1899

Ersatz
Entertainment

1899
Germany/USA 2022
Eight episodes

Warning: All the spoilers right from the outset. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I primarily started watching 1899, not because I’d heard of the co-creator’s former series Dark (don’t worry, it’s now on the list) but because the show stars a British actress I quite like, Emily Beecham, as lead protagonist Maura. I loved her in Daphne (reviewed here) and Little Joe (reviewed here) and I was interested in seeing her in other things.

This one has an interesting central idea for a TV show but there were some problems putting me off binge watching it too. Number one being that, from a few minutes into the show it pretty much telegraphs itself that what you are watching doesn’t take place on a steamer ship, with a diverse range of multinational protagonists all trying to escape their past... and probably isn't really set in the year 1899. I was pretty sure from very early on that what I was looking at was not represented at face value and this was especially highlighted in a really nice little moment where Maura is sitting in the huge dining hall of the ship and... there’s a glitch where she notices everyone in the hall suddenly drinks from their tea cups in synch. Like I said, it’s a nice moment and it’s subtly timed but, yeah, it certainly confirms the unreality of the setting, for those who already suspect.

Now normally I would have said that this was telegraphed way too early but, by the end of episode two, the final reveal is a bank of TV screens monitoring just what’s going on in the ship (which has stumbled across a lost ship, Prometheus, where there is no crew left except for a young boy who Maura takes into her care). So it’s not like they were saving the big twists as an end game. And then the Christmas holidays came around and, because I felt disappointed by already guessing that much from very early in on the first episode... I kinda gave up on it for a while.

Big mistake because, the other thing which then put me off watching it a little more at first, was the fact that the greedy corporate studio who are the sole(ish) venue of where this thing can be watched, cancelled the show in January 2023... so a second season is not expected to surface now, to carry on with whatever the big reveals and accumulated world building would have amounted to in the final episode of the first season. Now, I gave my view of the sad state of TV subscription chanels in my 13th anniversary blog (right here) but, suffice it to say, this didn’t encourage me to bother pursuing the show to its conclusion.

But, of course, I also felt like I didn’t want to start another TV show and have this one hanging over me as unfinished business so, yeah, I eventually finished it and was pleasantly surprised to find that the various layers of the reality as presented to the main characters in the show, start peeling back to reveal a much bigger picture of things each week, like a series of Matryoshka nesting dolls that keep leading onto something else each time you open it up.

Beecham is absolutely brilliant in the lead role and, I’ve noticed this about her before but she’s one of those actresses who can do ‘silent acting’... or perhaps I should call it the ‘acting of the inner, mental landscape’, really well. Vast periods of the episodes have her going without much dialogue but, as I’d seen from the films mentioned above, she’s one of those performers you can trust to carry those kinds of moments and, yeah, 1899 sure is full of them. She’s ably supported by a great ensemble cast too, including the likes of Andreas Pietschmann, Isabella Wei, Yann Gael and Aneurin Barnard.

And, yeah, I was a little disappointed at the ‘that old Chestnut’ nature of the plot, which is pretty much a 1950s or 1960s Philip K. Dick story come to life. As in, people trapped in an ersatz world not of their own making and not even knowing they are trapped. It’s an old plot but the actors pull it off and the whole look of the thing is pretty good. And it’s pretty dour too, it has to be said, in terms of lightning and set design but it’s ‘designer dour’, so to speak... so it looks pretty fantastic, it has to be said.

Now, 1899 has been cancelled but, do we need another series or is it self contained? Well... a bit of both. It seems to be pretty much self contained in that the reality and original period setting of the show seems to be somewhere Maura doesn’t need to go back to, as she wakes Matrix-like from a simulation with the other characters sleeping away in a virally corrupted computer programme... and she finds she’s adrift with them in a starship in the year 2099. But, the answers aren’t all there yet since we don’t know anything about the bigger picture and what role her brother, who seems to be a character of some evil intent, is up to in this newly discovered reality (which might well be a backup ersatz version again, for all I know).

So yes, it does kind of need another season (or at least a one off special to tie things up) and it does mean that, although I found myself really entertained by the various twists and turns of the surreal imagery of the show, I can’t really recommend 1899 to anyone else because... well... it won’t ever have an ending from what I can make out. Which is a real shame. I’m hoping this show doesn’t just disappear quickly into the ether to join many other shows by this particular company that have shared the same fate but... yeah, it probably will, I think. Oh, well... just another argument that the current model of TV development is broken and, actually, is destroying the potential audience for any new series that may be starting. Because trust from the audience that the show they are watching has an ending is being quite undermined by this kind of behaviour from several companies... and there’s no real excuse for it either.