A review by Nalini Haynes
The Refugees is a science fiction TV series about people from the future transporting themselves into the present “because we had no choice” and how a small town copes with the refugees.
Initially I thought this sounded promising, especially with current attitudes towards refugees, but this series promises to reinforce fear and prejudice while faffing around with flawed storytelling.
THREE BILLION people suddenly appear on Earth. This is a planet already struggling with its existing human population. Assuming the transportation event and added weight of all these additional parasites didn’t cause a catastrophic event, the inevitable consequences are famine within days and violence causing the death of billions. Then there’d be the cleanup, if enough people survived for long enough to even attempt a cleanup.
The overwhelming weight of numbers of real refugees feeds current fears: Australia, Europe and the US (for example) fear being overrun so they want refugees to stay in countries where we are bombing them and children lose lives and limbs playing harmless games when land mines explode. The Refugees sets out to reinforce those fears with its basic worldbuilding.
A farming family head into town and witness two of their friends yanked out of cars and carted off to concentration camps because their descendants from the future contacted them. The officials were also from the future. So The Refugees has the equivalent of Sharia Law being imposed upon the contemporary country, reinforcing yet another fear of refugees.
The reason for imprisonment: the descendants contacting their ancestors might change the future. Seriously. LIKE THE FUTURE WASN’T CHANGED WHEN EVERYONE TRANSPORTED BACK IN TIME.
If the world faced such a catastrophic event that the entire population of the planet had to transport back in time, WOULDN’T YOU WANT THE FUTURE CHANGED?
Emma (Natalia Tena) is a farm-wife who’s almost Japanese-anime in the way she goes from neutral to ranting that she wants their refugee resident off the property. Then her husband discovers their refugee, Álex (David Leon), has buried stolen guns in the woods. Instead of turning Álex out and calling the authorities, the couple listen to him explain how he’s been sent back from the future to protect them during a murder attempt that will/did take place that very night. So convenient. And as if events haven’t already changed because of the arrival of the refugees.
HAVE THE WRITERS READ ANY TIME TRAVEL STORIES? AT ALL?
They believe Álex for no apparent reason and sit at the kitchen table to discuss their imminent murders and plan ahead. If I could have thrown things at the screen without risking damage to my television, I would have.
The Refugees has broken world building that cannot be fixed with later episodes and will only become more complex and more frustrating over time. Plus it’s inherently xenophobic, feeding into the West’s worst fears of refugees as well as being incredibly WHITE even though it’s a story about refugees. I watched the pilot, which felt excessively long. Not even Natalia Tena can carry that script, awesome as she may be.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
Creators: Ramón Campos, Cristóbal Garrido, Gema R Neira, Adolfo Valor
Stars: Natalia Tena, David Leon, Dafne Keen
Running time: Pilot is 1 hour 40 minutes; rest of the episodes are about 50 minutes each. 7 episodes in total.
Could somebody please explain how Annie came back to life (with no hospital stay) and why she was given to the neighbors instead of her “father”? The whole series was so confusing. All temporal laws were shattered to pieces. So frustrating!
Pretty sure that was them showing the previous string of events that lead to the series, basically throwing us a bone and distracting at the same time. Paradoxes are beyond the writers’ comprehension I guess.
What makes absolutely no sense to me is how their son Thomas could have come from the future looking for them and be telling them what kind of parents they had been if they were supposed to have been murdered. If they’d been murdered then their son would never have been born. it just doesn’t make sense.
I guess I assumed that they died when he was a kid? It’s been years since I watched that show. I wasn’t inspired to continue past the review copy. You have a good point though: how old was he when they died?
Well, they weren’t murdered after Alex saved them, although Emma did lose the baby Thomas which should have canceled out his appearance all together. He never actually existed. But, obviously time travel rules never occurred to the writers. The whole story/plot was completely convoluted.
Your complaint that refugees are white, “even though they are refugees,” hence the story is flawed, is really ignorant. Refugees have and can be of any color. Just look at what happened during and after WWII and when Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago.
I said, “Plus it’s inherently xenophobic, feeding into the West’s worst fears of refugees as well as being incredibly WHITE even though it’s a story about refugees”.
You responded with “Your complaint that refugees are white, “even though they are refugees,” hence the story is flawed, is really ignorant.”
Have you considered the population of the world and that, if 3 billion people appeared suddenly, they would not mostly be white? And the people portraying their ancestors also would not be mostly white? Some diversity would be good.
And yes, I am aware white people can be refugees. I’m also aware that “whiteness” is a construct that has shifted over time. Before Australia’s White Australia Policy was ended in 1975, even Greeks and Italians were considered to be potentially people of colour depending on their skin tone. Irish tend to be Caucasian but were not considered “white” until the 20th century because they were a colonised people suffering under British (aka English) rule. And a few years ago I read that it’s questionable now whether Jews are considered white or PoC; I’d also point to the diaspora and the variety of ethnic origins of Jews these days as well.
I made one off-hand comment about the cast being mostly white and not diverse. I hope I’ve clarified my previous statement.
3 Billion people and no one of color in the bunch? Did they kill them off? Eat them (they did in the past)? When you are the majority population it’s easy to wonder why people of color would want representation. What if all of the refugees from the future had been black. White peoples would lose it. Just like the Kendrick Lamar half time show. White people lost it because they didn’t see any white people in the perfomance.
It would have opened doo for some very interesting plot lines if only black people showed up. They would no longer be a minority. So many interesting possibilities.
We should fear refugees. Look at the massive rise in crime once Europe opened up their borders. Also, what good have the done?
I disagree. For a start, if you visit the museum exhibition “World history in 100 objects” you will learn that migration and trade between European countries, Africa and Asia, has been consistent and world-history-shaping for thousands of years. Furthermore, migration due to war, famine, pestilence etc has been a thing for millennia too.
On the other hand, if you look at America, perhaps if Native Americans had the capacity to close their borders to Europe and the UK in the 15th century America *would* be a better place now. I’m sure Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand and Palestine – to name only three countries among many – would be better off if white people had been prevented from migrating.
But perhaps you’re ok with white crime and white colonisation?
Wow. Palestine eh. You think it was colonized by white people? That’s pretty ignorant. First off the last colonizers were the British. Second the majority of refugees that fled into British Mandate Palestine were of color. Today the country is quite mixed.