Taboo: Shovels and Keys

January 11, 2017 7:04 PM - Season 1, Episode 1

Believed to be dead on the African continent, James Delaney has returned to inherit his father's estate. Rumors swirl about James' mysterious past abroad, and nobody seems happy to see him. Especially the board members of the East India Company, who desire a valuable tract of land held by the late Delaney Sr., and which is currently willed to James.
posted by codacorolla (5 comments total)

I thought this episode was a little heavy on the exposition but I guess that's to be expected for a pilot. I would pretty much watch Tom Hardy sit in a chair and stare at the wall so I'm in on this one, for sure.

His child is also his sister's child, yes?
posted by something something at 8:05 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

They're laying it on pretty thick with the dark & gloomy visuals. But ok, I can be down with that.

It didn't occur to me that the child could be the sister's also, but yeah it does seem like there's more than familial love between those two, so I guess it's possible.

Any rate, I'm in for a few more eps at least.
posted by dnash at 9:25 AM on January 12, 2017

I very much so enjoyed the visuals, especially his strolls along the muddy banks of the river.
posted by komara at 7:54 PM on January 13, 2017

I get that there's no faster way to establish a bad guy as being a bad guy than to have his say something casually racist, but man, if your show is going to be that freewheeling with its use of the n-word, you ought to have at least one black character with a speaking role (and even then, you better be way more careful with how you use it than Taboo seems to be).
posted by Parasite Unseen at 4:18 PM on January 18, 2017

A BBC spokeswoman said:

“Taboo is a fictional series set in 1814 and the language referred to is used by the character Thorne who is displeased and threatened by the return of James Delaney who has spent the last 10 years in Africa.

“He uses the term to try to demean Delaney.

“The language used is in historical context and representative of that period in time.

Taboo is shown post-watershed.”

(Weird unpaired quotes kept intact from Daily Star article)

I'm digging this (and I've posted the second episode now, with the third likely to go up later today). 13 burning questions we have after the first episode of Taboo (Radio Times) answers some of my questions about the show ("apparently the mysterious words Hardy’s character uses throughout the episode are from the Twi language, spoken by of the native Ashanti people from Ghana"), while other episode-specific questions are answered in the next episode.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:01 AM on January 23, 2017