Spoiler warning for the first half-season of the “The Nevers”. You’ve been warned. Seriously.
HBO has a new prestige drama. You probably haven’t seen it - if the ratings are anything to go by, very few people have - and the critic reviews of the first batch of six episodes have not been kind. If you know one thing about the series, it’s probably from the original trailers [see below] which pitched it as a female-led ‘Victorian steampunk X-men’. If you know a second thing about it, it that’s creator and showrunner Joss Whedon ‘removed himself’ from the production when his long history of abusive and manipulative behind-the-scenes behaviour was reported widely in the press last year.
The ‘Victorian X-Men’ framework sums up the central conceit of the show fairly well. After a mysterious event in late-nineteenth century London, some people - mostly women - begin displaying superpowers, which makes them an target for widespread social fear and violence. A wealthy benefactor in a wheelchair with mixed motives begins gathering the so-called ‘Touched’ at a school/orphanage, while secretly battling against a sisterhood of ‘evil’ mutants. . . I mean, Touched . . .led by a villain with a ties to our protagonist who risks triggering a repressive blacklash from mainstream society. There are even direct equivalents to Mr Sinister, the Mutant Registration Act, the Hellfire Club and other X-men plotlines. So if we are to read ‘The Nevers’ as being political, we must first recognise that it’s highly derivative of the Marvel comics of the ‘60s and 70s.
This derivativeness is at least partly responsible for the show’s poor reception. We’ve seen all this before - it’s standard Whedon-esque ‘women and minorities good’, ‘Victorian patriarchal aristocrats bad’ framing that is essentially hegemonic in high culture. Simple and effective, but a little on the nose. The show’s immense, bloated cast and confused storytelling don’t help. And character motivation often swings wildly between episodes - the sure sign of a production that was scrambling to find its groove. Shutting down filming due to COVID-19 last year also clearly made things worse - I’ve seen speculation on social media the last two episodes were at least partially assembled in the editing room from the footage they had available pre-lockdown and pre-Joss Whedon’s departure. The big twist from the pilot - that superpowers are a result of being infected with spores [?] from a crashed [?} alien [?] spaceship [?} - was intriguing enough to get me watching, but I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with the show for long.
A superficial political reading
Throughout most of the first season, the Touched are opposed by a cabal of influential men led by the villainous [?] Lord Massen - an arms manufacturer who we see threaten striking workers, who believes in the death penalty as a deterrent and conspires with criminals to control London. The members of this cabal are all generic stand-ins for various aspects of the ‘establishment’ - one wears a British military uniform, another represents the Royal Family and so on. Despite hints that his own daughter is Touched (and thus leaving open the door for a future, Cheney-esque redemption arc), Massen gives several reactionary monologues throughout the first season on the threat posed by these suddenly empowered women (and minoritized men) to ‘order’. In his belief that the appearance of superheroes in Great Britain is an ‘attack’ and an attempt to destabilise British society by some hidden and unknown antagonist, we also see a hint of the anti-semitic and conspiratorial tropes that historical underwrite such reactionary beliefs.
In the context, the political objective of minoritised populations such the the Touched is merely survival. The established regime is highly punitive, and potentially genocidal. The only alternative, represented by Lord Swan’s Ferryman’s Club, is commercial and sexual exploitation. The only way forward is for virtuous oppressed groups - including women, sexual and racial minorities - to band together and defend one another. On the other hand, violent radicals (in this story, represented by the deranged Touched serial killer Maladie) must also be stopped, lest they incite social conflict to get out of hand. In this reading, ‘The Nevers’ is therefore little more than a heavy-handed liberal fantasy, in which oppressed minorities fight for their place in repressive society with the aid of superpowers which, in real life, they didn’t possess. In reality, a hundred years of social conflict had to pass before women warriors, black doctors and gay police officers became commonplace and uncontroversial.
Episode Six and the turn
And then we come to Episode 6 “True” - the mid-season finale - written by Buffy alum Jane Espenson and reportedly produced at least in part following Joss Whedon’s departure. In the show’s second major twist, we final get the complete backstory of our protagonist, and ‘leader’ of the Touched, Lady Amalia True. And its a doozy. We flashed forward hundreds [?] of years to a dystopian future where the fanatical True Life movement and the stock good-guy Planetary Defense Coalition (‘PDC’) are fighting over the ruins of Earth [?] devastated by pollution and nuclear war. The alien Galanthi have arrived to help humanity save itself with planetary-preserving technology and insight, but it’s too late. The True Life movement have killed all but one Galanthi - which they are holding prisoner and torturing - and which is now trying to activate a portal and escape. Is it trying to flee, having given up on trying to help humanity? Or is it going home to gather more of its kind and prepare an invasion?
Among the battle-scarred soldiers fighting over the last Galanthi is Zephyr, portrayed by sci-fi veteran Claudia Black. Zephyr is jaded and burned out from a lifetime of war - struggling with PTSD and a morphine addiction. In a key piece of dialogue, Zephyr admits she just doesn’t get the point of fighting any more - ‘victory’ always seem close but never actually arrives. Things always seem to get worse. “This close is always where we end up. It’s where we all fold. This close, change is too scary, even for the people who fight for it”. It’s a very familiar sort of weary resignation I’ve heard from many socialists and others on the left in the aftermath the Bernie and Corbyn moments, the sort of world-weary nihilism that fuels vicious infighting and cynicism. Nevertheless, like a true hero, at the end of the day, Zephyr decides to do the right thing, fight for the Galanthi and help it escape.
And then things get bananas (although, to be fair, there were hints). The portal, as it turns out, traverses time as well as space. And it takes the dying Zephyr’s soul [?] or memories [?] with it. So when the Galanthi distributes its spores over London as we saw it do in the pilot episode, it deposits Zephyr in the body of down-on-her luck slum dweller Amalia ‘Molly’ True, who has chosen just that moment to commit suicide, leaving her body conveniently vacant. It’s inferred, though never stated outright, that the Galanthi have changed their plans - they’re now interfering in human history earlier, and more directly, than they were willing to in the past, having failed to change humanity’s fate in the future. Zephyr - now stuck in True’s body - is shocked to learn that that Galanthi spores give the residents of the nineteenth century superpowers - in her time, those who ingested the spores simply become more intelligent, insightful and/or empathetic.
We can read this development in several ways: literal, allegorical or metaphorical. On the one hand, aliens interfering in human history to change the outcome is a reliable sci-fi premise. And at the metaphorical level, turning women and people of colour into superheroes grants “The Nevers” the superficial wish-fulfilment politics reading already discussed. But the allegorical reading is potentially the most interesting. We shouldn’t interpret the ‘Victorian steampunk X-men’ plot on its own terms, but rather as the creation of 21st-century beings who have political experiences not dissimiar to the audience’s own. Whereas previously, the Galanthi might have hoped that smarter more empathetic people would make for a more cooperative society, now it/they are just arming the oppressed and letting them loose. Are they out for revenge? Have they been driven mad? Have they lost hope? We don’t know. As a post-Bernie millennial socialist, the impulse of just ‘arming the proletariat’ and seeing what happens resonated with me; I wouldn’t necessarily attribute that degree of cynicism to Espenson - given the show’s production schedule, it just as likely reflects the general liberal/progressive disillusionment of the Trump era. But whatever the political message, it serves as a meta-commentary on disillusionment, how progress is made, and the necessity of direct action - political themes rarely encountered in mainstream entertainment.
Socialism and the nature of political existence
The emphasis on the political as a process - and not just as an enactment of the symbolic - is made clear towards the end of the episode in dialogue between True and her 19th-century protege, the scientific genius Penance. True, in this moment, has explained the full nature of her reality and the mission she has inherited from the Galanthi. “It is upsetting; the future being so grim,” Penance admits freely. It won’t be simple to change the human race’s fate, “But it’s a life’s work. Like as not to drive us mad. Or get us killed. And we’ll never know if we’ve done enough, or done it right.” As we all come to realise that the political revolution is not imminent, and may not happen in our lifetimes, those socialists among us sober enough to have a sense of historical perspective have come to see their political life in precisely these terms. We may not see it done, we may lose more often than not. But the nature of the work gives up purpose, and hope. Which is a form of existential gift more deeply satisfying than a simple tale of heroes and villains. I can’t vouch for whether or not ‘The Nevers’ has a future beyond its first season. But it made me think, and feel, and that’s high praise indeed.