The Darwin Incident

Episode 6

Provocation has been part and parcel to The Darwin Incident's modus operandi since its opening moments. Its subject matter is provocative. The opinions of its characters are provocative. The imagery it deploys in service of all this is provocative. A lot of the time the use of said provocative imagery overshadows any actual message being relayed, as in last week's episode featuring the scene of someone filming an abusive cop. This week's episode similarly strives for innovating intensity, even undercutting its own shock value—the turning-point scene in this episode was previewed in the show's general trailers, it opens with a content warning indicating how things are going to go, and with an arc title like "Red Pill Shooting Incident," there's not a lot of question about how they're trying to scare up attention here.

Is it provocation with purpose, though? A noticeable through-line of this episode is characters drawing delineations between pushes for rights and reforms between the historical and modern periods, and what gets deemed "acceptable" as far as effective protest. Gare's on-campus protest is as peaceful and approved above-board as could be, but still ultimately gets shut down because he was, in the parlance of our times, scaring the hoes. Later, Rivera articulates that the freedom fighters killing in the name of America's revolution would have been accurately termed "terrorists" at the time. The argument goes that what's moral is inherent, regardless of how society's pendulum swings, and those who fought for it at the time, however violently, are ultimately vindicated by history in the end.

Now, this side-taking perspective is to be expected from anybody recruiting for a movement as Rivera is. My issue with The Darwin Incident's deployment of it here is the way it supposes that these arguments are only being used as justification by an active terrorist group, portrayed as the antagonists in this narrative, promoting their cause at the time. Never mind that the ALA have consistently been shown as so ineffectual in their fanaticism as to be considered satire more than anything else—Rivera's agenda seemingly stretching several moves ahead to acquire Charlie indicates that he might ultimately be doing this for reasons beyond genuine animal altruism.

Similarly, it certainly is a choice to have the first character to confront and combat real-world racism in this show be said active, antagonistic terrorist who then uses it as a Teachable Moment to radicalize a young recruit into his agenda. These are structures the show has tacitly acknowledged are in place previously. So to use the violent murder of an unsympathetic gutter racist as but shock-value showing of Gare's radicalization, it sticks out. It raises the question of how much The Darwin Incident comprehends the imagery and comparisons it's co-opting versus using them purely because they're provocative.

Just consider the name of Gare's streaming channel. This in-universe "Red Pill" channel has nothing to do with what the term "Red Pill" has taken to mean in real-world social media arenas, nor is any effort made to explain the original Matrix-made terminology that might inform Gare's choice of nomenclature. It's simply a term picked up because the writing knows it's loaded in real-world circles and technically a shorthand for online radicalization. Yeah, it might actually be interesting to analyze how toxic masculinity feeds into that online radicalization and how that might even intersect with the show's takes on meat-eating as a societal ill, but it has no interest in that beyond trotting the term "Red Pill" out as provocative American imagery.

And in the arena of provocative American imagery, it doesn't get much more provoking than a mass shooting at a school. I can appreciate the meta-awareness The Darwin Incident displays with what it's doing, how Gare's livestreamed massacre is itself meant to incite both society overall and Charlie on an individual level. Granted, similar follies with Rivera's agendas come up with it, in that Gare's act is but part of an overall scheme, as opposed to the organic outburst of one spurned individual. Then again we know that online school-shooting cults purposefully radicalizing people within are absolutely a thing these days, so it's arguable that component tracks after all.

Part of the issue making all this imagery so loaded (or unloaded depending on if all this sound and fury ends up signifying nothing) is how it's predicated on Charlie's pending response. He correctly assesses early in the episode that he shouldn't have to be a mouthpiece justifying the rights of himself or any group he represents. And Rivera's use of Gare as a school shooter is designed around exploiting the disconnect in Charlie's drive to protect other beings and his base inclination toward self-preservation—never mind that Charlie himself has been shown as conflicted about that first part. The Darwin Incident is at least capable of not wholly making characters feel like authorial mouthpieces, as both Charlie and Rivera have been read as wrong in their perspectives at points in the narrative.

But it's still emblematic of the Sword-of-Damocles-style nature of what The Darwin Incident's ultimate point will be. That is, if it comes down on one at all and isn't just throwing provocations out. The scenes of Gare stalking the halls of the school with an automatic weapon are intense in their real-world banality. This even includes the Guy Fawkes mask and the fact that he's streaming on a channel called "Red Pill Gary." This kind of weaponized 4chan-grade cringe is how many modern mass shooters have operated, after all. It makes effective use of the dry, workmanlike presentation the show has had all through this, eliciting the kind of shock it's clearly striving for. Yet it's mostly a stunt at this point, both in and out of universe.

I don't want to react to the portrayal of a school shooting with an uncertain shrug, but that's where The Darwin Incident has left me, at least at this moment. So many of the arguments it throws out in the lead-up feels more like it's intended to swerve the audience in the same way as the Joker from The Dark Knight who was name-checked last week—a way to freak out the audience by making them go "Man, this bad guy actually has a point!" But the basic point of retroactive recognition of justice doesn't land anywhere until the story defines what it believes justice is in its setting in the moment. The Darwin Incident can and has gotten there before, mapping its arguments in ways that speak to the tenor of the real world. But right now, all it's doing is putting out shocking images in an effort to provoke arguing with it, not unlike Gare protesting on-campus with his signs.

Rating:

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The Darwin Incident is currently streaming on Prime Video.

Chris's favorite ape is probably Optimus Primal. He can be found posting about anime, transforming robots, and the occasional hopefully more salient political commentary over on his BlueSky.