the Founders says that they need to remind the Inlanders that the Offshore are superior, and suggest they do so by means of a test. If they win, that will demonstrate to the Offshore the rightness of the system. “And if you lose?” asks Chairwoman. If we lose, answers another Founder, maybe the Process isn’t perfect and we really should disband it.
They take a vote on which plan to go with, and everybody except the “Founding Couple” votes in favor of Chairwoman’s plan to establish a security force; only the Founding Couple want to go with the public test. So maybe only the couple are Founders, and the others are just fellow leaders of the Offshore?
After the meeting, Founding Father and Founding Mother return to their bedroom, where he tells her that he wants to return to the Inland and find his daughter Tañia, who is in danger.
Back at the market, a caption confusingly announces that it’s now two weeks after the fall of the Offshore. Strange; does that mean the Offshore scenes we just saw were flashbacks? A group of armed men have entered a town. Someone tells them to piss off back to the Process building, but these armed Offshore folks point out that the rioters destroyed it. So now we, with guns, who call ourselves the 3%, rule the Inland!
Okay, so I think I have enough information to describe this world now. The Founding Couple invented some kind of selection process to identify the most superior people in the world (by whatever metric) and take them to an artificial island or floating city or whatever, which is called the Offshore. The people of the Inland are split on their relationship to this Process: Some of them outright worship the 3%, believing that they truly are superior; others, who call themselves the Cause, oppose it and either believe that its results don’t reflect reality or that it is unjust even if it is correct. At some point prior to this episode the Cause overthrew the Offshore and destroyed it.
Back to the present. The teenagers are burning someone’s body in a funeral ceremony. One of them shouts that he wants justice and mentions something about a Shell, and a Pulse.
As the teenagers argue over… something… gunshots ring out. They split up; Joana and Guy-Who-Looks-Like-Daniel-Radcliffe run into Inlanders who attack them for being Offshorers, while Elisa and Other-Guy encounter an old man who used to belong to the Cause. Tânia (I think this is the correct spelling) belonged to the Cause as well, they tell the old man, and you need to tell her that she was the Founding Couple’s daughter. Correction: you need to know that she is the Founding Couple’s daughter.
He is surprised, and says that explains why she was painting ducks. I don’t know if that means changing the color of a duck (like painting a house) or if it means painting a picture of a duck. I also don’t understand the significance. Maybe the Inlanders never see the sea at all - hence the name - and her knowledge of what ducks look like was a sign of her uniqueness?
He also tells them that Tânia is dead, but had given him instructions on how to get somewhere important, which he chickened out before reaching.
Back to the flashbacks, where Chairwoman shows her colleagues POV footage of the new security division killing two members of the Cause. The Founding Mother isn’t happy; she leaves and takes a plane or some equivalent to find her daughter in the Inland.
I’m wondering: how far back are these flashbacks? Two generations? More? Or are they not flashbacks at all? Surely they must be flashbacks, if Tânia and the old man are the same age and she has since died.
The Founding Mother tracks down Tânia, who pulls a gun on her mother; she assumes her mother has come to arrest her for joining the Cause. But the Founding Mother assures her that’s not what she’s here for:
Tânia flees into the street, but when the Founding Mother follows her some others notice the high-tech thing she’s holding and realize she’s an Offshorer. That’s when the Security Division arrives – and a firefight breaks out. Tânia hears the gunshots and returns just in time to find her mother dead.
In the present, two of the teenagers, Natalia and Elisa (I think), discuss the events of this flashback. They say that if the Founders regretted creating the Process, people need to know. But it’s not clear how Natalia and Elisa know about the regret; the old man couldn’t have told them, since he never knew Tânia was the Founders’ daughter.
Meanwhile, Not-Daniel-Radcliffe finds his mother, who calls him Tiago.
Elisa and Natalia discuss their disappointment at how things turned out. They thought that all they needed to do was overthrow the Offshore, but that didn’t magically cause the rest of the populace to have a big meeting where peacefully discussed how to run the world. Anarchy doesn’t create equality; it just means people form groups to kill each other.
Elsewhere, Elisa is captured. Wait, elsewhere? I guess I misunderstood who Tiago was shouting at when he called Elisa’s name; the woman with Natalia is somebody else. The real Elisa is, as I said, captured and brought before a warlord who demands she kiss his ring.
Elsewhere elsewhere, “Xavier” wants to kill “Andre”. I think Andre is the warlord; he wants to build a new Offshore here in the Inland. He never cared about equality, he just wants to replace the Offshore’s “we are superior” with his own.
The other two teenagers, Natalia and Not-Elisa, go to the place the old man chickened out of reaching. They open a metal box and immediately drop the lid again due to the smell. It’s got rats inside, and is where the Founding Mother was buried.
Flashback: Founding Father is visited by Chairwoman. He asks for Laís, his wife, but Chairwoman is here to report her death. A funeral is held, at which the Chairwoman eulogizes both of the Founding Couple, Laís and Vitor. Vitor is dead too? Did he die of his disease, or did Chairwoman murder him to seize control herself? As part of her eulogy, she says that the problem with the Couple is that they were humans, and that in order to continue their work they need to be replaced with the idea of a Founding Couple. We see the Couple’s images erased from photographs of the Offshore’s leaders, Soviet-style.
Back in the present, the Couple-worshippers and their various opponents are preparing for war.
Natalia and Not-Elisa (named Joana) dig out the corpse and find the high-tech sphere. The sphere projects pictures, maps, and the test that the couple were going to use to check if the Process really works or not. Misunderstanding the test’s purpose, Natalia is disappointed; they’re still running tests, so they clearly didn’t regret creating the Process after all.
But Joana takes the sphere and brings it to the surface, standing between the combatants just before the war is about to start. (How’d she know where the battle was going to take place?)
She stands between the different factions and tries to talk everyone down. But a woman approaches her, accusatorily: Isn’t this the world you wanted when you shattered the Pulse? Joana says she had been delusional and now understands she was wrong. And she plays a video from the sphere explaining the test.
Joana proposes they go through the test: six candidates, and whoever wins will get to choose what happens to the Inland. I’ll be the first candidate. Who is brave enough to challenge me?
Xavier steps forward first, then the accusing woman, then a curly redhead who I’ve seen a couple of times so far but don’t know anything about, then Tiago. There’s one slot left.
Joana turns towards the warlord: Do none of you formerly-Offshore “superiors” believe you can win? So I guess I was wrong before; the warlord wants to maintain the supremacy of the Offshore, not replace it with a new one of his own. He is shamed into joining, but whispers a clearly treacherous command to his subordinate before coming out. So we have our six candidates: Joana, Xavier, Redhead, Tiago, Accuser, and Warlord.
The rules of the test are laid out. Each candidate will secretly select one of nine symbols, one of each combination of red/green/blue and circle/square/triangle. Whoever has the sphere has to choose one opponent and try to guess their symbol. If they guess right, that opponent is eliminated. If they guess wrong, you give the sphere to that opponent, and it’s their turn to guess. If you guess wrong twice, you are eliminated.
They all rush to grab the sphere first, which is really stupid of them. Whoever goes first has no info to go on and therefore an 88% chance of getting their first strike; you should avoid guessing for as long as possible. Redhead grabs it first, and guesses Xavier is a red circle; incorrect, but after a couple more passes Andre guesses correctly that Xavier had a green circle.
Accuser is eliminated next, for two wrong guesses. She gives the ball to Tiago. He guesses wrong, too, and is eliminated. But as he leaves he tells Joana what his symbol had been, enabling her to figure out through process of elimination that Redhead is the blue square. As she leaves, Redhead passes the ball to Andre.
Andre guesses incorrectly, so now it all comes down to this last guess of Joana’s; she already has a strike against her, so if she guesses wrong, she is eliminated. She announces that if she wins everyone has to destroy their weapons, and then they’ll go to the Process building to have a general meeting to decide the fate of the world together. Whereas Andre announces that if he wins, everyone must admit he really is superior.
So Joana thinks carefully:
She narrows it down to the red circle or the red triangle. One belonged to Veronica (the Accuser) and yours is the other one.
It’s hard to follow the game and type at the same time, so I can’t verify that this is correct. But seriously, Veronica, you can’t help Joana out? Tell her which one you were! Do you want Andre to win?
Joana finally guesses: Red triangle.
Before the sphere can respond, Andre gives the prearranged signal; his subordinate shoots the ball so it can’t reveal that she won. Each group flees to its corner, and preparations for the war begin anew.
Joana and Tiago flee and commiserate about their failure. But the following morning the war hasn’t begun yet. (Confusingly, Joana calls Tiago “Rafael”, so now I don’t know which is his real name.) There’s a heartwarming montage of people embracing and going back to their lives – but I’m impatient to find out why. What happened to Andre? What happened to the insane preacher guy who wanted to kill people for blaspheming the Founding Couple? Why did everyone suddenly stop listening to them?
They all head to the Process center for the meeting that Joana wanted.
Andre, alone, descends into the basement. He enters an underwater shuttle that takes people to the Offshore; despite the warning that there isn’t enough oxygen, he sets off anyway, committing suicide and hallucinating his significant other embracing him.
Unresolved questions
Andre’s loss of control over his faction was hinted at in advance, when his subordinate questioned him and was knocked to the ground in response. But the last we saw of the Founder-worshippers, they were dragging Veronica offstage for daring to claim that the tests were flawed. Why did they suddenly change their mind?
How will this new society be organized? Will they come to an agreement, or will it descend into warring factions again? Did anybody actually destroy their weapons, or is each faction keeping their weapons in reserve just in case the meeting doesn’t go their way?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 6/10. The setting is a pretty standard Hunger Games/Divergent-style dystopia, with some of the same plot holes from which such settings always suffer. But I’m giving it an extra point over the average because the story centered on parts of that dystopia you don’t often see: the aftermath of the overthrow; the failure of idealism; honest self-doubt among the ruling class. The flashbacks in particular, though they were confusing at first, provided an extra layer of depth.
Writing: 7/10. I want to give kudos to the writers for the “test”. I don’t know if they made it up themselves (when you dig into such things, they almost always turn out to be copied from somewhere else) but I’d certainly never heard of it before. Too many writers reach straight for a stock puzzle like the 3- and 5-liter bottles or the liar and the truthteller, so props to them for using something less common. And they picked (or created) a game that genuinely works as a multiplayer test of logic and cooperation.
Or at least it does in theory. Unfortunately, the game didn’t play out the way the Founders intended (even before it was cut short by gunfire). It’s understandable that nobody brought up in a resource-scarce dystopia would have sufficient knowledge of game theory to play optimally, and I can’t speak to what animosity there might be between the various factions. But over the course of the whole game there was only one instance of explicit cooperation between players. And even worse, the least cooperative player made it to the final two and only lost the game due to a coin flip.
But that may in fact be the whole point! If the Founders created a flawed Process, maybe their method of verifying the Process was itself also flawed. Maybe the message of the episode is that any method of testing will be too simplistic, will fail, when confronted with the complexity of the real world. It is a message that works on an impressive four levels:
The Process does not accurately divide people into superior and inferior;
Creating such a Process has detrimental effects on society that would outweigh any benefits even if it were accurate;
Any attempt to test whether the Process is accurate carries the risk of being as inaccurate as the Process itself;
Those being tested might not approach the game as you intend, for example by not recognizing the value of cooperation; by hating each other sufficiently that they’re willing to forgo the benefits of cooperation; or by shooting the testing equipment so that it does not reveal the winner.
The other major message of the episode is unfortunately rather muddled. In the middle of the episode, Joana laments that overthrowing the Offshore and disbanding the Process didn’t magically lead to a new, peaceful system but rather anarchy; it was a refreshing taste of reality in a genre that usually does follow the fall of the oppressor with a magical “and they lived happily ever after”. But then, at the end of the episode… that is exactly what happens. Despite at least one faction still willing and desirous of war against the others, the fighting somehow never began. And when everyone shows up together for the Great Meeting at which they will establish the new rules of society, the series ends before we get to see how that plays out.
What happens the first time somebody in the discussion is forced to compromise on, or entirely give up on, one of their core principles? What happens the first time one faction member insults another? Joana had demanded, if she won, that everybody destroy all of their weapons – but there are no indications that they actually did so. How many more game-ending snipers are waiting for a secret hand signal?
The episode certainly deserves respect for raising the question, but the ending didn’t match that level of cynicism; it was too pat, too rosy, too devoid of conflict and doubt. In the real world, the war would have begun immediately with the sniping of the game sphere, as other people with guns respond with their own gunfire under the assumption that they were under attack. So the tonal shift didn’t really work.
There were a few additional errors in the writing (like the use of a flashback to distract us while characters learned something they had no way of knowing), but I’ve written enough.
Production: 9/10. With very few exceptions, the world was very well-realized. The set designers did a good job creating a camp that looked cobbled-together from the detritus of our world.
The use of three strikingly different color palettes – oranges for the camp in the present, blacks for the camp in the past, and blues and whites for the Offshore – helped keep the different storylines straight, though they could have done better with the sound cues for the flashback scenes. The direction and editing during the test was superb, and while a lot of the score was not to my personal taste I liked the use of drums to build tension. I also have only good things to say about the acting.
Characterization: 5/10. The main characters were unfortunately the generic teenage heroes classic of the genre. Maybe their personalities were explored more in the rest of the series, but they weren’t in this episode.
I liked the depth that was given to the Founders, and I liked how they showed that Redhead still hates the main characters with a passion even at the great meeting at the end. I wish I knew more about the Chairwoman; I’m terribly curious as to whether Vitor actually died of the disease or whether she murdered him. Her expression in the funeral scene was ambiguous to me, and it’s possible that an earlier episode explicitly showed which it was. I also wonder what happened to her; is she dead?
Accessibility: 6/10. I got the basic contours of the world pretty quickly, but working out who was who took a surprisingly long time. Multiple times X called out Y’s name, and I guessed incorrectly which of several characters was Y. I also still don’t know how many different factions there are, much less what they all believe; I don’t know, for example, who Redhead or Veronica represent. Still, though, it was a fairly smooth watching experience, with the ground rules established pretty clearly at the outset.
Closure: 7/10. I can’t give this too a high a Closure score, for the reasons I discussed above; the series ends when the hard work of building a society has just begun, and it’s anybody’s guess where they’ll go from here. The music and the shiny happy people really want us to conclude that everything will be alright but there isn’t enough reason to be assured of it. But most of the story threads have been tied up nicely, with Andre committing suicide; the Offshore gone for good; some of the factions laying down their arms on camera; and at least the intention of rebuilding.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s a good-quality show, I’m not going to lie; the rare show where every single rating was 5 or higher (Accessibility is usually inversely correlated with the other scores, especially Closure). There are just two issues.
First, I’ve never liked this genre. Part of the reason I’ve never liked this genre is because of its naivete. That’s why I heaped so much praise upon the acknowledgement of reality midway through; it was quite the welcome surprise. But the episode backtracked at the very end, with little justification. That made the episode both better and more frustrating: they saw the pitfall coming and even announced it, then walked right into it!
Second, this is a case where seeing the finale really might have ruined the experience of watching the show. The accusation that by writing this blog I’m ruining the shows for myself is one I receive often, but it’s almost never true. If the finale is high quality, it usually makes me desperately curious to see the rest of the series. In such cases, there are always unanswered questions about how we got to the finale: How did the world get this way? What did the Process look like? What was Offshore society like in its heyday? Did the chairwoman kill Vitor?
It’s usually worth going back and watching the show for those. But in this case, I’m worried that exactly those parts of the finale that I liked the most – those parts that deviated from the typical presentation of YA dystopian fiction – will have been absent from the rest of the series.
I'm amazed at how observant and insightful you are. To keep track of these many characters alone is a lot. Thank you for the review! ❤
I love this series and the open-ended finale. I don't mind that it's hopeful. And I really don't think it spoils the series too much. First two seasons are a bit different, focusing on the Process and the tests. The production value is definitely lower, though.