When you put the truly strange mix of genres, settings and plot points into words you have to wonder how the hell this has gotten 3 seasons and quite a high budget - not Game of Thrones levels - but substantial enough for large scale action sequences and fantasy settings. I just felt I had to share how odd it is that all these things actually have happened, so there will be plenty of rambling SPOILERS below.
Season 1 you have an antebellum south post apocalypse run by a collective of feudal lords (barons) but then the remnants of a more industrialized society like factories and warehouses are still strewn across random locations. The strongest baron is a southern plantation owner type named Quinn but fights in samurai-esque armor while using a European style broadsword and for some reason he keeps Stephen Lang in a shed wearing a monocle taking care of pigeons, and he is in a wheelchair, and knows kung fu.
The main villain is a woman named the Widow that fights in high heels and wants to spread democracy to the Badlands but mostly seems focused on murdering anyone in her path and never actually changing the political status quo. The main characters want to find a magic city called Azra that no one knows how to get to or really makes much headway in ever finding.
Season 2 changes a lot, season 1 basically felt like it was supposed to be somewhere in Louisiana with a New Orleans-esque town set frequently showing up but that all changed in season 2 when production moved to Ireland and inexplicably decided to make the environment look more like Lord of the Rings with mountains and large sweeping drone shots of cliffs and valleys. Quinn now lives in an abandoned subway (and the outside looks like a castle) with a cult and a baby while watching Harold Lloyd's Safety Last and slowly going insane and drinking human blood. Quinn's wife decided to go live with Lance Henriksen's kooky totem religion instead.
While all that is happening, one character was kidnapped at the end of season 1 and is forced to live with an immortal witch that runs a kung fu school for super powered emo kids that literally activate their powers by cutting themselves - but they're also experimented on in the basement of a waterfall with a high tech laboratory.
Nick Frost joins the cast playing an irreverent kung fu monk and forms a bromance with the main character named Sunny. They trek through a Mad Max inspired landscape and find a literal continent spanning steel wall keeping them out of where season 1 took place. They also find a picture of Azra on a centuries old copy of WIRED magazine (yes this really happens) in an abandoned Santa's Workshop where they battle super sayian monks. Things go all Red Wedding and tons of characters get wiped out, the Widow consolidates her power and that leads to season 3.
Season 3 has only just started but they've leaned even harder into the Lord of the Rings style setting, Nick Frost now wears a purple pimp suit, Sunny has a nemesis unironically named Moon and a guy named Pilgrim shows up with super powered kids, decides to live in an abandoned Dinosaur museum and conduct bizarre masochistic religious rituals. There's now full on siege battles and colorful caravans and nothing looks like the southern setting season 1 used to have. Sunny has moved into a Breaking Bad style RV trailer until it gets kung fu'd too hard and rejoins the other characters.
This might sound like the ramblings of a mad person (if anyone bothers to read all of this), but this is all from a well funded American tv series - I don't know how that happened but I'm glad it did.
Submitted April 30, 2018 at 04:39PM by cabose7 https://ift.tt/2KoVzLL
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