Carnival Row season 1 finale review: A dark future looms ahead

Amazon’s Carnival Row wraps up its first season with an episode that provides some answers, kills off some characters and shakes things up for the future.

The truly amazing thing is that Amazon’s Carnival Row managed to hold off on introducing an incest plotline until the first season’s final episode.

It’s been obvious from the start that this series desperately wants to be a sort of high fantasy answer to Game of Thrones, inserting everything from complicated political storylines to unnecessarily grisly murders into its purported tale of star-crossed romance. In season 1’s final episode it takes that desire one step further, killing off one of its best characters and revealing that the rash of murders across the city are all part of an attempt to cover up a family history of infidelity and, now, incest.

Bright side: Absalom Breakspear isn’t evil! Or a murderer! He’s just Philo’s father. But he’s still awesome. He’s also dead now though, because this show hates me.

The brief heart-to-heart we see between Absalom and Philo is powerful and well-done, or at least it is once the former stops trying to shoot the latter because he believed he murdered the fae woman Aisling. It’s unfortunate that this is pretty much the only time we’ll really get to see Orlando Bloom and Jared Harris work together, because their characters are oddly complementary. Both fell in love with faery women and ended their relationships for dumb and selfish reasons. Absalom just went on to become Chancellor afterward, is all.

Absalom (still #1 Dad of this show!!) tries his best to do right by the son he never knew existed, promising to get Vignette released from jail and encouraging them both to get out of the city and chase the happiness he never allowed himself. Sadly, he doesn’t get the chance to fulfill his promise because he is stabbed by a puck in a self-flagellating religious cult and while he’s recuperating from his wounds his entire life falls apart.

The revelation that Piety Breakspear is the evil genius behind everything – she murders Absalom once he figures out the truth of her plan to kill Philo with the help of Dark Asher magic – is something we all probably should have seen coming. After all, we already watched her orchestrate a dramatic and complicated murder plot to take our her husband’s political rival. What wouldn’t she do to protect the prophecy of greatness that she sees as her son’s birthright, the entire reason she came to the Burgh and married Absalom in the first place? Even if she’s not 100% sure that he’s Absalom’s son at all?

(Spoiler alert: Could Philo Philostrate be any more of a Mary Sue? He’s got a literal prophecy out there foretelling his specialness!)

Anyway, Jonah and Sophie Longerbane are maybe possibly probably siblings, a fact which doesn’t seem to bother Sophie very much at all, which I guess really makes her the Cersei Lannister of this piece and not Piety.  She insists that the maybe-siblings have a real connection, that they can forge a great destiny together, and that since they’re descended from kings and pharaohs it’s all fine, because half those people married their own relations anyway. Um, what?

It’s not 100% clear what Sophie’s larger plan is, beyond claiming as much power for herself and causing as much chaos as possible. Maybe she sent the blackmail letter revealing the existence of Absalom’s firstborn for fun, and things spiraled from there. Perhaps her ultimate goal is simply to destroy society as she knows it. The answer is probably somewhere in between, but it’s hard to know what to believe or think about her when pretty much every aspect of her character is a lie.

Elsewhere, Imogen and Agreus’ love affair is discovered when her whiny brother Ezra spies on them getting busy through the window. (Creeper alert!) He breaks in and threatens to kill them both, but is thwarted by his sister clocking him with something that may or may not be a lamp. Props to Imogen Spurnrose for being generally amazing in this episode – from realizing what she truly wants to walking over to its house and straight up asking for it, she firmly establishes herself as one of the strongest women in the world of Carnival Row. (And who thought we’d be saying that after the series’ first episode?)

The fact that she cares enough about Agreus to leave behind the life she knew and run away with him to an as yet undetermined destination…well, it’s awfully sweet. And their relationship feels so much closer to the message the show is trying to send than some of its other stories. These two have overcome a lot to be together, not the least of which being Imogen’s open and vile prejudice, and we’ve gotten to see it all unfold, which of course means we’re more than a little invested (obsessed?) with how it their love story turns out.

Carnival Row has basically sold itself as the star-crossed tale of Philo and Vignette, and for the most part it fulfills that promise, as this episode sees them endure near-misses, near-death experiences and forced separation before trapping them both in the virtual gulag that the role is becoming. It’s certainly dramatic, all of this. But for my money, Imogen and Agreus are the love story that the show should be centered around, if only because they’re living, functional proof that the lines that exist between the people of the Burgh don’t have to exist, and that people of different races and species can not only co-exist peacefully, they can learn to care about and even love one another.

Philo and Vignette have to survive all the terrible things that have happened to one another, true. But Imogen and Agreus have had to survive – and remake – each other, and that feels earth shattering in this world.

Where does this show go in its second season? At the moment, Imogen and Agreus feel as though they’re headed off to be part of some other series entirely, while Philo and Vignette await whatever awful citywide ethnic cleansing that Idiot Jonah will doubtless pursue.

Absalom, we miss you already.

Carnival Row will return for a second season in 2020.