Date of airing: Januay 22, 2010 (Starz)
Nielsen ratings information: 0.659 million viewers, 0.3 rating/1 share with Adults 18-49 (simulcast on Encore: 0.58 million viewers, 0.2 rating/1 share with Adults 18-49)
Written by: Steven S. DeKnight
Directed by: Rick Jacobson
”That man has fingers in all the proper assholes. He wiggles them and everyone shits gold.”
This episode only works when you already know the entire season. Watching it for the first time, and you will feel and think what everyone else felt and thought when they watched this series premiere for the first time: 'WTF was that?' The visual style and the choice of dialogue needs some serious getting used to; some of the acting abilities may be questionable (the reason for that may be the difficult dialogue and the fact that they were acting wearing cloths for clothes); and the fact that this is supposed to be a show about Spartacus and the slave rebellion, but doesn't even go into any of it, may have confused viewers who were expecting a history lesson with sword-and-sandals scenes, but got VFX blood, tits, asses, and sex scenes inching close to porn instead. Maybe we were all just shocked back then, as we didn't know what kind of show this was about to become. SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND is the perfect example of a show you have to get past the first couple of episodes of to get to the really juicy stuff. Because the beginning of it is like anything else you've probably ever seen before.
The story is also hard to get into, because why would you want to spend time with a guy whose name you don't know, fighting a war for a Roman asshole whose political ambitions immediately make him a villain, with other Thracians who are equally nameless and were quickly becoming lifeless as well? The one thing that made the unnamed Thracian, who was called Spartacus after he managed to kill all four of his executors in the arena, a sympathetic character was when the love of his life got kidnapped and enslaved by the Romans, giving him a purpose spiced with revenge. You saw it in both men's faces at the end: Spartacus wants Glaber dead for what he has done, and Glaber wants Spartacus dead for the humiliation he just received. These two dudes will stand in the arena presently, to fight it out for the sake of a bloody, violent storyline.
Plus, this episode managed to showcase only half of the stuff that made the show so intriguing to watch in 2010: The fights in the arena, some of the dialogue choices and lines delivered by John Hannah as Batiatus (who essentially only had two scenes here, when it is he who is basically the lead character of Blood and Sand), and the purpose of Spartacus as a character in this new world of blood, death, and slavery. Everything else that made the show fun to watch would be introduced in the next episode, giving one more example of why this hour was critically maligned when the show premiered (simply because the audience hadn't seen what the show was about yet). The thing is, I have no idea how I would have started the narrative of Spartacus – this prologue episode was needed to get to the end of it, because you couldn't have brought it in the beginning and made the viewers care for him when the entire backstory was missing.
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| The Thracian makes sure that he will live another day to see revenge. |
