ZilFuchs

I'm very surprised to say about a series gone this long, but Guagamela is one of the best episodes so far.

The episode has taken a lot from classical literature, especially the history of Alexander the Great's Macedonian empire. The name of the episode is a reference to one of Alexander's greatest victories, the battle of Gaugamela. Marco Inaros assumes the role of Alexander. His ship is called Pella, which was also the capital city of ancient Macedon.

Marco Inaros' (Keon Alexander) speech at the end uses a lot of rhetorical techniques used by kings and generals of the past, as written down by ancient scholars. He is a bona fide space-faring warrior-king. The juxtaposition of The Belt and ancient Macedon/Greece is very clear for those who are well versed in this part of history. The Macedonians and Greeks were vassalized and later incorporated into the Persian Empire and suffered through great ordeal and atrocities. The Persians considered themselves to be at the centre of the World, or "Inners", while the Greeks for them were at the outer edge, or "the belt" with inferior peoples. Alexander, with his Macedonian beratna and "Free Greeks" seized the Persian Empire like a lightning storm, or should I say asteroid shower. Like Alexander's army of the past, Inaros' troops care little if the casualties of the enemy are soldiers or civilians, deeming it their right to exact revenge upon their oppressors.

In his speech Inaros talks about how the outer planets and the Ring Worlds now belong to the Belters. This can be seen as a reference to what Alexander The Great told his troops - that the uncharted and unknown worlds of the east (modern India) belonged to the Hellenic peoples after the crucial victory at Gaugamela which opened the Gates of Babylon for his army. When Inaros talks about a new way of life, a better way, a Belter way, this again is what Alexander The Great's objective and conduct was. As his army moved across lands they were followed by a huge amount of architects, engineers, clergymen and scholars whose task was to establish new cities and Hellenize the conquered lands.

I lift my hat to the authors of the novels. They have done their research and fictionalized it superbly, and of course the production team for putting it all on screen so well. Now I'm very curious to find out whether Inaros faces his "mutiny at Opis" later on in the story (I have not read the books).

This series was a fantastic find and it shows the deep understanding of the human psyche that is so visible in Russian art.

I was afraid the show would descend into another variation of "teen detective" like 13 Reasons Why, for example. The fear was totally misguided.

S'parta is full of complicated and believable characters, each with their own internal motivations. None of them feel like they exists just to direct the plot or other characters into one way or another. There are no clear-cut heroes or villains to be found. They all have a reason to think they are doing the right thing, but still people end up dead.

The viewer is sucked into liking some characters, empathizing with them, and later finding out several reasons why not to. Alexander Petrov does a fantastic job portraying the charismatic and enigmatic character of Michail Barkovskiy, the leader of his school class. It's simply impossible not to like him at first, but as the series progresses the viewer starts to question whether he really is such a "good" person or not. Looking at vile authoritarian leaders in world history people always ask: "How did everyone get sucked into that? I wouldn't have!". S'parta examines this theme with great understanding.

The show uses a lot of temporal jumps between the past, present and future but manages to somewhat obfuscate which one is which without making it confusing. Along with the harsh visuals and surroundings, together with the music used in the show it all serves to give it a strong sense of determinism - an unstoppable domino of cause and effect that Igor Andreevich Kryuko (Artyom Tkachenko) tries to unravel. Portraying a multi-layered, gifted but troubled detective, Tkachenko is excellent in his role.

It's very rare to find a TV show using a lot of young actors without having at least some bad performances mixed in, but in all honesty I found none of that. I am absolutely sure many of the actors and actresses in the show will have a long future in Russian film. Like always, I watched it in original language with subtitles. If you watch it dubbed, you can only blame yourself for that. You wouldn't give a serious thought to a dubbed song either, would you?

All in all, if you are able to watch a show using subtitles or happen to understand Russian, I highly recommend this show. If you happen to be an action-addict, S'parta is not what you are looking for. I've never rated anything as 10/10 and will not do so now either, but I do believe this to be the best series I've seen all year, and I've seen a lot.

I never read reviews or watch trailers before seeing a film or a series and this was no exception. I came in with an open mind and was thoroughly disappointed.

I don't know who came up with the idea that the show is sci-fi. It's just another run-of-the-mill American high-school drama played out in a comic book. The characters are such stereotypical cliches that is hurts. You have the altruistic main protagonist with zero flaws, the small leather-clad Asian chick with a sword and a motorcycle, the crazy Mexican cartel chick, the black teddy bear, a dumb Soviet jockey and so on. There is absolutely zero character development, unless you count all of them becoming superhero-like killing machines overnight.

The only parts where this show offers at least some depth of thought is in the narration parts of the main protagonist. There's a big gaping flaw to this, though - it's impossible to connect the narration with the character. They simply don't align. The only thing that seems to connect them is the voice of the actor.

I wasn't expecting any "realism" from a show like this. However, I did expect some kind of story line consistency, which there is none of. The school is supposed to be a strict environment, where disobedience is punishable by death. Yet the teen rebels break all the rules in all the episodes without ever facing the consequences.

The show itself doesn't seem to know what genre it is trying to be. Some parts play out exactly like a boring teen soap, some are that of an animated comic, some are from a bad musical and so on. At times it tries to become a comedy, but achieves that only in the self-irony of how bad it is.

It's hard to imagine what kind of target audience the show was trying to reach. It feels like it's for young teenagers, but they are basically excluded by the age restriction created by needless violence. I say needless because there's very little build-up and next to no tension. You always know the superhero teens will come out unscathed. The deaths that do occur don't feel like anything.

The acting in the show is mediocre at best, but I can't blame the actors for that. Their characters are so poorly written that I don't think even a star lineup could've done much to change that. The only actress who I felt like distinguished from the gray mass of meaningless characters was that played by María Gabriela de Faría.

I just about managed to watch through it all, albeit with rather heavy use of fast-forwarding. The show would have lost nothing had it been a 90 minute film, and even then it would have been a bad one.

I would not recommend the show to anyone. If this is what SyFy cancelled The Expanse for, they deserve to be bankrupt and buried for eternity.