The show’s biggest heel gets the win, but Tenax escapes the finale alive, so we won too, right?
It was around the time when Gold faction co-owner and emperor-in-waiting Domitian ordered the cold-blooded execution of an innocent child just to spite a guy who’d pissed him off that I thought, Boy, I sure don’t want this asshole to win. Domitian’s imperial brother Titus isn’t the greatest guy in the world, but at least it’s the Cirque du Soleil portions of opening day at the Flavian Amphitheatre — better known as the Colosseum — that move him. The parts involving friends being forced to kill friends, lest their own family members be slaughtered or their ex-boyfriends get their heads bitten off by crocodiles after their tongues have been torn out, aren’t Titus’s speed.
More’s the pity, then, that Domitian wins in the end. Even as Titus quite accurately sums up all his brother’s faults to the Praetorian guards who are serving as his assassination squad — “Shut up!” Domitian squeals at him, his voice cracking hilariously — Tenax sneaks up from behind and smothers the monarch. Domitian takes the time provided by Titus’s slow death to gloat, wiping his own tears on the dying man’s face. The murder weapon, by the way? A banner bearing the Roman eagle and the motto “The Senate and the Roman People,” two groups that haven’t been in charge of Rome since the rise of the Caesars. Choke on your norms!
But here’s the thing: When Tenax kills Titus, it’s a victory not just for the show’s biggest shitheel and primary antagonist, Domitian, but also for its main character and charismatic anti-hero, Tenax himself. As much as I wanted Domitian to get pinched for screwing with grain shipments, I wanted Tenax to survive and thrive with his Gold faction, his betting tavern, his army of street urchins, his first-among-equals relationship with Cala, the whole nine. I wanted him to cook up more fucked-up shit like serving treasonous senators to crocodiles in front of tens of thousands of screaming yokels (and a few horrified senators, lol).
This, ultimately, is the smartest move made by writer-creator Robert Rodat in the development of this show: Pairing the destinies of the power player we like the best and the one we like the least. Every victory is tainted, every loss contains a glimmer of hope. It leaves you wanting things to both happen and not happen at the same time — like the senators who offer up the weakest “Hail, Caesar” in human history as a response to Domitian’s ascension, we both accept it and don’t. It’s very smart storytelling.
It’s echoed by the ignominious fate of Scorpus, who’s been both a charismatic anti-hero and an unbearable shitheel during his run on the show. But after he gets a taste of his own medicine in the form of young Spanish brother Elia running Scorpus into a wreck the way Scorpus did to his brother Andria, Scorpus’s stint on the show comes to an end. It’s another fascinating and unexpected decision, a bit like benching your star quarterback by running him over with a bus. And it leaves our feelings about Scorpus completely unsettled, as the man had no real reckoning with what he’d done before his death. He’s bid a tearful, jocular farewell by Tenax and has a massive turnout at his funeral; none of these people know the first thing about him, really.
Complicating matters still further is the fact that Scorpus isn’t the only casualty of Elia’s maneuver. His brother, Fonsoa, runs into the wreck as well and dies of his injuries as a result. And Scorpus and Elia are far from alone in the “major characters who bite it” department. Titus, of course, gets assassinated. Consul Marsus and Domitian’s lover Hermes get eaten by crocodiles. Viggo dies in forced battle with Kwame; they fight only because Domitian has the lives of Viggo’s son and Kwame’s sister Jula threatened should they refuse. Judean queen Berenice is assassinated by her own people for her loyalty to Emperor Titus while she’s in the process of delivering slam-dunk evidence of Tenax and Domitian’s treason.
It winds up being a moot point thanks to other developments: A bribed navigator has been brought to the coastal region of Ostia and testifies to Titus in person about Domitian’s betrayal. But it’s impressive how skillful the show’s sleight-of-hand act is here, and throughout these two episodes. Every single missed opportunity to kill someone, every blown chance to save someone, feels like it could make or break the entire story, even though there are like two dozen such moments in total.
I also remain impressed by the show’s ability to wring interesting material out of characters I’d have pegged as stock stuff. Antonia is genuinely devastated by the killing of her husband, Marsus, and actor Gabriella Pession makes you sit with her grief. Similarly, as Hermes, actor Alessandro Bedetti sells the character’s pain, misery, and fear in his final hours to a degree that made me legitimately uncomfortable watching. (If that and the child murder fall on the “too much for me, thanks” side of your ledger, I can’t say I blame you; this is rough, rough stuff for a show that otherwise relies on CGI lions for a sense of danger.)
Elsewhere, the Blue-faction shareholder Caltonia does something rare for a patrician: the right thing. She seeks out her former colleague Salena, apologizes for coming onto her, and offers to pay the legal fees to get Salena’s shares in the Blue faction back from Marsus’s family. Granted, this will improve Caltonia’s standing relative to Antonia’s, but I swear I see honesty in the woman’s face in this offer to help. Maybe I’m just a sucker for cooperation between characters who were previously at odds. (Okay, I definitely am a sucker for that.)
Cala’s family takes center stage for much of the finale, just as Kwame takes center stage for the Amphiteatre’s opening games. Cala is forced by Berenice and Antonia to betray Tenax in order to save Jula. Jula is granted the wooden sword of freedom by Kwame, who transfers this reward for his bravery from Titus on to his sister, with the Emperor’s approval. In what feels like a story line that had a lot left on the cutting room floor, Aura and her girlfriend are suddenly gladiators now, though they don’t fight. Jula reveals to Alia that she’s pregnant, and the two head off to start their life together. Forced to kill both his best friend and the white lion while also bearing witness to the murder of the boy he’d promised to protect, Kwame vows vengeance against the Romans.
The real question once Domitian’s victory over Titus becomes apparent is whether Kwame’s mother, Cala, will survive Tenax’s vengeance. We know by this point that the gangster is a bit of a softie, but having his secret chamber of valuables looted and his life placed in the hands of his enemies by the only person he felt he could trust with any of that information … well, that’s going to rankle if you’re an experienced killer. Indeed, he waits in his palatial new house — previously occupied by Scorpus when, as Tenax points out, he wasn’t sleeping at brothels — to kill her. He’s dispassionate about it, he more or less tries to make her see why it’s the only thing that makes sense, but he’s definitely going to do it.
Cala backs Tenax down in a couple of ways. One, frankly, is by looking like actor Sara Martins; you can see a flicker in Tenax’s eyes every now and then when he talks to Cala, especially up close, that unmistakably reads as “Damn, this woman is hot.” When she puts his hand over his as he chokes her — hoo boy, problematic chills. The echoing sound and chilly moonlight in the room add a certain sensual frisson to the proceedings.
But the other way she talks him out of it is just by being what she’s always been with him: honest. Yes, she betrayed him, and she’d do it again in a heartbeat for her children. But that is the one and only reason she’d ever betray him. Beyond that, Cala’s honesty with Tenax is total … which is why, she explains, she’s the only person he can trust to take over his betting empire and its ancillary extralegal activities now that he’s moved up in the world to become Emperor Domitian’s master of the games. It’s a position no less than Julius Caesar himself once held, as Tenax is quick to note, and he’ll need someone he can trust if he’s going to try to keep his own Caesar in check.
I wound up having a lot more fun with Those About to Die than I thought I would after the first two episodes. Maybe there was a more elegant way around the problem of introducing about four dozen different characters in the space of a couple hours without resorting to cliché; if there was, Rodat, Roland Emmerich, and company didn’t find it. But they got there eventually, thanks not only to strong performances by actors who seem like they’re enjoying themselves across the board, but tricky writing that asked more of the characters than you thought they could support, only to be shown they could take the weight nearly every time. How much can I really complain about a series that ends with growly Iwan Rheon voice-over narration on an image of crazy-eyed Jojo Macari crowning himself emperor of Rome and saying “Let the games begin”? Not much at all, as it turns out. Not much at all.
