Taboo: Chichester’s Plan, or The Series That Might Have Been
(Episode 1.07)
FX
“They took him to the tower, and no one will be kind enough to feed him arsenic.”
Brace’s tearful, heartbroken confession to Lorna Bow in Taboo’s seventh episode represents precisely the capacity in which the series works best. Taken out of context, it’s weird, morbid, thoroughly at odds with itself. Taken in context, it makes perfect sense, because only in a world as unkind as the one Steven Knight has drawn in Taboo would sneaking a fatal dose of arsenic to a person be considered a kindness; only in that world could David Hayman, cheeks ruddy and eyes sodden, feel guilty and devastated at having failed to kill his master with poison, feel responsible for condemning him to the indelicate mercies of Solomon Coop and the hosts of the Tower of London.
The rest of “Episode 7,” however, highlights precisely what doesn’t work on Taboo, specifically the series’ sprawling, muddled narrative—two things a narrative can ill afford to be when it lasts only eight one-hour episodes in total. “Episode 7” shows us the ways in which Taboo might have been a tighter show, a show in harmony with itself and with its themes: George Chichester, perhaps unsurprisingly, plans to use Delaney as a witness in his investigation against the East India Company, though Delaney, ever the planner, puts poor Godfrey up to the task instead, being that he’s privy to Sir Strange’s secrets and his attempts at covering up the truth behind the fate of the Influence.
You’ll wish that Chichester had been introduced sooner in Taboo’s overarching plot, and that his role was larger to begin with. Lucian Msamati is a mesmerizing actor, and any moment he’s on screen, Taboo becomes an entirely different show from the one it began as: A disciplined and more refined work of historical fiction, in which justice is pursued against a more clearly defined crime than the sudden passing of Horace Delaney, which we now know isn’t the work of the East India Company directly but rather an act of mercy by a grieved house servant. Why couldn’t the series have been about Chichester and James Delaney to start? Why couldn’t the story have followed their split perspectives as they both try, in their own ways, to get even with the same individual?