Crime
The Artful Dodger
Oliver Twist’s Artful Dodger isn’t 13 anymore: He’s an adult. And being an adult comes with more grown-up problems.
If you find yourself in trouble in Berlin—as in, “there’s someone on my tail trying to kill me” trouble—there’s only one number to call.
Simon and Meret Schafer operate a top-secret safe house where undercover agents, mercenaries, or anyone with an unconventional career can hide. If they find themselves compromised, they make one call, and Simon and Meret help them disappear. Sure, it’s not the safest job in the world, but compared to the couple’s past lives as government spies, it’s a walk in the park.
Until those past lives come back to haunt them.
On their daughter Nina’s 16th birthday, Simon and Meret pick up a customer that’s not actually a customer. He’s an undercover agent sent to eliminate them.
They don’t go down that easily, of course, but the appearance of an assassin means that someone’s out to get them. The trouble is, with a past as messy as theirs, it’s hard to tell who that someone is.
As an unknown enemy closes in, Simon and Meret must figure out who’s hunting them and save not just their lives, but Nina’s as well. To protect their future, they’ll finally have to face their past.
It’s fitting that most of Unfamiliar’s first episode takes place at night, because this German spy thriller is dark, dark, and did I mention dark?
A few bright spots manage to shine through, such as Simon and Meret’s touching relationship with their daughter. But those spots are few and far between. Brutal violence, from melee combat to gunfights to torture, takes center stage and drowns everything else out.
These scenes of violence aren’t necessarily gory—you won’t get any gruesome close-ups of gunshot wounds—but the sheer reality of what’s happening may be enough to put off squeamish viewers. For example, in one scene, Simon and Meret perform an emergency cesarean section on a dying mother (long story); the action happens mostly offscreen, but the looks on the characters’ faces are enough to make it a harrowing experience.
Our central characters aren’t exactly upstanding figures, either. Sure, Meret might only threaten torture to find out if her daughter is safe, but at the end of the day, torture is still torture. And her readiness to get her hands dirty suggests she has some past experience in the area. It’s hard to root for two people with a string of literal skeletons in their past and no qualms about making more.
Couple all of that with frequent foul language, and Unfamiliar is, to put it lightly, not for everyone. In fact, when it comes to this gritty spy drama, “unfamiliar” is where most viewers should stay.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Note: This review covers the episode in the original German language with English subtitles. Language concerns may differ slightly in the English-dubbed version.
Ex-spies Simon and Meret Schafer operate a safe house in Berlin, unbeknownst to their teenage daughter, Nina. When an assassin tries to eliminate them, the couple must figure out which of their old enemies has come back to haunt them.
Multiple scenes of action and violence occur throughout the episode. The would-be assassin, Mark, cuts a tracker out of his stomach and shoots himself in the leg to get inside the safe house. We see a brief close-up of the abdominal cut, but the scene ends just as he’s about to fire the gun.
Once Meret uncovers Mark’s true intentions, she ties him to a chair and punches him repeatedly. She also threatens him with torture devices, but before she can use them, Mark breaks free, and they engage in an intense and extensive hand-to-hand fight. Meret stabs him in the back, they ruthlessly beat each other, and finally Meret wins by choking Mark to death. The entire sequence is brutal; you won’t find any pulled punches here.
In a flashback, Simon and Meret find a heavily pregnant woman who’s been poisoned, and they perform an emergency C-section to save the baby. Nothing explicit is shown onscreen, but it’s another tense, harrowing sequence. (The baby survives, and we later learn the mother made it through alive as well.)
While Mark is tied up, he jokes about being a sex slave. A group of government agents drink socially at a bar. After surviving the assassination attempt, Simon and Meret share a drink of whiskey.
The f-word is used nine times, and the s-word is used four. God’s name is taken in vain three times. “H—“ and “a–“ are each used once.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
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