HBO’s historical fantasy reveals its fascinating true mission in the midseason finale.
Warning: This review contains spoilers forThe Neversepisode 6, “True.”
There is no better feeling in television than watching a bad show turn into a good show.
Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly on ‘The Nevers’.Keith Bernstein/HBO
The sixth episode ofThe Neversis the troubledHBOdrama’s best hour yet, and the last before a midseason hiatus.
The focal-flashback structure ignores various speechy baddies and boring aristocrats and nobody mentions that terrible brothel.
But the episode also expands the series' scope in every direction.
A bold time leap edges the superheroes-of-steampunk setting into a head-spinning new science-fiction landscape.
The episode reveals just what an elaborate sandbox creatorJoss Whedonwas building for himself here, before hiscontroversy-swamped departure.
And I’ll admit, I didn’t think much ofThe Neverswhen it debuted.
“True” doesn’t fix every problem, but it adds crucial context.
Did those revelations need to take so long?
The episode ends with Amalia deciding to fill her compatriots in.
“It’s time to tell them everything,” she tells trusted partner Penance (Ann Skelly).
“The future, the Galanthi, the fight that’s coming.”
“The future of the world depends on the present,” Penance told Amalia last week.
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
The squad is investigating a spatial anomaly in some kind of secret laboratory.
A gunfight brings them into contact with a battle-scarred ally, who’s called Stripe (Claudia Black).
The episode splits into four chapters.
The first, “Stripe,” crafts a mini-Aliensslasher mystery.
People start dying, gradually and then suddenly.
The crucial tone to catch is utter nihilism.
Stripe has lost everyone and everything.
She had a couple spouses, and they never knew her true name.
(Personal information is sacred in this sad world.)
Knitter tries to talk the elder soldier toward a bit of hope and then winds up dead.
After betrayal and murder leave the squad wrecked, the Galanthi seems to be retreating to its home world.
Stripe retreats into morphine overdose.
Somehow, on the cusp of death, the soldier’s soul/brain/life-energy gets pulled through the creature’s wormhole.
She wakes up long ago, in another woman’s body.
But first: Chapter 2 is another flashback, moving in a separate but parallel timeline.
(Oh boy, atemporal pincer movement!)
A loveless marriage produces two miscarriages.
Her husband dies in debt.
Her sick mother-in-law is a near-corpse maintained at great expense.
Donnelly was always having fun onThe Nevers, playing True as a no-nonsense person in an all-nonsense world.
“True” lets her demonstrate her skills as an accent ninja.
They become lovers, while fellow inmate Sarah (Amy Manson) turns into Amalia’s closest friend.
Dr. Hague (Denis O’Hare) swings by, sniffing out rumors of cosmic visions.
As an act of self-preservation, Amalia throws Sarah to that wolf.
That’s how we got here.
“So, now what?”
Amalia says in Chapter 4, titled “True.”
Amalia has been promising her friends the Galanthi will save the world.
But the body count keeps rising, and now the city is on fire.
“Why did it go so wrong?”
Amalia asks the giant glowing orb with the miracle alien inside.
“Who is this?
Who the f— am I?”
A shadowy voice asks, “Did you think you were theonlyone who hitched a ride?”
Is that why Myrtle (Viola Prettyjohn) appears, looking ethereal in a purple-cosmos landscape?
This I will need you to forget."
And it’s not like her chat with the Galanthi offers any clear answers.
“I didn’t find out who our enemy is,” she tells Penance.
“True” ends almost precisely where last week’s episode wrapped up.
Presumably, season 1 will return with London in the grips of mob violence.
But this episode closes on a note of affirmation: Finally, we’re all on the same page.
And the sudden expansion ofThe Neversmythology offers amazing possibilities in the road ahead.
Amalia isn’t just any time traveler.
Will her knowledge of future historical events guide her actions?
orDickinson(what if Emily Dickinson got to justtellpeople “This is such bulls—!")
“True” literalizes this artistic mission into an act of world-saving heroism.
The oncoming 20th century is her ticking clock.
Can she save the future?
Whedon’s earlier TV shows had some wild twists.
ButThe Nevers' massive time jump most vividly callfs to mind the “Epitaph” episodes ofDollhouse.
I love the show’s mess, though I respect why some viewers despise it.
Its abbreviated two-season run pushes in all kinds of crazy directions, constantly flipping the narrative chessboard.
Where will the show go from here?
New showrunnerPhilippa Goslettwill steer the series through season 1’s second half, which seems rather far away.
(Maybe it will be like the “No Man’s Land” arc fromGotham?Gothamruled!)
It seems clear thatThe Neverswill return with the city in chaos.
Ironically, this final episode was the high point for the series as a non-chaotic piece of coherent drama.
The exciting revelations about Amalia’s past promise to redefine the show’s future.
If it has one.
Midseason finale grade: A-Season grade: B-
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