Kaos

I’m a bit behind with this one due to the large quantity of interesting TV demanding my time. When it first came out, my Classicist friends were absolutely delighted about it. I can see why. I can also see why it was not renewed.

For those that don’t know, Kaos is a heavily re-imagined story of Greek gods in modern dress. Zeus is worried about a prophecy that suggests that Olympus will one day fall. As he becomes increasingly paranoid and vicious, the other gods realise that he is in danger of bringing about the very disaster he is trying to prevent.

Alongside the heavenly drama there is action in the mortal realm of Krete, where the Trojans live as unwanted refugees and President Minos uses the threat of the Minotaur to keep power. His daughter, Ariadne, has a crush on her bodyguard, Theseus. Everyone loves Krete’s favourite rock star, Orpheus, except for this wife, Eurydice.

Whoever saw Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok and decided that he would be a perfect paranoid Zeus deserves a medal. Much of the rest of the casting is fairly meh, but I did appreciate seeing Suzy Izzard getting a staring role as Lachesis, one of the Fates. Also Billy Piper is great as Cassandra.

I’m not sure how this show was sold to Netflix, but I suspect it was a combination of “sex and violence just like Game of Thrones” and “Classical re-tellings are all the rage at the moment.” There is apparently an Odyssey movie in the works, which would have been sold the same way. However, that is not what Kaos delivered.

What we actually got was a very innovative and imaginative re-telling that will have those who only know a bit of Greek myth saying, “but it didn’t happen like that,” and those who know those myths well punching the air in delight. The result is a clever satire about authoritarian rule that has a lot in common with Sophia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon and The Chain.

Naturally my favorite character in the show is Caeneus. He’s a little-known character from myth. The original story has Poseidon raping a girl called Caenis, after which he turns her into a man and a great warrior. Why this happens isn’t clear, though it is very un-Poseidon-like. He was more likely to turn his victims into a snake-headed monster. Some versions have the god taking pity on Caenis, others say she asked for the transformation as a favour to avoid pregnancy. Nowhere is it suggested that Caenis identified as a boy before the rape.

In Kaos, despite what you might have read on the internet, Caeneus is portrayed as intersex. Specifically he appears to be someone with the trait known as 5-alpha reductase deficiency, whereby a child is born appearing female, but develops male genitals during puberty. Such children often identify as boys when young, or behave in a boyish manner. Parents of such children often say they could tell from an early age that something was different.

It is a bold move by the show, and one that was doubtless part-responsible for its demise. But the thing I like best about it is the suggestion that the gender binary is somehow ‘divinely’ mandated (by Zeus and his bullying family), and that Caeneus’s transformation somehow offended the gods. It also, very clearly, offended the female-separatist Amazons, who seem very TERFy. In other words, Caeneus’s transformation is presented as pissing off a bunch of awful people, and therefore as a Good Thing.

Here now is an example of why Classicists love this show. In the scene in which young Caeneus meets his childhood friend, Leos, he is shown carrying a dead hare. In ancient Greek culture, a present of a dead hare was a traditional gift between same-sex lovers. There are several vases showing such a gift between men, and one very famous one showing two Amazons. You have to be pretty heavily nerdy about Greek myth to know such a thing, but the showrunners did know it, and thought to put it in.

Sadly the show was much too ingenious and obscure for the money men at Netflix. The clever references will all have gone completely over their heads. They will have seen the social media blow-up about Caeneus being “trans”. I’m not surprised that they cancelled the show.

Having said that, it did wrap up fairly well. I would have liked to know what Hera and Artemis were going to do with their Amazon army. I was also looking forward to Dionysius and Ari getting together, because that’s the closest that actual Greek myth comes to a happy ending. Maybe Netflix can be persuaded to let someone write a novelization, with sequels.