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| A band of thieves gets more than they bargained for... |
6 episodes: A Woman Unseen, The Will of the Maker, The Serpent's Coils, Those Who Falsely Dream, An Altar of Fire, The Price of Salvation. Release Date: Dec. 9, 2022. Written by: Mairghread Scott, Mae Catt, Tim Sheridan. Directed by: Bae Ki-Yong. Executive Producers: Mairghread Scott, Chris Bain, Matthew Goldman, John Epler.
THE PLOT:
Miriam (Kimberly Brooks) is an elven mercenary who is a little too capable for the band she's been working with. She's more or less content to keep a low profile while taking on relatively simple jobs with the help of her partner, Roland (Phil LaMarr). Then her ex-girlfriend, Sapphira (Sumalee Montano), walks back into her life with a big job that promises massive payouts - and equally massive risks.
Sapphira is allied with Fairbanks (Matthew Mercer), a roguish Orlesian freedom fighter. They have a mission from the Inquisition, to recover the Circulum Infinitus, an artifact with the power to bring back the dead. The Circulum is in the hands of the Tevinter Imperium, an empire ruled by mages that was built on the backs of elven slaves.
That's where Miriam comes in. She was once a slave in the Summer Palace, and the group is relying on her knowledge of the layout to get them inside. But not every apparent ally can be trusted, and it soon becomes apparent that getting in was the easy part...
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| Sapphira persuades Miriam to join her cause. |
CHARACTERS:
Miriam: Initially comes across as the archetypal brusque, brooding loner. This is one of my least favorite character tropes, so my first impressions of the series' central figure created a bit of a barrier for entry. As is standard for this character type, she opens up more as the story goes on. More importantly, her past actually is interesting, going beyond the initial "abused slave" outline. By the end of the six episodes, I was more or less in agreement with grumpy dwarf Lacklon: Miriam never became my favorite character, but I was ultimately on her side.
Fairbanks: A minor Inquisition character is elevated to a central role. Fairbanks is very much the leader of the group, overseeing the planning and implementation of the heist - at least, up to the point at which everything goes pear-shaped. He is charismatic and humorous enough to make you like him. Still, it's always clear that he's hiding secrets of his own, meaning that you can never fully trust him.
Sapphira: Miriam's lover, who mostly just goes by "Hira." At first, she's presented as an idealized "good girl," whose insistence on doing what's right ended up causing her separation from the more cynical Miriam. Her artwork even vaguely resembles that of a Disney princess! Later episodes show more of her past, however, revealing a well of anger that rivals Miriam's own - and that makes her a far more interesting character in the second half than in the first.
Roland/Lacklon: These two quickly form a duo, with contrasting personalities. Roland is Miriam's partner, who is about as capable as she is, but who also is everything she isn't: dashing, humorous, emotionally open. Lacklon is a dwarven fighter who keeps a stock of "emergency grenades," and who grumbles after an emergency requires actually using them. The two instantly fancy each other, and their relationship recalls (without replicating) the Dorian/Iron Bull pairing in Inquisiton. They work as a couple and are engaging to watch in a way that the more central Miriam/Sapphira pairing never manages.
Qwydion: A rebel Qunari mage who, against expectations, is the most light-hearted member of the team. She is flirtatious and a bit goofy. When demons start appearing during the palace break-in, her response is to shout curses and run for her life - yelling "Sorry" as she passes guards that she knows her pursuers will devour as an appetizer. I know that some viewers objected to a Qunari being, essentially, comedy relief. Me? I found it kind of refreshing, and Qwydion is given enough moments of competence to work as a complete character.
Rezaren: The high-ranking Tevinter magister, in line to become the next Tevinter Divine, he has been tasked with studying the Circulum. He's affable in his dealings with others, and he insists that he wants to reform some of Tevinter's failings. Still, he is obsessed with the artifact to a degree that his lover, Knight Commander Tassia (Zehra Fazal), finds worrisome, and he seems a little too willing to resort to blood magic if it will get him what he wants.
Tassia: The Tevinter Knight Commander, and probably one of the more genuinely decent people in the show. She loves Rezaren but doesn't actually trust him to do the right thing. She isn't above lying to him, convincing him to accept a security lockdown on the promise that she'll immediately guard the artifact - only to instantly declare that she isn't going to value an object over human lives.
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| Tevinter magister Rezaren casts an unwise spell... |
THOUGHTS:
Dragon Age: Absolution is a Netflix series, set sometime after Dragon Age: Inquisition and before the (as of this writing) upcoming Dread Wolf Rises. Like a lot of streaming offerings, it's really a series-as-movie: not only does it tell a single story over its six episodes, its total running time is about two hours twenty minutes. In this case, watching the whole thing in one sitting doesn't even count as binge-watching.
The short running time is both the series' best and worst element. Save for the first episode, which I found to be by far the weakest, there is little opportunity for boredom. Once the characters make their way into the palace, they dash from one crisis and action scene to the next. The animation is energetic, a reasonable amount of the action is exciting, and plot and character revelations come rapidly. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger, and most of those cliffhangers are pretty good ones.
However, there is a lot of activity in an extremely short time frame. Though the story is very much about the relationships - particularly among Miriam, Sapphira, and Rezaren - I found the rushed pacing got in the way of me connecting with the characters. Only in a dream sequence in Episode Four did I begin actually feeling something for Miriam and Rezaren; and while I found the eventual revelations about Sapphira's motives to be interesting, none of them hit me on an emotional level at all.
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| Roland and Lacklon: The series' most convincing couple. |
ROMANCES, FOR BETTER AND WORSE:
Dragon Age: Absolution features three romantic relationships. Despite the cramped running time, two of these work well. Roland and Lacklon's romance is the best developed, emerging through banter, eye contact, and their physical interactions during the action scenes. Tassia's feelings for Rezaren also feel convincing. We can see her feelings for him in their very first scene together. Those feelings drive most of Tassia's actions, with concern for him dueling with her duty throughout. All of this works, the character interactions helping even the most unlikely plot turns to feel natural.
Unfortunately, the most important romance is the one that doesn't work, at least not for me. Most of Miriam's actions throughout this series are driven, in part or in whole, by her feelings for Sapphira. She joins the mission in hopes of rekindling their relationship, and her shift in attitude in the late episodes is driven by a desire both to help Sapphira and to prove herself worthy of her.
There's just one problem: Despite fine work by actresses Kimberly Brooks and Sumalee Montano, there isn't a single second of this series in which I actually believe in this relationship at all. It reminds me of the Star Wars prequels' Anakin/Padme romance: The story can't work without the relationship, but instead of making me feel the characters' love, the script just keeps stopping to tell me about it.
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| Battling spirits. There's a little too much of this. |
OVERALL:
Video game tie-ins tend to be pretty weak, and I'll admit that I went into Dragon Age: Absolution with low expectations. The series surpassed those expectations. The plot is decent, the Tevinter setting is both interesting and well realized, and the major characters all end up having layers that weren't initially apparent. Best of all, the series is actually rooted in the characters and their relationships.
However, while all the pieces are in place for a compelling story, the end result falls a bit short. It's all a little too rushed and too short to properly resonate. There are only a handful of moments of reflection or repose, most of them coming in the second half.
The story isn't dull, except for the clunky first episode. But despite the high stakes, it feels small and it lacks emotional power... two problems that I think would have been helped had it been given just a bit more room to breathe.
Overall Rating: 6/10.
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