| RATING: | 20% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Season 1
White Hegemony
The usual White supremacist nonsense that US tv produces in large number. White people think only in absolute terms that the only way to deal with any problem is the use of physical and psychological violence.
Whites continue to believe that, despite evidence to the contrary, they can dominate and control the world to their own material advantage; hence, the obsession here with omnipresent and allegedly omniscient surveillance techniques that actually do not exist because there are not enough people to man such technologies and insufficient intelligence to know where to look at any one time, anyway. This Aryan superhero complex leads Whites to imagine the world is filled with people who refuse to agree with them who are, therefore, somehow a threat - no matter their inability to be much of a threat to begin with
Yet, Whites here behave as though their empty-eyed smarminess were enough to make their fantasies of world domination achievable. This is the only realistic aspect of this drama: The panicky bluff and bluster that attempts to mask moral emptiness and imperial failure.
Whites resent claims that their cultures are Institutionally Racist so desperately try to claim that any immoral behavior by Whites is always the result of rogue elements in White culture who cannot move on from the days of racial slavery. White culture, itself, is thus inherently good and only an alleged minority of Bad Apples do bad things. The solution to the problems continuing to be allegedly caused by such rogue elements is thus for Whites to focus on the rogues as a distraction from the institutions that created such rogues; rendering the Institutionally Racist act of distraction a pretend attempt to deal with the problems caused - not by the rogue (who merely makes obvious the fact that White culture is Institutionally Racist) - but by Institutional Racism.
The White writers here have no idea how to write characters from other ethnicities such that People of Color talk and act in a White idiom (richly-filled with clichés stolen from better dramas) that makes them nothing more than chocolate-colored Whites or Black-faced Minstrels. Despite the mixed-ethnicity casting, the only culture on show here is irredeemably White. As always, Whites only accept People of Color who adapt to White needs and forget their own - Whites believe they have no need to change or to learn. To Whites, there are only two kinds of people: Whites (& People of Color who are White allies, not people in their own right) and anyone else. The Us & Them dualism of this drama makes it an unsubtle and undramatic exploration of character.
The absurd sexism here tries to hide its gynophobia by making the female characters experts in their own violent field while simultaneously indulging the White male tendency to objectify women’s bodies regardless of dramatic need (in case the male creators are labeled homosexuals). Whites trying to have their cake and eat it.
Maggie Q is wasted in a role that does not adequately display her martial arts skills nor her sense of humor. The original Luc Besson movie (Nikita) is so much better than this and the earlier English-language remake (Assassin).
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