Emerald City Review [1×06] – “Beautiful Wickedness”

‘Emerald City’ unravels some key answers mid-season and kick-starts a war that’s been brewing for a while.

You’d think, especially in a first season, ‘Emerald City‘ would make us wait for answers until a big fat finale—but it doesn’t.

Dorothy (Adria Arjona) is born in Oz, and thanks to West’s (Ana Ularu) enhanced interrogation techniques, Lucas (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) remembers how the ten soldiers in his company were butchered. West furiously realises that this is Glinda’s (Joely Richardson) work.

Glinda’s ‘pure’ orphans are sent into the Wizard’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) care as spies, whilst Tip (Jordan Laughran) and Jack (Gerran Howell) reunite, awkwardly. He shows his Tin self to her, and walks away—for once, of his own volition. Puppet-like, he trails Princess Ev (Stefanie Martini), who quickly becomes Queen after her father is frozen to a stony death by Sylvie (Rebeka Rea).

Ev makes the first of two declarations of war: she wants Emerald City down, and she will rule from her seat in Ev. Don’t mess with Martini’s Queen. Ironically, as she hides her face behind her masks, she is the most outward of them all—with the Wizard, hiding his ordinariness in plain sight.

As Dorothy accuses The Wizard—sorry, Frank Morgan–of being a liar, we’re told via flashbacks the tale of unqualified janitor Frank. Bitter he’s always getting called stupid, he tampers with the physicians’ vortex generator and transports them to Oz. There, he’s regarded as mysterious, witty and a genius—things Frank Morgan certainly aren’t seen to be, by his colleagues. So he stays, to rule with his (limited) science and his lying facade. When war finally erupts between science and magic, the Wizard makes the first move. By fatally shooting Anna (Isabel Lucas).

How’ll this impact Oz? Will Anna recover? And will it be via science? Or magic? Let’ jump right in!

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The Mother Witch is alive—and she’s one great birthing witch or Glinda’s got a huge suction machine stockpiling them all in her back yard…

Everyone called it so hard we practically yelled it from the very first millisecond Joely Richardson’s perfected Glinda waltzed on-screen that it had to be fake. Her gentility; her smile; her everything. It turns out; the Good Witch of the North was maybe not-so-Good after all.

Her contrast with Ularu’s West has always been startlingly polar, and predictably so. But in twisting Glinda’s perfection, they’ve paved way for West to become potentially the most intriguing, complex character all season. She is emotional, an opium addict and utterly uncaring of everyone’s opinions—but she fights her own battles. She doesn’t start wars.

But this revelation means the Mother Witch is still alive, and it also implicates Anna & co as liars. They are plants, there to find out the Wizard’s secrets. So where is Mother Witch?

Furthermore, Lucas becomes helplessly interconnected as he was carrying the orphans the day his name became besmirched with the death of his soldiers. Not only is he harbouring Sylvie, she’s wanted for becoming the Girl Who Turned the King to Stone. As Anna warns him about Dorothy, Oz brags about his knowledge of her:

Anna: [About Dorothy] “She gave you the only weapon capable of killing a witch.”

The Wizard: “Not the only one. Glinda’s always been cold as stone. Now she’ll be dead like one.”

The shot quickly skips to Dorothy clutching onto Sylvie, with the intent that upon Dorothy’s arrival, the Cold War between the witches and the ‘Wizard’ will settle with only one answer: death. Specifically, Glinda’s death by Dorothy’s (well, Sylvie’s) hand.

Nicely played, Oz.

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Queen Ev, Tip and Jack remain somewhat intertwined on their journey—but are polar opposites of their old selves as they’re torn apart once more.

Like a fond memory, Tip and Jack’s old friendship lingers. Yet now, they are not their young, naive selves any longer. Jack’s grown into a Tin Man with anger thrumming under his suit; Tip is a conniving, manipulative young woman under West’s tutelage. They’ve both settled—for something that is life. Not something that is comfortable.

Jack: “We can’t be fixed. I can’t be fixed.”

Consider their role in the upcoming wars, too. Should Ev wage battle upon Oz, Jack would remain by his Queen’s side whilst Tip is firmly on Oz’s. Not only gave they grown up and grown apart, they are literally kingdoms apart. And this is in spite of Tip admitting she loves Jack, though she doesn’t know what it means to her; we see Jack’s new heart spite Tip, just as much as he spites himself.

Despite Jack’s anger sometimes, and his uncontrollable heart, it may tick for Queen Ev. Yet he loved Tip in his own way, just like Tip does confesses she loves him. She just doesn’t know. Ev, who is alluringly irresistible, sashays into Jack’s life. Our hearts broke for her last week when she didn’t recognise friendship. This time, Martini makes us cower in fear as she commands and out-talks Oz at the dinner table. Could it be the mask?

With her passive father gone, Oz no longer has easy Ev under his control. Instead, he’s got an empire ready to wage war against him, and unless he’s able to conjure up some magical whirlwind to take Ev’s cunning away, he’ll lose.

Ah, it’s a shame he ain’t no magician, aye?

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The Wizard’s past finally lends some answers. It’s so ordinary that it turns the Wizard into a question of a character.

Of course he was the freakin’ janitor!

‘Frank Morgan’ was a tinkering member of a team of atmospheric physicists, including Karen Chapman. However, when he intentionally muddles with the vortex they create and send them inadvertently to Oz, Chapman—who’s familiar with Oz—assures them East (Florence Kambusa) could take them home. But Frank likes it here, despite Chapman’s ominous (yet not-subtle) warnings about the Beast Forever.

In a lifetime surrounded by others cleverer than him, Frank enjoys Oz where people actually think he’s intelligent. So he knows a bit of science—yes, we took science at school, Frank. But what Frank Morgan’s exceptionally good at is deceit (people think he’s a bloody Wizard!), and that’s blatant to Dorothy:

Dorothy: “I don’t trust you. Look at you. How you dress, the way you act…that wig. You’re just lying to everyone.”

Wizard: “Ugh. I could say the same thing about you. We do what we need to do to survive.”

This is pretty much the iconic scene in which Dorothy discovers The Wizard is nothing but a fraud. Vincent D’Onofrio’s portrayal is easily the best we’ve seen in years. D’Onofrio’s reliably excellent; he’s the morally sketchy, power-hungry coward one moment and a tender man the next. He’s a welcoming, honest guest; and he’ll also order the butchery of a village whilst stabbing you in the back. He’s Jekyll and Hyde, except Jekyll’s aware of Hyde and vice versa.

D’Onofrio makes the best of an otherwise rushed script. And what a splendid job he does, of convincing us to stay with the Wizard’s unfinished story.

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FINAL VERDICT: ‘Emerald City’ smartly cleans up after itself with a well-paced episode and captivating growth of certain characters, Not all them, but an army large enough to keep us asking if it’s Thursday yet already!

World-building was amped up drastically in the fourth and fifth episode, and this is the direct answer to “why?“. The script for once overloaded and paradoxically became sluggish. But the depth of the world ‘Emerald City’ has created in just six episodes is immense. From the connection between Ojo’s wife and Chapman, to the moody kingdom rivalries to battling sisters… It culminates in a war embezzled by lies, manipulation and greed,

D’Onofrio captivates and repulses via his excellent character-centric episode. He either had to fail miserably or nail it. He nailed it so hard. He’s quick  to switch from gentle and chuckling to a kill order, and his conviction and lack of guilt is so disturbing, it’s intensely good.

With the Tarsem Singh’s production wobbly this episode (Lucas’ strange version of a memory looked like it was Go-Pro footage from a kid on a go-kart). And with a dramatic announcement of a war coming, it could’ve overall been…well…dramatic. But ‘Emerald City’ came in fighting.

Its glitz and glamour are now staples of the show. Ev’s incredibly delicate masks say all that is hidden. Ornate, beautiful yet fragile. What lies beneath is a mystery we want to unfold, and to have a prop like a mask push the plot rather than hinder it, is well-done. Glinda’s an obvious choice too, pure-white and pure-perfection…because she portrays herself so. Not because she is.

Keep going, ‘Emerald City’. It’ll be a knockout!

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QUESTIONS & COMMENTS:

• Who are you rooting for? Glinda or West? Oz or Ev? Tweet us @TVAfterDark!
• I have to say—and I wonder if I mentioned it last episode (I must..)—how utterly creepy, perverse and wrong it is for Glinda to bring her girls up like that. But I liked Emerald City’s direction with morally-tight Dorothy’s horror, and Tip’s brazen blankness.
• Will we ever find out why Princess Ev (Queen?) has to wear has masquerade masks?
  • I wonder what the masks mean. Essentially, they are what she wants to “be” for the day, right? But do they possess any magical properties?
• Chapman warning about the ripple effect was certainly karma serving a nice dish in The Beast Forever.
• Even from the beginning, The Wizard is insistent on science—but with Dorothy here, perhaps it’s time to stop it co-existing with magic and quash magic in a near-colonial way. Is that what the Wizard wants? It’s shown he’s not unlike a tyrant.
  • Crash-landing and essentially taking over an empire with sheer domination and being proud of it, mind you, are dark themes…
  • I’m still reeling over what the Wizard did to that poor village. Awful.