The Nevers review: all of Joss Whedon’s obsessions on a Victorian X-Men show

It almost seems unfair to judge The Nevers based on the six episodes that start airing this month, dubbed “Part One” of the show’s first 12-episode season. The new HBO drama inadvertently became controversial, thanks to its creator Joss Whedon, who wrote and directed the pilot and initially served as a showrunner until he stepped down in November 2020, claiming exhaustion amid an ongoing wave of scandals. . According to the show’s stars, Whedon worked on this first batch of episodes and the version of The Nevers debuting on April 11 is the closest thing we will get to your version of the show. When this season’s “Part Two” debuts (“at a later date”, according to HBO) The Nevers it may start to look like another show entirely. I hope it is better than that.

The Nevers takes place in an alternative London around 1896, after a supernatural event presented certain people, mainly women, with strange abilities. These “touches” are viewed with suspicion by society in general, and their “turns”, or powers, are seen as dangerous. An heiress defends them: Lavinia Bidlow (Olivia Williams), who finances an orphanage for the Tocados. The orphanage is managed by Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) and Penance Adair (Ann Skelly); the former is a capable fighter who obtains brief and unwanted premonitions, and the latter is a brilliant inventor.

The premise immediately invokes the X-Men, perhaps leaning a little in the direction of Miss. Peregrine for Peculiar Children. (Some of the Tocados do not have exactly powers – they are just different. While one girl shoots fireballs, another girl is only 10 feet tall.) The Nevers‘status as a Whedon show done, the idea of ​​the superhero gets credit – he wrote X-Men comics and directed two Avengers films – but even in his early Buffy the Vampire Slayer days, Whedon has long been associated with a work that embraces the rhythm and rhythm of the comic narrative. He is a storyteller with a well-established sensitivity and is on full display in The Nevers. This is, ultimately, the biggest problem of the show.

From the beginning, The Nevers it’s an enigmatic fit for HBO. The premium network’s reputation as a prestigious flagship of television gives each of its dramas a sense of occasion, the expectation of television that aspires to push the boundaries. The Nevers, however, it is surprisingly pedestrian. It’s a direct show from Whedon with the addition of nudity and some bad words and less jokes than your average average. In the first four episodes made available to critics, the series slowly builds its mythology: Amalia True and Penance Adair (say their names aloud, you’ll understand) encounter a mysterious conspiracy of scary masked men abducting the Touches, as well as public sentiment. Touched’s direction is reaching its nadir, thanks to the work of Maladie, a serial killer with her own gang of Touched villains. The world is meticulously built, but it has very little spark. Unfortunately, it is currently more interesting as a referendum on its creator.

Whedon had a slow public fall from grace in the last year, after accusations of “abusive and unprofessional” conduct on the set of Justice League by actor Ray Fisher, and reports of similar toxic behavior on the set of his hit shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. None of this was openly linked to his departure from The Neversand stars Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly published effusive praise for him based on their work together in the first six episodes. Still, the deterioration of Whedon’s reputation is the biggest cloud hanging over The Nevers, and even if it weren’t, the series looks like a sufficient retreading of its previous ideas for the whole thing to look a little backward.

According to Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer it was made to subvert the cliché of the horror film of the blonde victim who dies at the beginning of the film. What if, instead, she kicked the vampire’s ass? This feminist pop idea was praised as revolutionary in 1997, although critics of the time noted that BuffyThe heart of was not as feminist as its creator seemed to think. In watching The Nevers, it is difficult to dispel the feeling that history repeats itself.

The biggest hooks the show offers are moments of dissonance, scenes that lean heavily to subvert the audience’s familiarity with the tropes of Victorian fiction: strictly defined gender roles, repressed feelings and open classism. Against this background, Penance Adair steps forward as an inventor who doesn’t have time to bathe and barely rinses her mouth (but still looks good). Amalia True is a stoic and fit woman who can destroy boys while wearing a corset and giant skirts. As they reveal how they defy convention, Whedon seems more satisfied with his own ideas than the public will necessarily be.

This dissonance shows its greatest disservice. Unlike the X-Men, The Nevers it has no real metaphor behind its sci-fi version of Victorian London. In the X-Men stories, the mutation can be read as a substitute for all types of marginalized identities, from queer communities to people of color. X-Men tales use gender twists to make stories about conflicts between the majority and minority more palatable than in real life – and more fun. Victorian fiction, however, plays on the gap between modern social customs and those of two centuries ago. We know, for example, that the gender roles of the time were restrictive and social mobility was out of the question, all to a degree that now looks cartoonish. But we can still find relevance in these stories, because stories about loud cultural lines can help us to understand the more subtle ways in which the same lines are drawn in the present.

But the comics turnaround of The Nevers it is not additive. Instead, it looks like a dead weight – another layer that prevents the audience from knowing these characters or understanding Because anyone would care in the first place. Having seen a lot of Joss Whedon’s work, I think I know why he cares – he’s fixated on telling stories about attractive women who can fight. This is a limited understanding of feminism. Buffy Summers, River Tam in Firefly, Faith in Buffy and Angel, Echo in Doll house – their heroines scoffed and kicked their way for men who would prefer them to die literally hundreds of times. It would have been nice to see Whedon, before he disappeared from sight, begin to question why his idea of ​​strong women all looks the same, no matter what time they are or what fantasies they are wearing.

The Nevers premieres on HBO on Sunday, April 11, and will be available for broadcast on HBO Now and HBO Max.