Blue, white, red, green, gold — these are the colors of the factions whose drivers thrill the crowds at the Circus Maximus. But the color I want to talk about is purple. A dawn purple, a dusk purple, making the streets of Rome look cool and rich and inviting. This particular shade of purple doesn’t really show up until director Marco Kreuzpaintner takes over from Roland Emmerich for Those About to Die’s fourth episode. But after spending much of the intervening time in the amorphous, blue-and-orange color-graded no-man’s-land favored by so many TV productions today, it’s nice to spend a little time in lavender and violet. Feels appropriately imperial, doesn’t it?
Speaking of emperors, the third and fourth episodes of Those About to Die apparently mark the end of Anthony Hopkins’s time in his Palatine palace. The old emperor dies in the arms of his attendants, who hold him upright so he can die standing, all the better to ascend to godhood. The question of his deification is a pressing one, actually. In the history of Rome, only Julius, Augustus, and Claudius were deified upon their deaths; Vespasian wants the honor, and his son and heir, Titus, wants to give it to him.
That will take some wheeling and dealing. Using unorthodox veterinary science to cure their Andalusian horses of the poison given to them by hotshot driver Scorpus’s erstwhile employer and lover, Antonia, Tenax’s new Gold faction dodges an assassination plot, wins its first race, and earns its imperial backer, Domitian, a small fortune when he bets against all the other four factions before anyone else knows about the emergence of the fifth.
But to the likes of Senator Leto (Vincent Riotta), the blustery head of the White faction, and Consul Marsus (Rupert Penry-Jones), Antonia’s slimy husband and co-owner of the Blues, this upstart faction simply won’t do. (Thousands of rioters upset by the change in the betting structure agree.) So a tidy quid pro quo is arranged: Emperor Titus will shut down the Gold faction in exchange for the other faction leaders’ support of his father’s deification in the Senate.
This leaves the Golds floundering. Scorpus quits in frustration despite the fact that Tenax both rescued him from his mother’s pimp as a child and then fixed his first three races to cement his reputation. However, the racer finds the market for his talents very much a buyer’s one, as few of the faction owners want anything to do with him anymore.
Tenax, at least, can still make a killing in his betting tavern — especially with the charismatic polyglot Cala now taking bets from him and opening up his client base considerably through her linguistic skills and overall salesmanship. Cala is proving herself adept at the Roman way of things; barely in town a week, she has already bought her daughter Aura’s freedom, with her other kids, Jula and Kwame, on the agenda.
But this is easier said than done. Jula has attracted the sexual attention of Antonia and Marsus, while Kwame is basically slated to be raw meat in the arena. With the help of Antnoia’s friendly servant Drusilla (Gabrielle Scharnitzky), Cala comes up with a new plan: Win the aid of Cornelia (Alice Lamanna), the daughter Antonia turned over to the powerful order of vestal virgins as a child. The word of a vestal can mean freedom for the enslaved or the condemned, even if only the head of the order can ultimately grant it.
Marsus and Antonia have attracted a lot of interest, as it happens. Caltonia (Angeliqa Devi), the woman whose position as head of the Blue faction was usurped by buying up those shares from Tenax in the premiere, reaches out to Salena (Romana Maggiora Vergano), the woman whose husband stole the shares from her to begin with, now living in penury near the Spanish brothers. I don’t trust the older woman’s intentions at all, but it’s another wrinkle in the battle of the billionaire sports-team owners.
Tenax, meanwhile, has another problem of his own. A hulking brute named Ursus (Daniel Stisen) shows up, nearly drowning Tenax in sewage before threatening to blackmail him dry over his killing of their master when they were both kids. A fire broke out, separating them; Tenax, known as Quintus back then, fled, thinking Ursus dead. Instead, the kid was sold into maritime slavery, worked his way into the Roman army, and tracked his old pal down. It is exceedingly easy to find people in Those About to Die’s sprawling Roman Empire.
Particularly by episode four, however, Tenax has a co-lead in the form of Domitian, Vespasian’s failson. Actor Jojo Macari plays this cunning dirtbag the way Vincent D’Onofrio played Edgar the Bug in Men in Black: as if his skull were approximately eight inches too big for the skin of his face. Head tilted heavenward, jaw jutting, eyes bulging, cheekbones slaying, Domitian looks like he’s about to say “What is the meaning of this?!?†at all times. It’s a terrific meter for the role to be played, especially when he’s bouncing off cooler customers like his tough-guy brother, Titus, or his lowborn partner, Tenax.
Or, increasingly, his much-abused lover-servant, Hermes (Alessandro Bedetti), who’s clearly got a lot more going on behind his pretty eyes than his imperial lover suspects. Hermes endures Domitian’s most Joffrey-like tendencies with stoicism — when your life depends on pleasing a guy who clearly gets off on issuing casual death threats, I suppose you’d have to endure it. He puts up with being openly objectified as “a mouth and an ass,†being made to perform sexually while Domitian watches in much the same detached way he watches people get trampled and dismembered in the arena.
Yet Hermes also proves himself a capable cloak-and-dagger operator, helping his bf sneak out of house arrest when he was suspected of stealing from the imperial coffers to check out his extravagantly bewigged games master Passus’s (Victor von Schirach) new prize white lion. Much more crucially, Hermes has eyes and ears among the slaves, providing Domitian with intel on the people of his brother’s queen.
The funny thing about this show is how far down it pushes “Who’d actually be good for the people of the Empire?†in your list of concerns as a viewer. Titus is a brute and a liar who has no compunction dooming his Judean wife’s people to lives of servitude, but it’s in the service of a plan to restore clean running water to the city, per a dream/vision in which his late father instructed him to serve the people’s interests with the empire’s fortune. Domitian is a much keener observer of how to keep people happy without the intervention of his dad’s ghost, but that goes hand in hand with a manipulator’s ability to make them miserable in the first place, as he did by helping to engineer the recent grain shortage and resulting riots.
Or did he? Could Titus’s Judean wife, Berenice, have been the real culprit? That’s the direction Domitian steers his brother in by staging a lurid re-creation of the sack of Jerusalem, with one of her enslaved liaisons standing in for her in drag and that white lion playing Titus. Did the plot against Berenice that all of this was alleged to have put down, the one uncovered by Hermes but denied by its alleged participants, even exist?
That there are even questions of this sort to be asked, instead of everything being thuddingly obvious, speaks well for Those About to Die. A good summer distraction should, ideally, be exactly that: distracting. I now find myself interested in the comings and goings of various real and imagined Roman nobles, of the criminal underclass, of famous horse racers, of women from North Africa who speak German and know how to get a little action going, of goggle-eyed aristocratic sickos. There’s some pretty racy sex stuff, too, and a guy gets his arm and leg chopped off. That’s entertainment, baby. Let the games begin.