And so, the new partnership between Inkblot and Netflix has its first series. When the trailer for Far From Home dropped, a lot of the discourse was heavy on how the characters did not look like high school kids, and the retort to that was that in Netflix shows like Elite and Blood & Water, those characters barely passed for high school kids either. Simply, all three series look weird, and Far From Home was hardly going to get cut slack for it, with the likes of Genoveva Umeh and Olumide Oworu in particular having previously played grown adults in other works. There are (valid) reasons why the roles of high school kids are played by older characters, but nonetheless, weird. Weirder if they’re actors we’ve very much seen before.
But that’s not the only thing discourse surrounding Far From Home, is it? We’ll probably get there…
The Good
I came across the Engines all over the Floor analogy this week – thanks to another Netflix show – and I’m sad to report I might overuse that thing till it bleeds. Simply put, you’re working on a car, so you take out the engine parts and put them all over the floor as part of the work. First problem; suddenly some of those parts no longer fit where you took them out from, so you just have to do away with them and hope that saves your ass. Second problem; anytime you get rid of them, more parts just show up and the cycle of stress never ends. You’re in a hellish loop.
For Ishaya Bello – played by Mike Afolarin – that cycle seemed endless, and the engine parts on the floor were never leaving. It wasn’t just a case of him getting out of one issue and into another. It was that he basically used one problem as a temporary solution for another.
And the sense of chaos and discomfort that is shown is where Far From Home gets some merit. Even for the viewer, it becomes quite stressful. And that’s aided by some decent acting.
Sadly, though, that may well be that in terms of the good for this series.
The Bad
While there’s a sense of intrigue, albeit discomforting, in Far From Home, at some point it starts to lose weight. There’s the fact that anytime we see Ishaya get into some trouble and it ends in a cliffhanger, he gets out of it, degrading the intrigue in itself. But what makes it worse is that anytime we end on a cliffhanger, we follow up with the cliff already dealt with. and an aftermath it comes with lasts about half a minute. Soon, we know what’s coming, and eventually, we stop caring.
The biggest accusation Far From Home faced in terms of story, though, was how it felt like an imitation of Hollywood high school, and frankly, that’s an understatement. Far From Home doesn’t just take every Hollywood high school cliché it could find – the outcast and star student have a will-they-won’t-they thing, the rich kid who wants to prove himself to his father, etc. Far From Home takes every Hollywood high school cliché, chops out its middle bit, and goes from start frame to end frame almost immediately, and the biggest case in point might be the dialogue. It has nothing to invest in but wants us to get invested. It offers little that’s concrete yet wants to command attention.
There’s the fact that Franklin Umenze does next-to-nothing to the plot, and even stops working as the plot armour device he was for Ishaya.
Then there’s the drug-dealing duo of Rambo (Bolanle Ninalowo) and Government (Bucci Franklin), where Rambo is so absurd with decision-making as a bad guy, it’s cartoonish, while Government reeks of a cheap rendition of another Hollywood cliché. But what makes it more galling is how they become the ultimate villain in the end, stripping whatever flesh this series had of a being story of teens trying to find themselves in, and simply pivoting to a good-guy-bad-guy scenario that speaks to a weird need for utter simplicity.
If you said Far From Home had some bad writing, you’d be sugarcoating it. If you didn’t say that, it’d be understood that you didn’t acknowledge Far From Home had any writing at all.
Then the series ends on some cliffhanger bit, whereby there seems to be more to come, even though, particularly from the point of the main character, there’s little to go back to.
The Ugly
Nice how Nigerians are watching a Nigerian series where kids do molly, and have beach parties, and there have barely been complaints about how we’re copying western culture to engage in moral decadence.
Conclusion:
Far From Home is neither bold, unique, or intriguing. It has nothing new enough to justify being below par, nor is it interesting enough to cover its flaws. We expect more to come from Inkblot and Netflix, but hope for better.
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