Archive 81 netflix show spoilers
So the A81 netflix show dropped today, and I know we were all dunking on it anyway, but they have not only made Melody Pendras fully straight, but also made her wife her straight roommate, and then also made Melody and Samuel romantic interests.
If this were an original show, I can see why they did it - have one of the protagonists fall in love with the evil guy, have it be a betrayal, and have her roommate be a supportive force in her life keeping her grounded. But this isn’t an original show - although, in my opinion, it should be with how little it resembles the source material - this is based on a story already, one that has one of the central relationships be two gay women who start off already in a committed relationship and end up getting married afterwards. The show has taken her anchor, the woman she loves, and turned her into her messy roommate, who cheers her on as she kisses the villain. If that doesn’t bother you, or make your stomach turn, then I frankly don’t want to hear from you.
In the original podcast, her connection to and love for Alexa, her girlfriend, is the reason why she does everything she can to survive the Visser building, why she forms a place in The City for the Visser community and builds herself and Alexa a cottage to live in peacefully, and why inevitably they get married. For a character stuck in 1994, this kind of relationship was not only still controversial, but Alexa even experiences homophobia to the point of killing the guy to be with Melody again. Gay people populate all of Archive 81, and its a podcast that shows gay people can be extraordinary, and we will survive through great tragedy. Alexa and Melody loved each other so much they killed for their love, they left behind their homophobic families for love, they built community for love, and they’ve been married for 20+ years. To have Melody lose that anchor and that relationship makes it harder to believe why she would survive through the season (although again, they’ve already changed it beyond recognition from the original).
Melody doesn’t even meet Samuel until the end of Season 1 - she hears about him in passing stories, glimpses of his followers, murmurs through the walls of the cult meetings he holds. Samuel is designed to be a heard but not seen villain, the picture of a condescending academic who uses the people of Visser to reach his ends, uncaring about their fate, whereas Melody actively forms community in the building. The fight in Visser is not two lovers and good VS evil, it is a fight between chaos VS order, poverty VS capital, and the individual VS community.
To take everything building the narrative of season 1, to turn Melody straight, to turn her wife into her roommate, to turn Samuel into a love interest, and to change the entire conflict and reasoning behind the story, is to ultimately destroy the meaning of the show. And frankly, even if they wanted to just fuck the plot into the ground, to make an important gay woman straight just to appeal to netflix’s homophobic values is pitiful and disgusting.
I strongly dissuade people from giving it any attention. I wanted to watch the whole thing to see how it turns out, but watching Melody kiss a man actually made my blood boil.
