Animation
Knuckles
The Sonic spinoff blends explosive adventure and road-trip-buddy-comedy into a fun romp for both kids and diehard fans.
Europe was a backwater in the 13th century, filled with squabbling kings and lords and bishops. The East was where the real action was.
The Mongol Empire dwarfed those of Rome and Persia. Alexander’s mighty realm would’ve shivered in its shadow. It stretched from modern-day Turkey to China and beyond. The Mongols expanded their sprawling space by bringing down king and kingdom, destroying whole villages and slaughtering their citizens. By the latter half of the 1200s, Kublai Khan—nominal ruler over this endless stretch of land—was thought by many Europeans to be in league with Satan himself.
Sounds like a great guy to visit, doesn’t he?
Marco Polo thinks so. He decides to sneak aboard his dad’s ship when his father, Niccolò, is opening a trade route between Europe and Kublai’s Khanate. And when Niccolò hands over young Marco to the Great Khan as something of a poker chip, well, there’s not much Marco could do but make the best of it.
History knows Marco Polo, of course, as one of the world’s greatest adventurers—a man who inspired many an explorer thereafter (including Christopher Columbus) as well as countless watery games of hide and seek. For Netflix, though, Marco Polo serves as another sort of inspiration: a series far more interested in exploring the intricacies of sexual politics than Kublai’s exotic empire.
The inaugural season of Marco Polo (released in its entirety Dec. 12, 2014) deals with Kublai’s efforts to quell the stubborn Chinese city of Xiangyang (and thus bring all of China to heel), while Marco becomes ever more familiar with Mongol and Chinese culture.
But the fact that he, and others, grow so familiar with one another—as in intimately familiar—makes this show far more objectionable than your typical PBS doc on European adventurers. The sex and nudity here, unfettered by any sort of TV network standards, can be both pervasive and extreme. Women cavort partly or sometimes completely unclothed, and everyone, it seems, engages in all manner of sultry, sleazy, sweaty escapades.
This new land for Marco can also be a place of great danger, strife and cruelty. We see people fight and kill in sometimes very bloody ways. Corpses can litter the screen, impaled and/or rotting.
History geeks like me might appreciate the feel of this series. But lessons about the complexity and surprising liberality of that age-old Far East civilization are learned at one’s personal peril.
“The Wayfarer”
Marco Polo travels to the court of Kublai Khan with his father and uncle, hoping to establish trade relations with Kublai’s empire. They succeed only when Marco’s father offers the boy up as a servant to the ruthless leader.
Khan wants Marco to prove his loyalty by walking through his harem without “touching” any of his women. We see the naked and mostly naked women paw at him and begin to strip off his clothes as orgy-like sexual acts are committed in graphic manner around them (heterosexual and homosexual). There are fully exposed sexual motions, positions and sounds. The episode includes other explicit sex scenes as well, including prostitution, and always featuring nudity.
In a storm, Christian priests call out, apparently ineffectually, to God, while sailors try to keep their ship afloat. One is later killed with arrows, and the rest run away. “This says very little for your Savior,” Kublai says when he learns about the priests. He tells the Polos that Christianity is welcome in his kingdom, as are all other religions, but demands the Pope pay him fealty. Marco’s father gives Marco a cross from Jerusalem.
The Polos walk through a village filled with corpses impaled on spikes. Marco trains with and is beaten badly by a blind martial artist. Kublai orders Marco’s mouth to be filled with “horse s—.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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