It’s hard to care when he dies (though the show clearly wants us to care) except to be kind of grossed out by the focus on his gaping neck wound.Ī lot of this comes down to table setting-the characters we know and love and love to hate either don’t appear or show up too late to redeem the episode. The nameless man getting killed in Capua is actually a nameless Thracian who is first introduced as an aspiring rapist, then shown to be a violent jerk, and finally a reckless drunk. Spartacus joins the Romans, then fights the Romans, then he and Sura are captured and taken to Italy. The story and characters in this episode are displayed and dispensed with as fast as they possibly can, because we’ll never go to Thrace again during the entire show’s run. The show, as it continues, will tell a lot of very poignant stories about love, but Spartacus and Sura have a number of intimate moments together (mostly for the dramatic irony of Spartacus planning to give up fighting) that, if they’d made up the majority of the show, would have dragged the rest of the season down. If you turned it off and didn’t bother after the first ten minutes, I couldn’t blame you.īut most of what’s striking about the pilot is just how boring it is. The show seemed to take its cues from Zack Snyder’s 300: the men are sweaty, dirty, and shirtless constantly, slow-mo is used in excessive and distracting effect, and great spurts of CGI blood fly whenever someone gets so much as a paper cut. The show wastes no time in establishing what it’s there for: a CGI crowd that never looked good but looks worse with age. The episode opens in media res, our hero is hunkered down under the Capua arena sands as some nameless nearly naked ne’er-do-well is being cut up by a clearly better, faceless opponent, before jumping to Greece to show how he got there.
#Spartacus season 1 episode 1 plus
It’s a little hard to remember the first three to four episodes after four seasons, two Spartacuses, plus a decade on since it first aired, but Spartacus-especially its pilot-seemed like it was everything you thought it was going to be and more.