![]() We also know more about Janus than before (namely that it stops the flu vaccine working, and will leave only the Roma people fertile). And, to enter the grounds of pure speculation, Jessica might well be carrying his child. Ian – like Grant and Wilson – is now a murderer. Milner, Lee, Donaldson and Geoff are now dead. With the Network still planning to push ahead with V-Day (albeit following a smaller, more controlled flu epidemic), Wilson still on their side, Jessica back in custody and Dugdale’s family being newly watched and threatened, not a great deal seems to have changed since the beginning of series two. That eye-patch should have tipped us off that he was destined for comic book super-villainy from the get go.Įpisode six was less an ending than a eventful pause in Utopia’s story. In Utopia’s soundest proof of its central idea that people are capable of anything given the right – or wrong – circumstances, conspiracy theorist Wilson eventually became the thing he’d started off fighting against. ![]() That honour goes to the self-mutilation of Wilson Wilson, who responded to being repeatedly told this week what was and wasn’t ‘him’ by becoming someone else – specifically, Mr Rabbit. ![]() Where else on television would a character be chatted up by her own bloody chip-wielding hallucination and that not even be the episode’s most memorable, disturbing scene? There’s violence and comedy and weirdness and philosophical dilemma elsewhere, but not in this combination and certainly not gift-wrapped in such a stylish package. That’s the boiled-down explanation of Utopia’s attraction: it’s simply unlike anything else. We may never get viewing metrics from Amazon or any of the streamers, who are under no obligation to provide them, but it sure would be helpful in understanding some of their decisions, both as a critic and a consumer who pays multiple streaming bills each month.Even as an exercise in reductio ad absurdum, Terrence’s opening monologue on the selfishness of creating first world humans was a thrill simply because no-one else on TV is saying it. I have no explanation, but obviously it comes down to Amazon's formula regarding cost versus eyeballs. Why was Hunters renewed and not Utopia? Well, its reviews were a bit better, and it had more of a 'fun' hook. Why did The Expanse get a sixth season? That I can't tell you. I'll miss this cast, which included John Cusack, Rainn Wilson, Sasha Lane, Desmin Borges, Dan Byrd, Ashleigh LaThrop, Farrah Mackenzie, Christopher Denham and Euphoria's Javon Walton, but at the same time, I'm glad they're now free to do other things, because I don't think a second season would have necessarily improved upon the first without jumping the shark a la Lost.Īs for Amazon, I wish it hadn't allowed the potential audience for Utopia to busy itself watching The Boys, which also held the focus and attention of the streamer's marketing department, making the Utopia launch something of an afterthought. Better to invest that money in either a fresh idea or another IP that could catch on with the culture rather than serve up seconds of a meal that no one was all that interested in the first time around. It just never had the breakout success envisioned by the streamer, and at that point, given the themes of the material and the current state of the world, the cost just isn't worth it. So while I was personally looking forward to a second season of Utopia and delving deeper into the mystery behind its titular comic book, I completely understand why the show just wasn't worth the potential headache for Amazon. The streamer obviously has no problem with violent shows, since it released Season 2 of The Boysjust three weeks before Utopia.īut this was a show in which children were routinely killed and the characters (rightly) questioned a vaccine, which is not something America or the rest of the world really needs right now. Now, if Utopia had scored with critics or subscribers, I think Amazon would've ordered a second season without blinking. Yes, it was an eerily timely series about a pandemic, but television is supposed to be a distraction from the real world more than a reflection, and people could basically look out their window and get the paranoid gist of Utopia, which upped the ante, naturally, in terms of violence.Ĭoming from the writer of Gone Girl, this shouldn't have been a major surprise, especially since I was familiar with the original UK series, but Flynn's Utopia was an incredibly violent show, particularly for one with such a young cast. For starters, timing is everything in Hollywood, and Utopia could not have come at a worse time.
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