WiC Watches: Carnival Row season 1

EPISODE 101: “SOME DARK GOD WAKES”

Rycroft “Philo” Philostrate investigates a mysterious assailant with a grudge against the Fae. Vignette Stonemoss barely escapes Tirnanoc with her life and arrives in The Burge looking for a fresh start. Imogen Spurnrose meets her new neighbor. In Parliament, the fight over the critch heats up.

What happened?

The opening sequence delivers a quick history of the current geopolitical situation in the Carnival Row world: Tirnanoc, the legendary kingdom of the mythical Fae, has been pillaged by the Empires of men. The war ended seven years before, when the armies of the Republic of the Burgue withdrew, leaving the surviving Fae at the mercy of their brutal rivals, the Pact. Slaughtered and terrorized, the Fae seek any way to escape.

“Some Dark God Wakes” opens with plenty of action and fantasy, with Vignette (Cara Delevingne) leading an escape out of Tirnanoc as the Pact soldiers and their were-dogs pursue; flying aboard a refugee boat operated by human profiteers, Stonemoss and her fellow Fae refugees end up smack dab in the middle of an ocean storm. Vignette carries a photograph of Philo (Bloom), her former human lover whom she believes to be dead. The ship founders and sinks, but Vignette survives.

Carnival Row. Amazon.

Enter Inspector Philo and the gritty, retro-Victorian cityscape of the Burgue, the capital of the Republic of the Burgue, and the destination for all Fae refugees. Philo is a tough cop and “one of the good ones,” committed to serving the refugee population of the Row. He’s on a case involving a mysterious suspect named “Unseelie Jack” who has been brutally assaulting innocent Fae denizens.

At Balefire Hall, the parliament of the Republic of the Burge, the human politicians rail against the insidious influences of the Fae refugees (the ‘critch’) with the exception of Chancellor Absalom Breakspear (Jared Harris), whose empathetic nature makes his political standing precarious. Vignette ends up an indentured servant to Ezra (Andrew Gower) and Imogen Spurnrose (Tamzin Merchant), while Philo carries on an affair with the war-widowed Portia Fyfe (Maeve Dermody), the mistress of the boarding house where he’s staying.

Indira Varma as Piety Breakspear in Carnival Row S1

The plot thickens as Vignette meets up with her old faery pal Tourmaline Larue (Karla Crome) where she works at the seedy Tetterby Hotel, a brothel on the Row. Tourmaline realizes that Vignette is wearing a widow’s braid and stuns her with the news that Philo is still alive. Meanwhile, status-seeking Ezra and Imogen discover that their new wealthy neighbor is a faun named Agreus Astrayon (David Gyasi). The wayward Jonah Breakspear (Arty Froushan), son of the powerful Absalom and Piety (Indira Varma) Breakspear, is abducted from the Tetterby brothel.

The action returns in a rooftop chase as Philo tries to run down a possible “Unseelie Jack,” a sailor who utters a dire warning before jumping to his death. Stealing a knife from her masters, the angry Vignette unleashes her wings, dons her faery clothes, cuts away her widow’s braid and flies off into the night, looking to kill Philo, though she is unable to do so once she finds him. The episode ends with the arrival of a dark shadowy being emerging from the sewers to drag away the servant fairy Aisling (Erika Starkova).

Was it good?

The first episode of Carnival Row takes its time establishing the parameters of its unique fantasy world, introducing the main characters and setting up the pins for the unfolding plotlines to come. Cinematically sumptuous and wonderfully imagined, it perfects its grimy grays of day and dark, lamplit nights to emphasize a distinctly Victorian era, hunting Jack-the-Ripper feel. Bloom is sufficiently grizzled and glowering, while Delevingne exudes both the defiant spirit and fragile, hollow-boned lightness of her faery race.

But Carnival Row’s premiere installment stumbles by attempting to bring too many horses to the narrative racetrack. It’s a stunning fantasy full of mythical creatures, a sociopolitical parable, a war story, a love story, a gumshoe murder mystery, and a Jane Austen-style British parlor drama all trying to combine into one cohesive tale. This wide landscape of ambitious possibilities threatens to get out of control and go in too many directions at once, muddling the show’s identity and watering down its dramatic impact.

The storytellers need to quickly combine storylines or prune some away, to choose, and choose well. In a quiet moment “In Some Dark God Wakes,” when Portia asks Philo to reveal the war stories behind his scars, he responds by asking, “What makes you so sure it’s a story worth hearing?” If Carnival Row can sharpen its focus and land clean dramatic blows, the answer may well be a resounding, “Because it is!”