For anyone who’s fallen in love with a show, you know that feeling of emptiness you get after you’ve finished a great series. You fall into a sort of limbo where no other shows interest you, and you don’t know what to watch. Well, that was me a few weeks back.
I had just finished watching Schitt’s Creek, a sitcom that follows the wealthy Rose family who suddenly find themselves broke. The only thing left under their name is a small town called Schitt’s Creek which they bought as a joke years earlier and what eventually becomes their saving grace.
After crying over the emotional final episode, that emptiness had arrived. I had heard about a Netflix drama mini-series, “The Queen’s Gambit”, about a chess player, but who really wants to watch a show about chess? No one right? Wrong.
This coming-of-age period drama set in the late 1960s follows the life of Beth Harmon played by Anya Taylor-Joy, an orphan who battles with addiction while on a mission to become a grandmaster, the highest class a chess player can attain.
Opening with a young woman waking up disoriented in a Paris hotel room who downs some pills with alcohol, audiences watch as she scrambles to dress for what we eventually find out, is an important game of chess.
Oh, we sure are in for a ride with this one. The episode brings us back about a decade or so, to when Beth is brought to an orphanage in Kentucky after surviving a car crash which killed her mother. At first it seems like something out of a psychological horror film with the twins from “The Shining” about to be seen down a hallway or ghosts drifting through the walls. The halls are dimly lit, the façade is manor-like, and the employees give the orphans “vitamins” – two pills, one red and one green which are said to “even their dispositions”. The pills, we later discover, are tranquilizers which play a crucial role in the storyline of the mini-series.
The series, written and directed by Scott Frank, is based on the novel by Walter Tevis that goes by the same name. Beth comes across chess when she is sent down to the basement to clean chalkboard erasers and encounters the orphanage’s janitor, Mr. Shaibel played by Bill Camp, who she sees playing chess by himself. After realizing she has a knack for the game, he eventually becomes her chess teacher. When the rest of the world seems to confuse her, the game is the only thing that makes any sense. At night, after popping a few tranquilizers, Beth is able to hallucinate chessboards upside-down on the ceiling and replay games and techniques she has learned.
From the orphanage, Beth is adopted, and her skills are quickly noticed. The show continues through her teenage years and depicts her life as a glamourous but distressed and troubled chess prodigy. This coming-of-age story is also about a woman rising in the chess hierarchy in a male-dominated sport and world.
Whether it be from the way she picks up the chess pieces or the way she glides as she walks, Taylor-Joy brings a charming awkwardness, witty, smart, and eventually elegant character to life. The beauty of this series is that you don’t need to understand the game in order to love the show.
Although the plot doesn’t delve much into Beth’s biological or adoptive parents’ backgrounds or that of other characters, the overall theme of the miniseries of whether or not Beth can overcome and survive the obsessive factors that contribute to her success, it is still an engaging watch. This is a story about hope and overcoming extreme odds.
To Beth, chess is “an entire world of just 64 squares.” So, with that being said and all our pieces in place, “The Queen’s Gambit” is sure to cure that post-series depression.
