Editor’s note: This is our second article this weekend on the hit Netflix series Kaos. Check out Storm Faerywolf’s review of the show from this past Friday here.
When I was a teenage zealot, I used to imagine what television might be like in a world that was primarily Pagan.
I would rewrite episodes and remake the settings. I dreamed out Rudy Huxtable’s first blood ritual with her mother and grandmother and sisters in attendance, or Ross and Rachel’s handfasting in Central Park. (Luckily Central Park is full of Pagan statuary, even in this timeline.) It was a monumental undertaking to imagine the world as it might have been without the craze of monotheism, but an enjoyable one, as well. And while I’ll never see that world I dreamed, this year a small window has opened on it. Over the last week, I got acquainted with two recent Netflix shows about the Pagan world as it might have been: KAOS and Twilight of the Gods.
The Seid-Kona from Twilight of the Gods [Netflix]
KAOS comes to us from creator Charlie Covell (The End of the Fucking World) and is billed as a drama, but is better described as a black comedy. In it, the Greek gods are immanent, with Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) throwing bolts of lightning and Hera (Janet McTeer) listening to the wagging tongues of confession from her people below in Krete.
The story follows Eurydice (Riddy) and Orpheus (Aurora Perrineau and Killian Scott, respectively) along with a huge cast of gods, demigods, prophets and priests. It’s a dizzyingly broad narrative, bringing in elements of Homer’s Odyssey and the myths you know best and laying them like rushes under an original story. The visuals are a feast: a saturated and opulent Olympus above a well-lit and lush city. The desaturated underworld drags on in soft greys, with Hades (David Thewlis) as a nasty, officious bureaucrat and Persephone (Rakie Ayola) as a frustrated harridan.
By contrast, Zack Snyder’s Twilight of the Gods looks lackluster. A 2D animated series, it gives minimal expression and zero luster to its excellent voice actors, leaving one with the impression of a storybook brought to “life” by a cheap animation software, rather than real people. A Hans Zimmer score sweetens the whole thing, but the production is utterly hamstrung by a humorless script and a charmless visual spread.
The story of Twilight of the Gods is also one of immanence, also the product of myth laid beneath a new narrative. Thor (Pilou Asbæk) attacks a wedding feast between a typical Viking and a woman from a giant-blooded tribe, killing all but the bride. She is Sigrid (Sylvia Hoeks). Redoubtable and brave, she swears revenge.
The dialogue of KAOS ranges from hilarious (“Mortals! I made you, and this is how you repay me?”) to truly moving (“All the best things are human.”) The black comedy, as a genre, has long served as a vehicle for emotional revelation like a blade surrounded on all sides by a bouquet of laughs, so that the viewer receives it all with open arms, unguarded when the truth slides in.
Nabhaan Rizwan as Dionysus in KAOS [Netflix]
Many of the show’s best lines are given to the young and striving Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), who wants his father’s love almost as badly as he wants to party. The Kretan societal gesture of faith is a hand to the forehead, as if in face-palm realization or regret, accompanied by “Vero,” spoken aloud, alone or in group. (Why the show didn’t go with “alethia” or some other Greek word instead of the Latin is a mystery; take your linguistic beefs to the writers’ room.) The way that people speak (“I defy the gods! Fuck the gods!”) works to create a setting and society based in our fictions and guesses about the ancient world, but reflecting our own.
Meanwhile: “My king is hung like a horse, and I rode him as such.” Thus speaks Sigrid, the girl with giant blood, despite the fact that she looks to be less than five feet tall and an absolute waif-warrior. Twilight of the Gods gives her a lot of opportunities to describe her husband’s “beautiful lust-limb” before succumbing to one blood-lust or another. The gestures and language of faith do not enter here, primarily because to the Jotun-girl, the gods are only enemies. “We fear no Gods!” is again and again her battle-cry, though these gods are dastardly, one-dimensional villains. We are dragged toward Ragnarok with nothing but lust and rage to power the journey, without patience to get to know even Sigrid well enough to care what becomes of any of them. Over the course of the first three episodes, the writing becomes as flat as the animation, and no heart can beat without at least a narrow third dimension.
KAOS is entrancing, stylistic and expansive, presenting a world brutal and beautiful enough to contain a mythology that’s got jokes and sex and mystery. Twilight of the Gods is nasty, brutish, and dull; it belies a mythology that could have jokes, and could be a lot more fun about sex, and could offer some mystery, if the show could only stop running its anime storyboard schedule for five minutes. There’s no question of which series’ pantheon is winning this war.
KAOS [Netflix]
That said, KAOS, despite being about Greek gods in Greece, seems to have zero Greek actors in any of the roles. I researched deeply, poring over the profiles of the huge cast, which is largely British and Irish, for a hint of Hellenic inheritance. One possibility remains: an insightful falafel vendor who is uncredited and speaks with what might be a Greek accent, who might be played by a Greek actor. (I suspect this is Kronos in disguise, but that is strictly headcanon.) An updated cast list, perhaps after a story reveal, could allow a lone Greek coming through the narrow casting gates at Thermopylae.
Twilight of the Gods, on the other hand, boasts a cast packed with Danes, Icelanders, Finns, Swedes, and Norwegians, along with the typical compliment of Anglophone-world actors and even a few from the African diaspora. While KAOS also boasts a wonderfully diverse cast, I couldn’t help but note that while many of the actors on Gods come from places where the Norse gods would have been part of their culture, nearly everyone on KAOS comes from one of the many countries where Greek mythology was whitewashed, Anglicized, and massively appropriated for centuries.
Twilight of the Gods [Netflix]
Despite this advantage, Twilight of the Gods sparks no joy. It’s a doomscroller’s own gaol, Norse-flavored and dispiriting. Imagine an animated Northman without the entheogenic trippy parts. KAOS scratches that Bullfinch’s Mythology itch while also making a Pagan laugh in a world they might have imagined when they wished that things were different. Maybe even better. Who knows?
Of course, if all a Witch wants is a Halloweenish good time, Agatha All Along just started streaming on Disney+, and it already slaps the candy corn out of your mouth.
Twilight of the Gods and KAOS are both available on Netflix.
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