The Nevers review, Episode 5: “Hanged”

Another new episode of The Nevers, another collection of lovingly hand-crafted character details drowning in a muddled storyline.

Five episodes in, I think I know basically what to expect from an episode of The Nevers. It will be creative, it will be quirky, it will look great, it will have explosive set pieces, and it will be full of twisty dialog that gives it a real sense of character. “Hanged” has all of that going for it. We pick up about a month after Maladie’s anti-climatic capture last week, and Amalia and Penance come into conflict over whether to save her from her public execution or use the opportunity while everyone is distracted to tunnel under the city and find the Galanthi, the ship that gave the Touched their powers in the first place, the one that Lavinia and Dr. Hague are excavating.

Their argument is believable and acted to the hilt by Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly, who’s really good at selling some of this loopy dialog. Here she is arguing that saving Maladie is important to show the girls that being Touched shouldn’t be a death sentence: “A part of them breaks or goes quiet for always when the world turns beastly, when we just let it.” I don’t think every actor could make sense of that line, but Skelly gets there.

But this scene also has some of the issues I’ve come to expect from The Nevers, namely its tendency to rush into plot twists without laying the groundwork we need to understand them. The Galanthi is a good example. Did we know that’s what it was called before? Because all the characters talk as if it’s been explained to them. And not only do they know the word, they know what it means and why it’s important. “You expect me to turn my back on the only power that can make all of this right, that told me a month ago it needs me, so that we can prove to the public we’re in league with a psychotic killer,” Amalia spits at Penance. What power? How will it makes things right? How does it provide anyone with hope? I feel like there’s a whole episode missing or something.

The Nevers does this all the time. For instance, why is Nimble Jack suddenly part of the gang? Apparently he’s so entrenched that Penance’s plan to free Maladie depends on him, but we didn’t see any of this closeness develop. The Nevers is a character-driven show that leaves out the character development. It’s bizarre.

And the show keeps dropping hints that Amalia is something more than what she appears, which is fine, but taken with all the other vagueness, it’s starting to grate. “The future of the world depends on what I’m doing,” she tells Penance, who apparently knows what it means. “The future of the world depends on the present. Isn’t that why you’re here?” Penance shoots back. “I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know how it got this far or what I’m doing next,” Amalia replies. I feel like I’m dropping in a conversation midway through and it’s getting annoying.

Amalia even lampshades how undercooked the mythology of the show is when she tries to convince people to help her reach the Galanthi. “I know I’ve been vague about what that means but it’s the first step to learning why we were brought here together and what we’re meant to do next,” she says. So the show knows it’s not delivering in this area, but rather than doing better it’s just admitting it and hoping that’s enough. On that note, why does Augie choose to go with Amalia over Penance? What does the Galanthi mean to him, cause it must mean something. Let us in on the secret, man!

Everything involving the Galanthi annoyed me. The through-line about Maladie’s public execution is better, but the show still plays games with us. You know something is up because the episode never gives us a good look at Maladie’s face, always hiding her at a distance or behind a mane of matted hair. As it ends up, this isn’t Maladie at all. It’s the women who worked for her, the one who wanted desperately to be Touched. She and Maladie switched places right before Frank took her in, and she’s willing to die for her boss. After Penance’s rescue plan starts to go sideways, she opens the trapdoor on the gallows and jumps through herself. It’s unsettling.

As for Maladie, she was posing as Effie Boyle the whole time, having murdered the real article a while back. Amy Manson does a terrific job of changing her voice and manner to appear like a different person; I had no idea, and her Keyser Söze moment at the very end is a lot of fun.

That said, her plan is…what exactly was her plan? Before the hanging, the Colonel uses his powers to convince a couple of guards to dig up some kind of fusebox buried in the earth. He throws the switch and sends a current of electricity flowing through the metal railing in front of the gallows, frying all the onlookers touching it.

Is that how electricity works? It’s news to me, but Frank seems to intuit the danger. “She’s gonna kill us, everyone who came to see her die,” he says. What gives him this revelation? I have no idea. It kind of feels like Cersei’s Sept of Baelor sequence from Game of Thrones but nothing is set up. And I get that Penance picked up on what was happening because of her ability to see the flow of energy, but it’s awfully convenient that she didn’t tune into that until the script needed her to.

This episode felt like it knew what climaxes it wanted to hit but didn’t care at all how it got there. This show is always in such a rush; I feel like we’re watching events that should happen a couple episodes later.

I also raised an eyebrow at all the discussions about whether hanging Maladie was the right thing to do. I found it hard to believe that so many characters were sticking up for her after all she’d done. Even the one member of the blue blood crowd at the beginning is against the hanging, calling it “barbaric,” which it is, but it seemed self-serving that all of our main characters save the evil Lord Massen were critical of the execution (to varying degrees) and the only ones for it were the masses of bloodthirsty onlookers we didn’t know.

The Nevers is still full of fun details. For instance, I liked that Desiree couldn’t pronounce the word “judgment” when reading Effie’s article. I liked Harriet having a spat with her boyfriend and using her ice breath (turns out she doesn’t so much freeze things as literally turn them into ice). I liked the implication that a member of the British royal family is Touched. (“Bettina has lumbago!”) I liked Maladie, as Effie, saving Harriet from trampling, adding another wrinkle to her character. But the big picture is sloppy and it’s not getting better.

Episode Grade: C

The Bullet Points

• The sex scene between Amalia and Doctor Cousens at the beginning is kinda gratuitous. And why intercut it with the excavation of the spaceship and Maladie’s sentencing? Weird choice.
• More hints that Amalia is more than she seems. Doctor Counins: “Are you planning a rebellion?” Amalia: “A reunion.”
• “After all, both the ostriches were females.” I’m sure that was a great story about birds, Augie. No wonder Lavinia is getting headaches.
• Lavinia is interesting. It seems like she honestly does sympathize with the Touched but considers them diseased people to be cured, which is why she’s excavating the Galanthi. Also her costumes are great.
• Thank you to Harriet for letting me know that England had outlawed public executions by this time period. I didn’t know that.
• Frank Mundi with a pretty good burn on Hugo: “You ain’t a man with an office, you’re a pimp with a gimmick.”
• The scene between Lord Massen and the Begger King has some good exchanges. “Am I meant to call you lord?” “Am I meant to call you king?” I also liked this line: “The Touched are gonna change things. So did the fucking longbow. I’ll adapt.”
• There’s an act requiring that the Touched be registered. Not for the first time, the show is very X-Men.
• “I have practiced saying this and I feel sweaty!” Myrtle’s clap after Penance’s big speech is pretty cute.
• “Quit yelling, love, I’ll be down in a minute.” Fake Maladie is funny. Also, I imagine the earthquake-like noise she was responding to was Amalia and crew using Penance’s drill.
• Of course Massen helps Hugo up out of the chaos at the hanging. Blue blood’s gotta stick together. But why was Hugo there in the first place? Did it have something to do with what Effie/Maladie whispered to him at the police station? Is he working with her? Something to file away for later.

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