Queen's Gambit Hot Take

Here is my Hot take on the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit: You can skip the first episode and a half and you don’t miss anything.

An english teacher of mine once said that you should start your story as close to the end as possible. I think there is a lot of truth to that statement.

So I turn on Netflix one day and it gives me a preview of the new hot series, The Queen’s Gambit. They show this scene of Anya Taylor-Joy signing up to compete in a chess tournament and the guys are like, “What? A Girl?” And I’m like, "Oh, she’s gonna win the tournament isn’t she?" So I'm intrigued and I love Anya Taylor-Joy, so I decide to check it out. But then I realize that the show doesn’t open with that scene, in fact, the whole first episode doesn’t even have Anya Taylor-Joy. I start scanning forward to find the scene in the preview and it doesn’t even appear til halfway through the second episode. So I say, "fuck it" and start watching from there. And I didn’t miss a single beat. I was totally into it and totally got it.

Now I’m sure if you watched the whole show you would argue to me that I’m missing some crucial part of her backstory, but I disagree. Backstory only informs the character to a certain extent. It can be crucial in storytelling, but what happens next is always more interesting than what is happening now. Plus, they bring up her backstory almost every episode. I get it. She’s an orphan, and learned chess from the janitor at the orphanage. We literally see her mom die in one of the later episodes. Her arc about addiction, and trauma, and growing up all still completely works.

The only moment that I kinda felt that I was missing something was at the very last episode where this character shows up and I didn’t know who she was. I assume she was in the first episode. But like, I’m not an idiot. I can follow what's happening, and then the second half of the episode is back to the main plot and I’m all caught up.

Now, I decided to take my hypothesis further with another Netflix series Peaky Blinders. Would this show still be as engaging if I stated watching from the point where Anya Taylor-Joy shows up in season 5?

Yes. Well, not exactly.

So Netflix obviously was trying to capitalize on the success of Queen's Gambit by recommending more things they have that star Taylor-Joy, including putting her face on the thumbnail for Peaky Blinders, a show where she only appears in the 5th season and plays a minor character. But, I really like Anya Taylor-Joy and I thought it would be fun to test my theory so I started watching the show from the start of season 5.

And it kinda worked. Well, not to the same extent. The first couple episodes I was not very interested because I didn't know the characters and wasn't already invested in the story. And my hope to latch onto Anya Taylor-Joy's character didn't really work out because she is very minor averaging around 1 scene per episode. But as the season went on, and the story continued to build I started to get sucked in and by the end of the season I was on the edge of my seat.

Peaky Blinders is about a family of British gangsters in the 20s, and the 5th season opens with the economic crash of 1929. So this season Cillian Murphy and the gang struggle to hold onto their power while the world shifts into the Great Depression. Literally everything goes wrong for the protagonists which makes for good drama. And what really got me hooked was that this season was really about the rise of fascism. Which unfortunately, is extremely relevant today.

Now, did my gamble with Peaky Blinders work as well as it with The Queen's Gambit? No. But I was still engaged in the show, which I think has more to do with the show's excellent direction, great performances and its distinct visual style. While I probably didn't enjoy the show as much as someone who has seen the entire show, I did thoroughly enjoy myself. I probably won't go back to check out the earlier seasons, but I will be checking out season 6 whenever it comes to Netflix.

Sometimes you don't need as much backstory as you think. Star Wars starts with Episode IV, and it works pretty well from there onward. People thought they wanted the backstory until they got it. I don't think Pacific Rim would've worked half as well for me if it was about the first battle with the monsters instead of the last. But TV shows are obviously different. They are designed to have many episodes and seasons to flesh out the characters and the world. So it's easy to skip one episode of a miniseries, but skipping multiple seasons of a show isn't quite as satisfying.

In either case, The Queen's Gambit is a great show that you should check out. It has great performances, Taylor-Joy is great as usual. There's really cool cinematography with these crazy long takes. The music is really cool. It's a great show. Peaky Blinders is also a really good show that's perfect if you want to get sad about the state of the world.

In Peaky Blinders season 5 episode 3, about 18 minutes in, we get this cut:

Coincidence? Probably. Especially since this season came out a year before The Queen's Gambit, and the chess scene doesn't even have Taylor-Joy in it.