‘See’ makes you look within

“The gift of sight can be blinding,” the line keeps resonating as from a sound wand and makes you realise the worth of your other senses. When blindness is deemed to be disability at our time, losing sight and growing heightened capacity of hearing, feeling, tastes and so on for 500 years in the far future in a society where sight is considered as heresy, is not only an extraordinary concept but a wonderful eye-opener.

The third and final season of this exquisite fantasy drama presented by Apple Tv concluded on 14 October leaving its numerous audiences in a state of rumination. Since this action-packed drama was launched in 2019, viewers had waited keenly for the next season while bingeing the previous seasons.

The final episode of this saga has been one of the most poetic and dramatic episodes ever.

Set in a dystopian future, the drama presents a future generation of mankind who lost their sight because of an unknown virus and lost the sense of sight over the time. A very few who remained sighted are disdained by the majority and hunted down and executed as witches.

Baba Voss (Jason Momoa), the chieftain of a mountain tribe gets ready to go at any length to save his adopted sighted twin children- Haniwa and Kofun. While the first two seasons were shaping up the storyline, the third season had been able to convince the viewers to be one of the most standout shows in recent times.

Two sisters, one queen Kane as the personification of evil yet tremendously affectionate to her little sister Maghra, wife of Baba Voss while the latter has a humane heart which makes mistakes at times yet pulls together.

In the final episode we see sister killing sister when you may want to take sides, but end up questioning the definition of good and evil and justice and oppression.

Jason Momoa till the end of the show served justice to his character and it will not be an exaggeration if someone term this as Momoa’s best work so far. Almost indestructible yet protective husband and father, immensely strong yet vulnerable at the same time, Momoa as Baba Voss shines from start to end as a protagonist.

We were heartbroken seeing Baba Voss sacrificing his life at the end, we cried to see Maghra mourn, we laughed at Ranger’s humour. We were comforted and relieved from the doubt of the advantage of vision in the last episode as Maghra explained, “…it was not vision that built Tormada’s bombs, but the scientist’s cruel exploitation of sighted children that accessed the knowledge of the ancients (current civilization). And it is that destructive knowledge not vision itself, should be outlawed.”

Throughout all three seasons, the scenes of blind people navigating through the debris and ruins of high-rise buildings, broken airplanes and vehicles without having any clue of their uses sends chills down our spines imagining the level of rage the nature can put upon us. All these extravagant show-offs of civilization and parade of concrete establishments may lose its worth at one blow of nature. And the coming human race would not even recognize those ruins of any use. This is utterly appalling that all that we brag about and condescend to our ancestors for not having those may suddenly become useless and forgotten.

The unsighted people call the sun ‘godflame’ and irons and concretes ‘god bone’. It is believed in their society that their ancestors were doomed due to their sight and thus vision is forbidden. There had been a whole army, witch-finder army, to find and execute sighted men.

After the death of Jerlamarel, biological father of Momoa’s adopted twins and whose motto of life was to gather and father sighted children to revive old human kind, in second season, his hideout and library along with his children were captured by a scientist, Tormada, for creating bombs, what the future men name ‘God thunder’. The story in the third season polarized as how humans use knowledge for destruction and evil. Each episode came up with new twist revealing underlying evils of those known for kindness and humanity of those evils.

Among a wide variety of characters, Sylvia Hoeks as the deranged queen Kane, Hera Hilmar as Maghra Kane, Christian Camargo as witch-finder general were phenomenal as usual in the final season. The death and platonic love of Lord Harlan played by Tom Mison who was introduced in the second season left many in tears.

Like the previous season, this final edition also took the audience through the philosophical journey, fantastically cinematographed, stunningly choreographed fighting scenes and intense storyline.

Apart from human evils and environment awareness, the show relentlessly offers lessons of parenting by quotes like, ““Every child eventually comes to a bridge that they must cross alone” or “Sometimes the best way to protect your children is to let them believe you’ve stopped.”

The love of the invincible Baba Voss for his children has been the pivot of the drama often justified with such lines, “You and your brother are the only world that I have lived in since the day you were born. My children, I’m as blind as anyone. But I see you both. I will never stop seeing you.”

The ingenuity of blind humankind to cope with nature and survive cohesively has been made astonishingly convincing.

Programme creator Steven Knight, who also has been the showrunner of big-hit drama series Peaky Blinders, had excellently portrayed layered characters including another action superstar and former wrestler David Bautista as Edo Voss.

Although not entirely a novel concept, the show has given us a purpose to rethink our actions of acquiring destructive powers and the consequence of exploiting mother nature as Tamacti Jun, the witch-finder general says, “regardless nature will have its way, she always does!”

The show ironically pointed out that the long-conceived ideology “knowledge is power” may sometimes be overwhelming.

Last but not the least, the drama felt like a follow-up of the Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s dystopian novel ‘Blindness’ where the ultimate human evils unfurl after an epidemic break out and people suddenly start to losing their sights. 

The dialogue ‘sight can be blinding’ perfectly resembles to the saying by one of the Saramago’s character, the doctor, that all humans are “Blind people who can see but do not see.”