Drama
Lord of the Flies
‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptations, via the book itself, intrinsically come with dark, violent moments. The Netflix version is no different.
Etta has embraced the family business, and she now wants to kill the competition. Literally.
That’s what happens when the family business is drug smuggling and all your, um, business partners were murdered in front of your eyes. Now Etta is out for blood, hoping to enact the most hostile of hostile takeovers. Sure, it won’t bring her loved ones back. But as long as she can slaughter the guilty, Etta can live with the pain.
Maybe.
Etta hadn’t been part of the family business for very long before things went seriously south. Her parents—whose front was a tourist-friendly boating business in south Florida—kept Etta strictly on tour-group duty, leading sunburned tourists through the swamps to spot an alligator or two. Etta’s folks wanted her to go to college and stuff: Leave the drug-running side of the biz to Etta’s not-so-bright brothers.
But Etta talked her way in—just as her parents’ criminal bosses decided to diversify into human trafficking.
Well, Etta wasn’t going to stand for that. In her opinion, flooding the country with cocaine is one thing, but selling scared women into slavery is another. She took a stand and, well, that stand got her whole family killed. The bad guys nearly got Etta, too. Indeed, criminal boss brothers Mateo and Samuel, along with their head enforcer, Elias, thinks she’s dead.
Au contraire. Etta’s alive—escaping a couple of serious scrapes on a boat called the Revenge. (Yes, the show’s a bit on-the-nose.) And clearly, she just has one option open to her: She must go to the police.
Just kidding! No, Etta has determined to kill everyone who took part in her family’s collective demise and create her own criminal empire for good measure.
Ah, that’s more like it.
Peacock’s M.I.A. has one thing going for it. Watching this salacious, shallow show makes me think that I, too, might one day write something that could be picked up by a streaming service and allow me to retire in guilty comfort.
We’d have to emphasize the word “guilty,” because I’d have to set aside many moral qualms to write a show where you’re supposed to root for a murderous drug dealer. M.I.A.’s ethical issues are legion—from its goopy, bloody violence to its R-rated language to its woefully skewed sense of right and wrong.
But even if you consider this an acceptable guilty pleasure (as Peacock would clearly prefer), you’re dealing with lackluster writing, uneven acting and plotting that is, incredibly, both ludicrous and predictable.
Ironically, the one thing that Peacock’s show M.I.A. isn’t missing is action. The onscreen deaths are brutal and bloody. We even see a pregnant woman get gunned down by cartel thugs. And as such, M.I.A. will be missing from my own streaming plans.
(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.)
Etta finally convinces her parents to let her take part in the family’s drug-smuggling operations. But shortly thereafter, their employer dies, leaving the illicit business to his two sons. One pushes to diversify into human trafficking. When Etta realizes what she and her family are being asking to haul now, she balks—allowing the trafficked women to escape. And while Etta’s mother tells Etta she’s proud of that decision, that decision also turns out to have fatal consequences.
Members of the drug cartel—the sons, their main enforcer and a bunch of henchmen—capture most of the family and corral them into a dockside warehouse. Etta escapes the roundup and hides in the waters nearby, but she’s unable to escape the horror of watching the rest of her family (as well as a deaf woman whom the killers mistake for Etta) being killed. Etta’s father gets shot in the head, and his blood sprays across the face of Etta’s mother. Etta’s two brothers and their wives (including one who’s pregnant) are also bloodily gunned down. The killers then pour gasoline over Etta’s mother and the deaf woman, presumably planning to set them alight while they’re still alive. The enforcer instead shows “mercy” to them both, shooting them before setting the warehouse on fire.
The original cartel leader says that he’s “rotting,” and he shows his legs as proof. One limb has been amputated; the other is mottled and riddled with infection. He hires someone to kill him with a set of lethal injections. After he dies, the man’s longtime nurse gets thrown, alive, into her employer’s coffin just before it’s sunk to the bottom of the sea. An alligator attacks and drags someone underwater. A character gets stabbed in his side. In an effort to get someone to fall out of a boat, Etta guns the ship’s engines. A character gets pushed over a fence. A woman is nearly thrown off a ship.
Trafficked women fill the hulls of two boats—unsure of where they’re even being taken. (They all eventually swim ashore to safety.) Etta and her father retrieve parcels filled with drugs (presumably cocaine) and hide them under the false bottom of a cooler. Etta’s father runs a deep-sea fishing operation, and his customers drink beer as they fish. (When Etta tries to take one for herself, her father tells her no: She’s working.)
A pregnant woman, presumably eager to give birth, says she wants to “get this thing out of me.” Etta tells her that sex and semen can induce labor. We see some women wearing slightly revealing garb.
We learn that the local sheriff is in on Etta’s family’s drug operation. He turns a blind eye when Etta uses live chickens to lure alligators to her tour boat. Etta and her family work to evade authorities.
We hear one f-word and three s-words. “B–tard” and “h—” are also heard, as well as one misuse of God’s name.
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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