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The Last Czars
Jul. 20th, 2019 09:03 amI started watching Netflix’s The Last Czars because I’m a sucker for royalty and Russia, and the first episode was going fairly well in a cut-rate episode of the The Crown kind of way -
When all of a sudden the show stops dead and there’s a talking head academic type explaining something or other about the Romanovs, as if this were a documentary and not a drama at all.
In fact, the show is some unholy hybrid of the two. The dramatized scenes are much longer than you’d normally get in a documentary (and include Nicky and Alix fucking on a bearskin rug in Nicky’s opulent office while praising God in the hopes that this will help them conceive a son, I’ll take “things I never wanted to see” for ten thousand, Alex), but juuuuust when you’re relaxing into the show and getting into the story, all of a sudden Simon Sebag Montefiore is on screen explaining to you about Khlysti, an orgiastic Russian Orthodox sect with whom Rasputin had ties.
This is particularly maddening because it seems so unnecessary. They don’t need talking heads, and a voiceover, and other characters within the storyline (usually Nicky’s brother, who seems to be the only sensible Romanov) explaining “This latest mistake will haunt your reign, Nicky!” to handhold viewers in what is ultimately a quite simple storyline: “Tsar Nicholas II makes a series of mistakes that lead to his downfall.”
...However, it’s been so long since there’s been a new season of The Crown that I’ve gone into royalty-withdrawal, so I’m still watching. (Maybe I should try to forestall this in the future by watching one of the many - many! - productions about Victoria.) It’s only six episodes long, and I’m already halfway through, and I want to know if they are in fact going to have M. Gilliard decide that this poor girl in a madhouse in Berlin is Anastasia after all.
When all of a sudden the show stops dead and there’s a talking head academic type explaining something or other about the Romanovs, as if this were a documentary and not a drama at all.
In fact, the show is some unholy hybrid of the two. The dramatized scenes are much longer than you’d normally get in a documentary (and include Nicky and Alix fucking on a bearskin rug in Nicky’s opulent office while praising God in the hopes that this will help them conceive a son, I’ll take “things I never wanted to see” for ten thousand, Alex), but juuuuust when you’re relaxing into the show and getting into the story, all of a sudden Simon Sebag Montefiore is on screen explaining to you about Khlysti, an orgiastic Russian Orthodox sect with whom Rasputin had ties.
This is particularly maddening because it seems so unnecessary. They don’t need talking heads, and a voiceover, and other characters within the storyline (usually Nicky’s brother, who seems to be the only sensible Romanov) explaining “This latest mistake will haunt your reign, Nicky!” to handhold viewers in what is ultimately a quite simple storyline: “Tsar Nicholas II makes a series of mistakes that lead to his downfall.”
...However, it’s been so long since there’s been a new season of The Crown that I’ve gone into royalty-withdrawal, so I’m still watching. (Maybe I should try to forestall this in the future by watching one of the many - many! - productions about Victoria.) It’s only six episodes long, and I’m already halfway through, and I want to know if they are in fact going to have M. Gilliard decide that this poor girl in a madhouse in Berlin is Anastasia after all.
