Britannia

Looking for things to binge on while cooped up in quarantine, you could do far worse than this strange, involving, and sometimes brilliant show. Produced as a joint venture between Sky and Amazon Prime, the first season is up for streaming on Prime, and the second season will hopefully be available soon. They obviously spent a lot of money on the production, and it stars a lot of faces that will be highly familiar to those accustomed to British film and TV.

Set in 43 AD, the show depicts the invasion of Britain by the Roman Empire. This is a highly mythologized version of events, because the show portrays the Britons and Romans as almost completely ignorant of each other, when they had been well-known to one another for almost a century by this point, and in fact several kingdoms in southern Britain were more or less Roman client states. But a whole new world is more dramatic and exciting, and so there is a reference to Caesar’s invasions in 55-54 BCE and that’s it.

In firm keeping with the tradition of writers like Howard and Talbot Mundy, the Romans are entirely the villains here, with David Morrissey giving a wonderfully smirking, arrogant performance as General Aulus Plautius. The Romans invade in the night, burn down villages and kill anyone who resists, taking everyone else as prisoners and slaves. They come in as motiveless conquerors and killers, and really, to the people they invaded, they would not look like anything else.

The invasion immediately sends the already fractious Briton politics into a frenzy. The land is chiefly divided between the Cantii and the Regni, with Ian McDiarmid as King Pellinore of the Cantii and the fabulous Zoe Wanamaker as Queen Antedia of the Regni. They are already at each others’ throats because years previously Pellinore’s daughter was married to Antedia’s son, and she castrated him on their wedding night. Ouch.

So everybody hates everybody else, and then the Roman invasion throws gas on the fire. Kelly Reilly is fantastic as the pale-eyed rogue princess Kerra, with her thick mane of red and her predatory stare. McDiarmid plays her father Pellinore as a pious man who earnestly wants peace in the face of intransigent enemies, and the events that follow are thick with betrayal, murder, battle, and backstabbing of a dozen kinds.

An interesting element here is the depiction of the druids. We know very little of the druidic order now, and the show takes advantage of this by inventing freely. Mackenzie Crook – best known as the goofy, wooden-eyed pirate Ragetti in Pirates of the Caribbean – is chilling and unnerving as the Archdruid Veran, a man said to be hundreds of years old, and who wields unseen and frightening powers. The show actually shows the druids as a religious power who control people through their faith, rather than simply some kind of weird cult. Even though magic in the show is often paired with drugs and altered states of mind, there is definitely more going on than that.

But the show goes out of its way to keep there from being clear-cut heroes and villains. Most of the bad guys have reasons to be the way they are, and more layers than simple cutouts. The druids seem malevolent, but then Veran seems to have reasons for what he does, and a lot of times, he seems to be right. It convincingly gives the impression that he is involved in some long game he won’t explain. A lot of the characters, even ones you sympathize with, are at cross-purposes, and when they come face to face you are not sure who you want to prevail.

The fight choreography could be better here, and there could be more of it. Overall the show is well-directed and well-acted. It looks great and the costuming is especially beautiful. There’s just nine episodes in the first season, but that was enough to have me looking forward to the second. If you are trapped, sheltering-in-place like I am, and you have access to Prime, then this is certainly a show to check out.