This week’s See finds everyone taking stock of their miserable situations before the inevitable next course of action. The Apple TV+ dystopian sci-fi epic about a world where most people lost their sight generations ago is getting ready for war.
Sibeth is missing, Baba is back, Maghra finally sees the light, Tamacti Jun is at his wit’s end, and Kofun steps up.
See recap: ‘This Land Is Your Land’
Season 3, episode 3: In this week’s episode, entitled “This Land Is Your Land,” Sibeth, aka the deposed Queen Kane (played by Sylvia Hoeks), has gone missing. No one knows whether she’s escaped or is being hidden by someone loyal to her cause. Queen Maghra (Hera Hilmar) begs Lord Harlan (Tom Mison) to talk to Trivantian ambassador Trovere (Trieste Kelly Dunn) to see if they’ll accept something else in Sibeth’s place to take back to Trivantes as a show of good faith.
Former Witchfinder General Tamacti Jun (Christian Camargo) thinks they’re screwed. But Maghra still doesn’t know if Baba Voss’ (Jason Momoa) tales of explosives are a lie or not.
Baba and Maghra are still on the outs because she’s mad he left her all those months ago and he’s mad she let her sister Sibeth live. Maghra lets him go free from the dungeons after his attack on Trovere on the condition that he counsels their son Kofun (Archie Madekwe), who’s been in a bad way since the birth of his own son.
Lucien (Dean Jagger), evidently not feeling humbled by his defeat at Tamacti Jun’s hands, is meanwhile stirring up foment in his part of town. A group of angry dissidents almost kills Kofun. (He is sighted, and thus in their crosshairs, to say nothing of the daughter of the queen they so despise.). However, Charlotte (Olivia Cheng) and Baba intervene to save him. An inconsolable Maghra has the assailants rounded up, even though Tamacti Jun warns her not to.
An explosive plan
Wren (Eden Epstein) finally makes it back to Haniwa (Nesta Cooper) to corroborate Baba’s story about explosives, or “God Thunder” as he calls it. Tormada (David Hewlett) is going to use the bombs built by the children of Jerlamarel (Joshua Henry) unless they detonate them all first. Baba wants to take Kofun to go do it themselves rather than sending an army.
When Harlan hears about the coal used to make the explosives, he confronts Trovere, who finally convinces him that she didn’t know anything about Tormada’s explosives. She suggests Harlan should come along to strengthen her argument that Tormada has gone rogue and is planning a coup. Harlan doesn’t like the optics of that, so he suggests he sneak in instead so it doesn’t look like they’re plotting together.
On the home front, Baba Voss finally has a heart-to-heart with Kofun and gets him to accept his son. Then he makes up with Maghra. And then, in a perfectly stupid development, it turns out that Kofun — who couldn’t stand to look at Sibeth the whole time she’s been imprisoned — has saved her from capture because he doesn’t want the mother of his child to be killed by the Trivanteans.
… and another ridiculous premise
I … just don’t have the time to consider this. Kofun’s going to plunge his city into chaos and kill his whole family for something that was basically a predetermined conclusion. If the Trivanteans aren’t going to execute Sibeth, then Baba Voss will as revenge for her killing Paris.
Kofun’s fighting a losing battle here, and it just makes zero sense that he’d care this much to do it. It doesn’t take long for Sibeth to get impatient enough to go out of hiding to get her baby back, but Baba Voss finds her before she can leave. She threatens to kill the baby if they don’t let her live. He finally tells her that the baby can’t see, so her prophecy is wrong. Just then, Harmony (Nina Kiri), Sibeth’s last ally in town, stabs Kofun in the gut so Sibeth can escape. Baba kills Harmony but Sibeth gets away.
Tamacti Jun gets the imprisoned Lucien alone for a minute to try one last time to convince him to recant his views so he doesn’t have to execute him, but he gets nowhere. The faithful are too convinced of all the religious paranoia drilled into them since birth. Maghra hangs three of them and lets the rest go. Tamacti Jun is pleased but Haniwa is pissed. She feels like her mom put everyone else before the sighted. A real damned-if-you-do stalemate.
See’s dialogue needs to pick an era
The dialect they created for See is inconsistently utilized lately. Charlotte does the Joss Whedon punchline at one point when Eden and Haniwa embrace.
“I should leave, right?” she says. “Yeah, I’m gonna go.” Then she moonwalks out of the room.
In last week’s episode, while Baba Voss was interrogating Harlan and Trovere, they stopped their serious threats to question each other in a depressingly sarcastic fashion that ended in Harlan exasperatedly saying, “Fuck you!”
This show really should decide if its characters are talking like it’s the bleak future or like a 2022 writer’s room gave you your marching orders. Trovere stops an earnest plea to not be killed by telling Harlan to “either kiss me or kill me, but do something!” It’s wildly erratic, even though Trieste Kelly Dunn sells the line very well.
Other than that, this was a pretty ordinary episode. Jason Momoa remains very much the best thing about See, and the last two episodes have allowed him to be at his Momoa-est, killing people and spouting platitudes and being sarcastic. It’ll be good to have him make movies and stuff now that he’s not under contract to this show anymore.
★★☆☆☆
Watch See on Apple TV+
New episodes of See season three arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
