The Wheel of Fortune — “O Fortuna,” if you prefer — turns and turns, but sometimes it needs a shove in the right direction. Take Scorpus, Rome’s greatest charioteer and biggest fan of referring to oneself in the third person. When his partner-boss Tenax, recovering from ghastly injuries and even ghastlier surgery incurred at the hands of his childhood acquaintance Ursus, tells Scorpus he seems too busy drinking and whoring to race anymore, Scorpus insists that drinking, whoring, and racing go hand in hand in hand.
Racing, Scorpus explains, made him rich and famous. Being rich enables him to drink good wine at will. Drinking good wine makes him happy. Happiness makes him horny. And being famous enables him, when horny, to fuck basically any woman in Rome. What would you do? To spurn the drinking and the fucking in favor of the chariot-driving would be to spit in the face of Fortuna herself, he insists.
Ah, but here’s where the wheel-spinning gets interesting. Scorpus’s stock has dipped a bit somewhat in recent weeks, thanks to the constant hiccups with the Gold faction and the constant assassination attempts, sprinkled liberally with sex, by his former patron Antonia. (Trying to kill Scorpus by shoving a scorpion up his thigh is a nice unsubtle touch I’m glad this show is not above.) New darlings are beginning to win over the mob, from up-and-comer Xenon (Emilio Sakraya) — who has romantic feelings for Scorus despite their rivalry — to Scorpus’s own Gold faction teammate Andria, who wins a race while Scorpus is dealing with the aforementioned drinking, fucking, and scorpions with Antonia.
This is when you can feel the show’s creative team, led here by episode eight’s writer Marissa Lestrade, take the wheel by the hands and give it a hard turn to the left. Scorpus — handsome Scorpus, gifted Scorpus, funny Scorpus, drunken Scorpus, routine onscreen sex-having Scorpus, Scorpus of one of the show’s umpteen funny foreign-ish accents, that Scorpus — straight-up murders two innocent people! He deliberately drives Andria into a wrecked chariot, killing him. Okay, fine, he was being reckless but at least he could say he didn’t know for sure the guy would die. That’s a lot less true of Xenon, though: When the younger rider and eyewitness to the sabotage rejects both Scorpus’s bribes and his “I thought we had an understanding after the other night”s and vows to tell the faction leaders what really happened, Scorpus strangles him in his sickbed.
This guy is a huge piece of shit! And here I thought he was going to be our lovable scoundrel till the end! How wrong I was!
And so I couldn’t help but wonder: Have I been wrong about Those About to Die overall? Especially after those first few comparatively corny episodes I was content to write this thing off as enjoyable trash — hardly an ignoble thing to be, I might add. But I’m starting to notice surprising shades to some of these characters, who I thought I’d gotten a handle on right from the start.
Take someone like Consul Marsus, the Blue faction leader deposed by Titus and Domitian for conspiring to claim the title of Emperor himself. Rather than continue to weasel and wriggle and prevaricate, he not only accepts his fate but encourages his surprisingly genuinely saddened wife, Antonia, to denounce him publicly in order to save the reputation and fortune of their family. The guy seemed almost like a parody of an evil Roman patrician; this was a new side to him, and you can see actors Rupert Penry-Jones and Gabriella Pession sink their teeth into this comparatively rich material. (To her credit, though, Pession seems equally at home dropping trou and murdering people. If it worked for half the cast of I, Claudius I don’t see why it can’t work for her.)
Or what about the noble struggle of Cala to free all her children from captivity? How’s that going for her? Well, in order to successfully save her son Kwame from the far superior fighter Flamma in the arena, she sneaks into his room while he’s with a woman — grunting into her like a rutting bull, amusingly — and poisons both their glasses. This stranger’s life is a small price to pay for her son’s, I guess, just like Kwame himself felt about the guy whose leg he hacked off to dodge Flamma during their first fight. I’m not saying I necessarily blame either of them, I’m just saying a show only interested in the most bare-bones Roman storytelling wouldn’t complicate surface-level noble characters like these two the way Those About to Die is doing. (And that’s even before we get into the way Cala unintentionally keeps her daughter Aura in the closet by insisting she return to Numidia as soon as possible instead of staying in the steamy streets of Rome.)
Or we could consider Domitian. Joffrey in a toga (I know, I know, it’s serious), he’s a nasty little shit who probes at Tenax’s gnarly leg wound to threaten him and has his boyfriend, Hermes, hauled away because he’s in a bad mood about something else entirely. And he is unequivocally behind the grain shipment delays that caused his father and brother so much trouble.
At the same time, he’s a gifted politician whose ability to identify the desires of the masses and write well about them transports his imperial father, Vespasian, into gales of impressed laughter in a very effective flashback. (This kind of scene is why you keep Anthony Hopkins on the payroll as long as you can afford to; if that guy’s impressed with your character’s rhetorical skill, who are we in the audience to disagree?) When he at last makes his play against Titus, asking Tenax to have the Emperor killed before the Emperor can kill him, it’s a bit tough to know whose side we should be on.
That’s because Titus, too, isn’t an easy guy to get a handle on. He loves his Judean queen, Berenice, but keeps her in the shadows out of expediency (though she has urged this herself) and, more importantly, keeps her people enslaved, even if it’s for the relatively well-intentioned cause of restoring running water to Rome. Titus also has sex with his Roman wife and produces an heir, lovelessly but on schedule, ensuring dynastic continuity in a way even Domitian openly admires.
More interestingly, he’s admittedly learning political maneuvering from his brother. Rather than spring the accusation that Domitian is behind the grain shortages on his brother — an accusation leveled by White leader Senator Leto, one of the few faction owners left standing after Marsus’s attempted treason — he confronts him with it directly.
“I’m learning how to play this game from you,” he tells his kid brother. “I’m telling you an accusation and I’m watching how you respond.”
“What do you see?” asks Domitian, affecting irritation.
“That’s the part I’m still learning,” Titus admits, calling him “either a somewhat strange but loyal brother or the best liar I have ever seen.” Well, we know which one is right by now: After this conversation, Domitian tasks Tenax with having Titus killed, which will cost the gangster a princely sum and the dubious loyalty of the elite Praetorian Guards.
As if toppling the Roman Emperor weren’t enough, Tenax is also making a play to get in Cala’s pants. Well, sort of: He’s surprisingly respectful of her wishes to take things slow, to wait and see, once they finally take their flirtation into the ever-so-slightly physical realm. Personally, I’m going to need to see more evidence that Tenax and Cala would make a good couple — alright, to hell with good, a hot couple — than him saving her life from Ursus, as he does at the end of episode seven. They just seem like such natural platonic work spouses to me that they’ll need to do more to prove otherwise beyond showing me Iwan Rheon and Sara Martins’s good-looking faces.
I’m growing increasingly fond of Those About to Die as it goes. I enjoy unexpected filigrees and flourishes like Xenon coming on to Scorpus, like the playful “tchk tchk” sound Antonia makes when she tells her prospective new driver, Elia, that he’ll need to prove himself (if that wasn’t an invention of actor Gabriella Pession, I’ll eat an Andalusian), or like Tenax proclaiming what might as well be this show’s house words as he maps out his plan for the soon-to-open Flavian Amphitheatre, a.k.a. the Roman Colosseum: “Enough is good, more is better, too much is perfect.”
