Carnival Row Season 1 Review

And so at long last I reach the end of season 1 of Carnival Row. And it was... okay.

The good thing is there is a lot of world-building. We learn about the fae, we learn about the Brugue, we learn how Philo met Vignette, we learn about Kingdoms of the Moon, we learn pix hover when they orgasm, we learn about male buttocks and female breasts & buttocks because of course we have to have nudity.

We learn a lot of stuff, although there's a lot of stuff we don't learn because the series is full of other learnable stuff. For instance, we don't learn anything about the Black Ravens, and they come and go because Vignette needs something to do on her own. And that's the main flaw of the series: everyone is pretty much on their own.

For an ensemble cast, the main cast doesn't do much ensembling. Philo never meets Imogen, Agreus, Jonah and Sophie, Vignette barely meets anyone except Philo, Imogen, Agreus and Ezra are pretty much off on their own, Jonah is with his parents a bit but mostly interacts with Sophie. Runyon starts as a puppet show owner whose "puppets" are another breed of fae, but he loses them pretty quickly and after a chat with Philo, ends up as a tutor to Jonah who wants him as a special advisor for season 2.

And yes, the show has been renewed for season 2. Amazon Prime ordered season 2 pretty much right away.

So Carnival Row seems very... disparate. There's Philo hunting the darkasher and dealing with his on-again/off-again relationship with Vignette. Eventually we discover the darkasher murders are tied to Philo because everything is tied to Philo. He's been prophesied to do great things, because he's Absalom's (illegitimate) child. And Absalom's wife Piety has been killing anyone who knows Philo and Absalom are connected. I'm not quite sure why, since they don't seem inclined to tell anyone what they know. And Runyon seems to know quite a bit, but the darkasher never goes after him. It's also mentioned that she hunts them down via the darkasher to try and find Philo, but the killings we see have no indication of interrogation.

Absalom and Jonah have issues, because Jonah is Absalom's son. Although eventually we learn he's illegitimate as well, as he is the result of a romance between Piety and her husband's political opponent, Ritter Longerbane. And Jonah is involved with Ritter's daughter Sophie.

Agreus is the Puck who is trying to blend into human society, and gets romantically involved with Imogen after he forces her to be seen with him as the price to support her brother Ezra's new business venture. Ezra isn't happy about that, although he goes back and forth between accepting Agreus and welcoming him into human society, and getting PO'd when he thinks Imogen actually has feelings for Agreus. Vignette is briefly a servant to their household, but leaves when Ezra tries to rape her.

Because of all this info dumping and plot juggling, a fair amount of characterization gets dumped along the way. I'm not sure what Ezra's feelings are for Imogen and the fae. Sometimes he seems happy with them, sometimes he isn't. Philo is arrested for murder based on his confession to his human lover he's half-fae. That seems a bit odd, that you can get arrested based on the "testimony" of essentially a jilted lover. Philo had his wings shorn at an early age, so how does anyone tell he (or any other shorn fae half-breeds) are fae?

Not to mention the magistrate seems to take Philo's lying about his bloodline rather personally. Is there some background relationship there we're never told, where the magistrate treated Philo as the son he never had? Not to mention Philo just learned he was a half-breed. Geez, magistrate, Philo just found out. There's no reason given for you being on his list of top five people to tell. The guy acts like Philo betrayed him personally. And the magistrate's anger moves the plot along, getting Philo tossed into jail for murder. Until Absalom gets him out.

Then there's Darius, Philo's former comrade-in-arms, who is in prison for... some reason. We never find out why: presumably at some point his werewolf nature was found out by the army. Why they didn't kill him, we never learn. We also never learn why Philo has visiting privileges. Darius just wanders in and out of the story.

Jonah seems okay with the fae, or at least the fae prostitutes and his (presumed) fae mother. But at the end he locks them up in the Row. I'm also not clear if Piety is a fae. Or a wing-shorn fae like Philo. Jonah is Philo's half-brother but makes no attempt to reach out to him. Also, Philo is Ezra and Imogen's half-brother, but they never respond to that. And I'm unclear, if Absalom was Philo's father, then who was Ezra and Imogen's father? They say their father took in Querelle, Philo's fae mother. But their father isn't Absalom. Is he? We do hear their father tended to flout convention, which is why Imogen is such a social rule-breaker. But how was he connected to Querelle, such that he took her in when she was pregnant with Absalom's child. Were the father and Absalom friends? Were the father and Querelle friends? We never find out.

With all the world-building, the story itself is rather rushed. Besides the elements above, Imogen and Agreus make a cute couple, but there's no real indication of why they fall in love, other than IITS. The darkasher/serial killer plot floats in and out of the background. And the Philo/Vignette romance never gets much attention. We see most of it in the episode 3 flashback, rather then in the other seven present-day episodes. In the present they spend most of their time avoiding each other because Vignette is mad at Philo for abandoning her in the flashback. Like Imogen and Agreus, they make a cute couple but we barely see them together and most of that is Vignette telling Philo she doesn't want to see him.

As noted, I'm still trying to determine what Piety is. Is she a human, or a fae? If a human, how does she know so much about fae magic, and using the darkasher, and liver-cutting fortunetelling? But if she's fae, nobody seems worried about it. Piety brings the fae witch Aioffe into her home and presumably visits her shop. But we're supposed to believe fae are social pariahs. Absalom having a wife that is a fae, much less consorting with other fae, seems to be a political liability. But no one ever mentions it. I guess she's not fae, because that would make Jonah half-blood like Philo. But Jonah becomes the chancellor when Absalom dies, and no one seems upset he's half-blood. So... Piety is human? If so, she seems to be very strongly tied to the fae.

The main strength of Carnival Row is the acting. Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne are okay. Caroline Ford and Arty Froushan are good. David Gyasi as Agreus is probably the best performer on the show, getting to do anger, and sneering condescension, and isolation, and love, and hate. Agreus has a gamut of emotions he gets to portray despite the Puck prosthetics, and Gyasi does an excellent job. All the other actors are good: there aren't any bad performances. Jamie Harris has a thankless role as the bigoted police officer Dombey with his enormous Muttonchops of Doom. But if he's unlikable, it's because he's an unlikable character rather than anything Harris does wrong.

As for the unlikeability of the bigot, Carnival Row is supposedly an analogy for modern-day racism and immigration. I didn't find it that in-your-face, and other shows like Alien Nation have done the same thing over the decades. If it's not too blatant to me: maybe because it all seems rather... disparate. The Burgue is basically England, and the Pact are basically Germany. So why not just call them England and Germany? Giving them fancy non-reality names just drives the analogy further from the real world. Carnival Row shows "real" bigotry, but it takes a lot of steps to separate it from real-world bigotry. People who don't think racism exists can say, "Oh, well that would never happen here: it's an alt-history setting" And judging from many of the online comments, those who think it does often wonder why the creative team didn't make a stronger point of it.

But then again, I'm not a big fan of blatant real-world immigration/racism issues, either. So damned if you do, damned if you don't. Like the recent episode of the new The Twilight Zone, "Point of Origin". Maybe trying to make TV present real-world issues, given the current crop of TV writers, just doesn't work. Writers like Rod Serling could pull it off back in the 60s by either making it more subtle ("The Big Tall Wish") or more universal ("A Quality of Mercy"). But there were a lot of... "talky" anti-racist screeds in older shows, too, like a lot of Westerns of the period. Or Star Trek's "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield". We hear a lot about how Serling took on real-world issues. But a lot of other shows' attempts at doing so are forgotten or derided. Maybe Serling was really good at it and most other TV writers, not so much.

As an attempt at doing anti-racist analogy, Carnival Row doesn't quite stick the landing. As an exploration of an alt-reality and a presentation of new beings and a new civilization, it seems more determined to build up that world than give us believable and developed characters in it. Carnival Row is a good show, and I look forward to Season 2. Hopefully they'll build up the characters more now we've learned about the setting. Season 1, like the season 1 of many shows, seems more like a prequel than a story unto itself.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?