Carnival Row – Some Dark God Wakes

  • Title: Carnival Row – Some Dark God Wakes
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Carnival Row - Some Dark God Wakes TV review

The best word to describe the first episode of Amazon’s new series Carnival Row is awkward. Attempting to blend fantasy, sci-fi, and a kinda-sorta (but not really) steampunk ascetic around a winding story lacking a true focus offers some interesting ideas but really shows no intention of heading somewhere interesting (at least until its final few minutes). Before we even get to a single scene, a dump of narrative exposition informs us about three different races, a war, refugees, and human smuggling across borders. In the first few minutes we also get refugees fleeing an occupied land and a shipwreck. None of this, however, takes place in the show’s primary setting. Here the shift focuses away from the faerie lands of Tirnanoc to the far more human lands of The Burgue where Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) is searching for a serial killer. Th premiere also offers glimpses at the charged political climate of the land (a not-so-subtle allusion to the U.S. and its current views on immigration) and, for good measure, throws in the proclivities of a politician’s son frequenting faerie whorehouses.

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