‘1899’ Episode 6 Recap: A History of Violence

1899 has been trafficking in tragic backstories since the start. Maura’s institutionalization. The arson murder-suicide of Eyk’s family. Jérôme being betrayed and framed by his friend Lucien. Ling Yi accidentally killing a friend in order to sell herself into non-consensual sex work. The homophobia from which Krester, Ángel, and Ramiro are all fleeing in their own ways. All of these are compelling stories to one degree or another, even if a few feel more like stories than glimpses into reality.

This episode, though, gets real. Jesus, does it ever. In easily the show’s most disturbing sequences to date, the standard hallucinatory flashbacks, centered around Tove, show how she was brutally beaten and raped by the owner of the land on which her family were tenant farmers. There’s no real reason to give any credence to the words of a rapist, but he tells her family, whom he ties up and forces to watch the assault, that he’s doing this in retaliation for Krester taking the “innocence” of his son. By the time he attacks Tove he’s already shot half of Krester’s face off, lending an extra element of horror and helplessness to their appalling plight.

It’s a prolonged, graphically depicted act, one for which even Tove’s eventual escape, beating, and killing of her attacker provides little catharsis, so brutal and unpleasant was everything that preceded it. Considering its marked departure from 1899’s somber but not gut-wrenching tone and the pre-existing debate surrounding fictional depictions of sexual violence on screen, I’d imagine some viewers will object. Given that, I feel, it genuinely is more than 1899 viewers may have bargained for, I don’t even blame them.

But behind the show’s genre elements are, ostensibly, human stories designed to give those elements heft and weight. Nothing we’ve seen thus far feels weightier than what we see Tove survive. What’s more, to the extent 1899 is serious at all about its by-now obvious allegorical resonance with real-world refugee and resource crises, accurately depicting an act of violence as hideous and traumatic rather than stylized and dramatic is necessary to get the point across. The show is treating this as the terrible crime it is, and not allowing the audience to look away. 

Regarding that genre material, it’s getting more epic in scope by the hour. But first, the basic setup of the episode. The survivors have split up in groups: Eyk and Maura search for the Boy; Anker, Ramiro, and the first mate man the telegraph in the bridge; Mrs. Wilson, Iben, Tove, and Clémence search for other survivors; and Franz, Olek, Lucien, Jérôme, Ângel, Daniel, and Ling Yi head down to the coal furnaces to get the engine running again. 

Little character moments are sprinkled throughout all this: Clémence puts on a pair of men’s pants, inspired by Tove’s apparent self-determination; Ling Yi and Olek kiss; Anker confesses that he doesn’t believe in God, much less that God is speaking to his wife Iben; in the episode’s sole funny moment, Ramiro kisses Anker right on the head when the lights go back on in the darkened ship, then immediately pulls away like, whoops, got a little carried away there.

But the sci-fi stuff is where things get really ambitious. A series of growing, pulsating, black crystalline outcroppings start popping up all over the ship, and even in the netherworlds to which the hidden black shafts lead. Mrs. Wilson touches one and it turns her entire hand black, which she keeps from the group.

Eyk and Maura, who are growing closer and closer, wander into her little reality pocket and investigate the asylum her father owned, having built it to try to find a cure for her mother’s dementia, which he blamed on their kids. They discover the hull of the ship behind its façade of reality. And it should be noted that Maura had the same room number in the asylum — 1011, a partial tip of the hat to 1984‘s Room 101 — as she does on the Kerberos.

Then Daniel shows up, warning them they’re running out of time, that “it’s spreading everywhere,” and — here’s the kicker — that he’s Maura’s husband of 12 years. Maura, who doesn’t recognize him, just about loses her mind and locks him up at gunpoint, though not before he uses his little pocket gizmo (which she steals) to send Eyk to his own pocket reality. 

Throughout Eyk and Maura’s journey we get some of the show’s most openly surreal (as in Magritte) imagery to date, as they climb out of and contemplate big square holes in the air. There’s an homage to The Shining when Ramiro and Anker discover every book in the bridge consists solely of the repeated sentence “May your coffee kick in before reality does.” And when Eyk crawls back out of his pocket reality through a shaft, he finds himself aboard the Prometheus, surrounded by dozens of other abandoned ships of the same design.

And watching over it all is Maura’s father, Henry Singleton, from the comforts of what looks like a post-apocalyptic future reality overrun by the crystal outcroppings and presided over by a massive black pyramid, just like the one possessed by the Boy they’re searching for. By “they” I mean Henry and the first mate, who uses the warp zone under the ship’s bar to travel to this reality (a “breach of protocol,” Henry says) to report to the older man. 

Also a big storm is coming, and “All Along the Watchtower” plays, just in case you were concerned the climactic needledrops were getting any subtler. 

All in all, this is an effective and affecting episode, easily 1899’s most difficult material to date. As I said, you may or may not feel it earned the atrocity it depicts. But hopefully, it’s a sign that the show is not content to resign itself to sci-fi chills and thrills. It may well have much more on its mind.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.