This was another Netflix show that I could have gone either way with but the last episode just made me drop a star or two. The filming is well done. The story is very interesting. The acting for the most part is solid. But the writing really needed a lot of improvement. I have zero problems with nudity in any film or series. Here it just seemed gratuitous. The reasoning for the nudity was fairly weak and pointless since we saw Sofia cross over totally clothed. I won't give more away but the constant contradiction by the writers got irritating. On one had, the cult says this life isn't real and your body is nothing but a vessel. On the other hand, they drug up Sofia into having a weird orgy because she had to give up her body to lift the veil. So which is it? If she had to have sex in order to lift the veil, then her body matters. It may still be a vessel and all but without her body the veil wouldn't have been lifted.
The other big problem is the lack of explanation for everything. We know this relates to Gnosticism but why Sofia and her mother? Because they were special? What happened in her family's history that made them so important only to Gnostics? Every other religion had no use for Sofia but coincidentally the Gnostics did and luckily her and her family were there and never left their small town. They could have moved thousands of miles away and no one would have found them but nope. They stayed in the only town in the world with the gate to hell that only Sofia and her mom could open. And this wasn't some secret either. Most of the older people in their small town knew about the gate to hell. Yet in a town that small there were no stories or myths or anything to allude to it. Not even the miners who worked there for years had ever discovered this overly conspicuous stone door that led to the gates of hell. Groovy.
The last episode just killed it. Knowing the choices she had, knowing that everything was up to her and her alone, knowing that she was lied to by the cult, knowing all that she personally lost, Sofia still hadn't learned a single thing. Yeah, the want a second season obviously but they wasted a good premise with iffy writing.
The other big problem is the lack of explanation for everything. We know this relates to Gnosticism but why Sofia and her mother? Because they were special? What happened in her family's history that made them so important only to Gnostics? Every other religion had no use for Sofia but coincidentally the Gnostics did and luckily her and her family were there and never left their small town. They could have moved thousands of miles away and no one would have found them but nope. They stayed in the only town in the world with the gate to hell that only Sofia and her mom could open. And this wasn't some secret either. Most of the older people in their small town knew about the gate to hell. Yet in a town that small there were no stories or myths or anything to allude to it. Not even the miners who worked there for years had ever discovered this overly conspicuous stone door that led to the gates of hell. Groovy.
The last episode just killed it. Knowing the choices she had, knowing that everything was up to her and her alone, knowing that she was lied to by the cult, knowing all that she personally lost, Sofia still hadn't learned a single thing. Yeah, the want a second season obviously but they wasted a good premise with iffy writing.