'Bastard Executioner': Starts slow, arrives at a dark, compelling place
Kurt Sutter has gone mad. That seems the only appropriate explanation for the TV auteur's new creation, The Bastard Executioner, an ambitious if puzzling, paradoxical, and contradictory medieval yarn that premieres with a double episode at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX.
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Kurt Sutter has gone mad.
That seems the only appropriate explanation for the TV auteur's new creation, The Bastard Executioner, an ambitious if puzzling, paradoxical, and contradictory medieval yarn that premieres with a double episode at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX.
A twisted, meandering tale about brotherly love, loyalty, nationalism, and vengeance set in 14th-century Wales, Executioner is as atrociously violent and bloody as Sutter's inspired outlaw-biker epic Sons of Anarchy, which earned good reviews and solid ratings for FX.
Sutter here trades the Harleys for horses and the semiautomatic pistols and shotguns for broadswords, axes, daggers, and pikes, then slathers the proceedings with a thick helping of Christian theology, witchcraft, and pagan mysticism.
It's a deeply bewildering, intoxicating brew. So much so that one is never sure if the resulting madness - Sutter's lunacy - is a divine gift from the muses or just plain nuttiness.
An overlong, Star Wars-size written prologue sets the stage: Wales is a vassal state, controlled with an iron fist by a coterie of English barons who bleed her people dry with high taxes. Repression breeds resentment among the Welsh populace, who rise up periodically in doomed, bloody rebellions.
But there comes one such revolutionary, the noble, mild-mannered Wilkin Brattle (newcomer Lee Jones), who is somehow destined to make a difference.
We know this from a dream sequence in which a totally hot, nubile angel tells Wilkin he has a destiny to fulfill.
He's later reminded of this by the village healer/witch, Annora. Played by Sutter's wife, Katey Sagal, who rocked it as amoral biker matriarch Gemma on Sons of Anarchy, Annora is a cross between the Wicked Witch of the West and Stevie Nicks, all wafty and waiflike as she winds her way around the village.
Executioner opens with an excruciatingly slow introductory section set in Wilkin's village, an idyllic green paradise straight out of Disney that's so fake, so saccharine, so utterly ironic that it reads like a Monty Python skit.
Even the villains seem like cartoon characters, including the vicious Baron Ventris (Brían F. O'Byrne), who seems to speak like a Shakespearean king, and his bloodthirsty consigliere, Milus Corbett (Stephen Moyer), who takes advantage of attractive young houseboys when he's not busy killing innocent folk.
About halfway in, the pilot suddenly shifts gears, and we find ourselves in a hard-nosed historical thriller straight out of Game of Thrones and Vikings.
The Bastard Executioner is hardly as accomplished as either show. It doesn't have the ruthless narrative precision of the HBO show or the breathtaking beauty of History's thriller.
Yet, even though the first two installments seem like the unfocused, muddled ramblings of a drunken storyteller, The Bastard Executioner eventually takes us to a place so dark, shocking, and surprising that one feels compelled to keep watching.
TELEVISION
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The Bastard Executioner
Premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday on FX.
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