When Spartacus and Crassus finally face off on a sandy summit above a swirling, immense battle, “Victory,” the finale of Spartacus, isn’t afraid to be emotionally manipulative. It’s hard not to be overcome with dismay as Crassus grasps Spartacus’s sword and swings it towards him (from “Enemies of Rome”), or stunned delight as Spartacus blocks…
I imagine, for some people, that “The Dead and the Dying,” the penultimate episode ever of Spartacus, will stand as an engrossing, exciting episode of television. It features Spartacus, upon hearing word of Crixus becoming the defeated Gaul, turning the tables on Crassus with some clever deception, then staging a battle in the arena to…
Given there’s only have three episodes left, the first half of “Separate Paths” is surprisingly slow, bringing the inevitable Crixus/Spartacus conflict to a head with genuine respect for the difficult relationship that has developed between the men since they met in Batiatus’s ludus. Given the short shrift Crixus has had this season, it was good…
“Mors Indecepta” showed the best and worst of Spartacus. At its best, we had the continuation of the thrilling chess match between Spartacus and Crassus, with Spartacus’s catastrophic attempt to assassinate Crassus followed by his stunning turnaround: conquering the trench and building a bridge out of hundreds of fucking corpses. At its worst, the episode…
After two brutal, action-packed chapters, “Spoils of War” is – after a bloody prologue – a less eventful, less bloody episode. It confidently establishes Gannicus as a hero worthy of admiration and solidifies Crassus as a formidable foe– witness his blithe disregard of Gannicus’s diversion attempt, and the reveal of his true plan at episode’s…
Let’s take a moment to consider how far Spartacus has come. The first episodes are justly maligned, more a cut-rate rip-off of 300 than the complex, thoughtful yet deliciously trashy melodrama we’ve since enjoyed. But even as the first season hit its stride, it remained a small-scale show, filled with scrappy battles and petty political…
Decimation – the Roman tradition of killing one in every ten men as punishment – is not only a key event in this episode of Spartacus: War of the Damned, it’s an appropriate title for a brutal, violent episode, an hour-long slog through blood that leaves you feeling unclean afterwards. As I discussed after the…
This week’s Spartacus episode was in many ways a “typical” Spartacus episode – a good stretch of the running time was spent at a drunken party, filled with female and male nudity, a handful of sex scenes and, of course, bouts of violence born of mistrust or competitiveness. The conclusion went from a confrontation between…
Spartacus is a series that’s always made good use of Australian and New Zealand actors and in the second, middling quality episode of Season 3 it introduces a couple new Australasians to the fold. The first addition is Anna Hutchison (Underbelly, Cabin in the Woods) who plays Laeta, introduced to show the human toll of…
Spartacus is and always has been a show drenched in violence (also sex, though that’s mostly peripheral to the narrative). This is clear from opening scenes where we see Spartacus and his men slice their way through countless nameless Romans. This is a concern for me in this final season. The violence in the first…
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