New Worlds: Episode 4

"I dream of a vast continent, a republic where millions of men live in liberty."

So, New Worlds is over with a whimper, and I notice that, unlike The Devil's Whore, it caused nary a stir at the time and, mere months later, is pretty much forgotten. So what went wrong? Well, it's dull, for a start, with forgettable characters entirely lacking in charisma. And then there's the didacticism. While there's nothing wrong with looking at the past through the eyes of the present- it only exists in those terms, after all- New Worlds goes too far in putting modern sentiments into Restoration mouths.

The Devil's Whore managed to square this circle, looking at the "Good Old Cause" through the eyes of the contemporary Left examining its own heritage. Yet the characters were all of their time. Here we have Whigs expressing modern values, unhistorical attitudes to the Native American genocide, and crude use of dramatic irony in the many hints that the USA is set to exist in ninety years time. Most notably, the concluding bit of text doesn't even mention the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an elephant in the room that demonstrates a crude attempt to avoid a Whig interpretation of history which values the post-1689 constitutional settlement and trying to put a modern Leftist slant on, well, Whigs.

Charles II continues to be an I characteristically miserable bastard, and then dies right on schedule. Abe Gough is tortured, but escapes execution and buggers off to Boston to embark on a career as the authorial voice. Chris Finch from The Office is still around. There is much examination of the fact that Massachusetts is founded on the genocide of local tribes, and conflict with the King's representative that crudely foreshadows the 1770s ("I am here to remind Massachusetts that it is a colony and not a republic"). Hope is a bit racist. Sidney is horribly executed. Beth's mixed race baby is shunned, and reclaimed by it's fatger's moribund tribe. The Monmouth Rebellion happens. Etc. Etc.

This is actually the best of the four episodes, and moderately involving to watch. But by now it's far too late. 

New Worlds: Episode 3

"Our lives will never change until the kings are torn from their thrones."

This episode, we get Native Americans being all noble savages and that in ways that, while trying hard not to be racist in their depiction, may cross the line into patronising as all depictions of tribal societies inevitably do. We also get interesting political discussion which shows us how the die-hard republicans of the Good Old Cause morph slowly into Whigs, keeping an outward show of monarchy but sidelining it to the extent that one Ancien Regime French ambassador once famously refused to accept that England was a monarchy at all after 1688. This is not a Whig script, of course; it is still interested in the history of the Left and not that of Liberals such as myself who are, while way to the left of Clegg and those dangerous Orange Book entryists, are not from that tradition.

Anyway...

Beth survives transportation and meets a sort of proto-Squanto, proceeding to go predictably native and to act as the hand-wringing, post-colonial mouthpiece of our authorial voice. The King proceeds to be a right bastard, and Angelica's house goes to one of a Judge Jeffries' mates who isn't very nice to the staff, allowing us to see a bit of proto-Chartist class conflict. There's a lot of proto-this and proto-that in this somewhat Marxist script. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but I wish the script had put equal attention to giving the characters a little depth. None of them come across as anything more than ideological mouthpieces.

Beth and her new Native American mates soon run up against John Hawkins, Henry Cresswell and their equally genocidal Puritan mates in Massachusetts which, once again, it is instructive to see depicted as the frontier. Abe, meanwhile, gets involved with the Rye House Plot. Ted, now back in Massachusetts, finds his beloved Beth now married to the dastardly Henry Cresswell. And the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts gets a bit of a bollocking on behalf of the King, who is on the Indians' side, sort of. One of the Massachusetts Bastards, incidentally, is Chris Finch from The Office.

Beth's presence in the tribe is discovered, and our RP accented Yankees Hope and Beth resume sleeping together, now a much naughtier thing than it was before. Ned soon becomes outraged at the fact that not only his love rival but also his father are, as William Goffe had put it, "land pirates". Soon enough the tribe is wiped out in a nasty bit of germ warfare. Such is the original sin of America, and it is a very English sin.

The political subtext is entertaining, I suppose, but in the absence of characters in whom one can take an interest it's all there is to grab hold of, and it's not exactly subtle. New Worlds continues to disappoint.