My Review of "The Queen's Gambit"

The Queen's Gambit is probably one of the most talked about series on Netflix this holiday season. It just recently came out at the end of 2020 and absolutely everyone has been raving over it so I thought I'd give it a shot. There's a lot of very cool moments and the pacing is great but it all seemed a little familiar. Then I realized it closely resembles the sequences of a lot of my favorite anime's and Manga comics.

The whole series starts off like a movie. The setting is in the 1960s. It seems as though our main protagonist, Beth, is stumbling out of bed trying to find herself. She's awoken by a fancy hotel employee knocking on the door. We soon find out she's late for a really high profile chess competition. Of course she's freaking out not knowing how she got where she is.

That's when the episode brilliantly pulls back to the past. Here we see glimpses of herself when she was a very young child. It looks like her mother had done something horrific to kill herself for little Beth to become an orphan. We're only given small shots of memory of her past with her mother. They will later on become clearer as the first season comes to an end but the way the filmmakers did this kept me intrigued. I was glued to the set wanting to know more about her past.

Instead the first two episodes are based on her time at the all female orphanage. There she meets up with her only friend Jolene. The two of them build a friendship as they are some of the older orphans. She teaches Beth about the drugs that the orphanage provides them. One of the drugs is an intoxicating tranquilizer. Soon afterwards we realize Beth gains a dependency on this tranquilizer drug. It's back in the day so I don't doubt that this stuff actually happened in real life.

Learning more about Beth we soon realize that she's a gifted child. She's so bright that she finishes everything before all the other kids so she's given busy work. That's when she meets the janitor, Mr. Shaibel. He is a loner that has a penchant for chess. After some coaxing, she convinces Mr. Shaibel to teach her the ways of chess. It's not too long that Mr. Shaibel discovers that she's a chess prodigy.

From there on she continues to learn about chess and life. There are a lot of important lessons that she learns along the way and she meets so many interesting people along the way. In turn this show has a ton of messages to us as the viewers as well. They go into all sorts of social issues that include gender equality, race relations, the social class system and a discussion of what it means to be normal.

As a gifted person Beth doesn't know what it means to have a normal life. Even her supposed "normal" life wasn't even normal a she was orphaned at an early age. Still she has the actual ability to be the best at something and the rest of the characters in the movie reminds us that not everyone has this ability. Some of us carry on with our lives having to give up on our dreams. Only the few are able to carry on and those that do are encumbered by the huge pressure of performance.

In a way this reminds me of how sports movies and Japanese anime are set up. We have a prodigy of sorts that has talent and ambition to make it to the top. They run into a ton of obstacles in the way. These hindrances eventually become life lessons and they grow friends through these situations. The friends eventually help them defeat a main top villain that's been nagging at them throughout the series or movie. It then becomes a story about family and what's really important in life.

There's so much to like about this series though. On top of the fact that the flow of the movie was spectacular. I really loved the art direction of the series. It's almost sort of a throwback to the days of Mad Men and we all remember the art direction of that TV series.

More so it also had a lot of call backs closer to the end of the series. It made it feel like not one minute of the series was wasted. It's sort of like how Breaking Bad made all their call backs and made you realize that everything even at the beginning of the series was important to the story. The origins of Beth are so important because they make the closing moments so much more impactful. As a TV series they're able to pull on our heartstrings a little tighter because we've watched through a few hours. We have those memories locked in our heads and truly feel like we understand what Beth and the other characters are going through.

Overall, I couldn't believe how entertained I was with this series. I don't remember the last time I watched a series that made me want to binge watch. This was absolutely amazing and I really have to tip my hat to the writers because none of it seemed cheesy at all. I have to give this series a 9 out of 10. I highly recommend this series and I will be going out to all of my friends to tell them to watch it!