lumosnight

It has been a trend for many Turkish telenovelas to portray the brutal Ottoman Empire through the lens of nostalgia, and these types of series have been propagated at an international level: first the Balkans, then the Middle East, then South Asia... and finally one of them reached Netflix.

The Turks are presented as the honourable good guys who treat everyone fairly. The non-Turks such as Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Hungarians are all portrayed as slimy, back-stabbing hypocrites who betray their nice Turkish overlords. Imagine, they do not understand the honour of living under the Turkish boot!

The few non-Turks who are the 'good guys' are Mehmed's subjects who have a servile attitude and are happy to obey his orders. They are the Uncle Toms of the series. Such as Princess Mara, who is portrayed as Mehmed's biggest supporter... when in reality she hightailed out of the Sultan's court when her husband died and became a nun in Serbia. She wanted to get back to her family, not to be a pawn in Mehmed's games - in fact, the reason why she even married Mehmed's father was to save her country from Ottoman invasion. That was why she never had Murad's children and instead became strategically friendly with his son and heir. She was a well-known benefactor of the Orthodox Church and strongly lobbied for the rights of Orthodox Christians across the empire.

Vlad Tepes Dracula is portrayed as a cartoon villain, who kills his subjects in the most brutal ways. The series conveniently omits that he and his brother Radu were sexually abused by Mehmed himself, or how Vlad learnt from the Turks all those horrible ways of putting people on the stake by witnessing how they executed civilians who couldn't pay the 'infidel tax'.

Mehmed is portrayed an a nice guy who tolerates Vlad's non-payment of taxes and is horrified by the way Vlad kills people - oh the irony.

I couldn't continue watching this propaganda. It is one thing to romanticize your history, but entirely something else to give an entirely falsified version of accounts in order to spark up the sentiment of Turkish nationalism, which this series plainly does.

To summarize the plot: a wolf is attracted to a rabbit because of her 'irresistible scent' - he doesn't know whether he wants to eat her or make love to her. He doesn't even know her personality properly -what he does know is that she is 'perfect for him' and he wants to commit his life to her. The rabbit is an outsider and she is continuously placed in damsel-in-distress situations where he has to save her, while also not trusting himself to be with her because he might hurt her.

The story sounds familiar? Of course it is, because that is the same plot as Twilight. It is a fanfiction of forbidden love, with carnivore and herbivore animals instead of humans and vampires. No wonder teenagers love this show.

The first episode captures your attention because there is a murderous carnivore on the loose, but that plot completely gets pushed to the side in favour of a lemonade story where Legoshi the wolf stalks and pines after Haru the rabbit. He has obsessive internal monologues a la Joe Goldberg from the tv series "You", but that's not seen as creepy at all.

The characters deliver a lot of quasi-philosophic lines that do not make much sense, like "No matter what I do, figuring out a woman's mind never gets any easier" and have dramatic outbursts very frequently.

Characters make plenty of unnecessary sacrifices, when they could have just called the police or avoided saying something. It also makes no sense why carnivores and herbivores are forcing themselves to live together in a society where they don't trust each other and carnivores have walk on eggshells so as to fit in with herbivores' standards, when they can just take over and keep the herbivores as their meat stock. The creator obviously did not think this through, and it shows that this universe has been poorly planned.

On the other hand, this show does keep your attention, so you do want to know what happens next. In my opinion, Season 2 is considerably more interesting than Season 1, which wasted a lot of time on Legoshi's pining and white knighting of a rabbit he barely knows. I actually like a good interspecies romance, but this is poorly handled, perhaps season 3 will be better.

I want to give this a 6.5, but since there is no option of this here, I will have to settle for a 6, as a 7 would be a bit too generous.

When they say 'based on a true story' what they mean is that there was once a Korean narco trafficker in Suriname, and that is where all the similarities end. He did not front as a pastor, nor did he have a cult following of crazies.

So the story follows a man called In Gu who is down on his luck and has to support his family. His friend gives him an offer that is too good to be true: to set up a business in Suriname where they will export skate fish to Korea and thus become rich. In Gu takes him up on his offer, never once investigating the political situation in Suriname, nor checking the regulations for importing food into Korea. The two of course get into trouble with the local gangs who each want their cut of the revenue and In Gu ends up having to work with the National Intelligence Service to hunt down the local Korean kingpin, the notorious Pastor.

Everything feels incredibly naive with the story, where our main character happens to be a brilliant negotiator who is capable of pulling the wool over all the narco bosses' eyes and he manages to pit them against each other. The NIS officer who begs him for help is so laughable in how helpless he is in the whole situation, and his disguises are quite unconvincing.

The Korean production of this show obviously wanted a cut out of the 'narco trafficker' genre which is very popular now. However, it is obvious that they haven't done a bit of research on what made narco bosses so remarkable. Anyone who watched the Narcos series would realize that the leaders of these cartels were highly intelligent, despite not being educated, and they were very good judges of character. In Gu's deceit would have be discovered early on and he would have been killed the moment he even attempted to put them against each other. Only the most observant would stay on top, which is what made cartel leaders so intimidating.

Overall, this is a fun show, but it would have worked much better as a full on comedy that parodies the narcos genre - now that would have made it truly memorable.