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lerato mthethwa 🇿🇦

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Thunderbolts* *The New Avengers (2025) dir. Jake Schreier

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Simone Biles

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DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN (2025-?) 1x09 | Straight to Hell

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My vagrant queen

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Adriyan Rae as Elida in the TV series VAGRANT QUEEN – 2020

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Adriyan Rae Joins Cast Of Mara Brock Akil’s Upcoming Netflix Series ‘Forever’ http://dlvr.it/T4zW5x

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Adriyan Rae Vagrant Queen (2020)

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So last night @chimericaloutlier and I finished watching the SyFy Channel show Vagrant Queen, based on a comic book neither of us have read, which I had been wanting to watch for a while now. The show only got one season back in 2020, so I knew not to get too attached.

What I didn't anticipate was that I was going to agree with a lot of the users on the IMDb. This show is very, very bad.

It's kind of a perfect example of what people mean when they say that we don't just want representation but that we want GOOD representation. Because here is a show led by a queer woman of color (playing an alien) who gets to have an onscreen romance with another woman (also an alien), but that's all in service of a show that reminded both my wife and I of nothing so much as Cleopatra 2525.

Mind you, at first that cheap cheesiness was part of the charm. But as the show wore on, the "syndicated adventure show from the late 90s vibes" became a lot less charming. Worse, like a lot of these kinds of shows the politics ended up being astonishingly bad.

As the title implies, our heroine is a deposed child queen who has been living in exile, hiding from the revolutionaries who overthrew her monarchy. And the revolutionaries are portrayed as Very Bad Guys, while every time we learn ANYTHING about the monarchy we begin to realize the Villains Were Absolutely Right. By the time the show ends on a cliffhanger centered on the remaining monarchists doing something evil it is clearly less of a "heel turn" and way more of an inevitable outcome of their true nature.

The season also hinges on a totally inconsistent MacGuffin that causes me no end of irritation to think about; every episode contains one "bullet-time freezeframe" that I think is meant to imitate a comic book splash panel but just looks dumb every time; the constant location subtitle "Another Galaxy. Not Yours" is not even funny the first time and they use it EVERY TIME they do establishing shots; and one filler episode is just an extended homage to Clue: The Movie that just shows that if you don't have the right cast and crew to handle screwball comedy you should not attempt it.

Also, it just made me wish I was actually watching Clue instead.

It's a real shame, too, because Adriyan Rae as the titular queen, Elida, is so great. She's an absolutely stunning human being, for one thing, but she's also charismatic and instantly sympathetic--even when the show lets her down. It's definitely not her fault that you start really rooting for the "Bad Guys" by the 50th time she casually murders a generic storm trooper.

And, again, she is a gorgeous human being. I need to emphasize that.

I guess it's kind of unfair to heap criticism on a show that fizzled out back in 2020--which was somehow 4 freaking years ago--but I think I should still express disappointment even when nobody could possibly care any longer.

I also suppose it is good that the show that only got one season was not some amazing lost classic, but the missed potential still hurts.