![]() ![]() When Kevin inadvertently travels back with her, the show again bungles an opportunity to probe the racial taxonomy at play. In so doing, she hopes to both affect change and also, most importantly, puzzle out her time travel debacle. Instead, she talks back to the plantation’s master, Thomas Weylin (Ryan Kwanten), as she blatantly tries to radicalize his slaves and young son, Rufus (David Alexander Kaplan). There is curious little insight into how Dana’s position as an educated woman of color in a place where such a person was anomalous affects her ability to survive. ![]() Yet instead of creating a contrast between what it’s like to be a Black woman today and what it was like to be a Black woman back then-perhaps obvious, but potentially thematically rich- Kindred is more invested in Dana’s pursuit of answers. But Kindred is still most interested in what’s going on back in 1815, where Dana slowly tries to put together an explanation for why she’s suddenly on a plantation. The show also introduces a set of next-door-neighbor Karens, who are instantly suspicious of a young Black woman moving into a big house in their upscale L.A. The addition of these subplots (skeptical family grief for dead mom getting to know a new boyfriend) is meant to give the story another pillar beyond Dana’s travails on the Maryland plantation, where she is sent to in the middle of the night for unknown reasons. Bereft of the observational intimacy that made Dana’s story in the novel so heart-wrenching and shocking, this version of Butler’s story is a modern-day mystery-thriller-with a superficial exploration of racism for good (?) measure. The show, created by playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkins, plops Butler’s themes into a centrifuge and spits out a gray, cold, unappealing mush of an eight-hour drama. 13, is likely not what Butler fans have clamored for. But Hulu’s take on Kindred, whose eight-episode first season drops all at once Dec. Decades of acclaim made Kindred an obvious candidate for the first Butler adaptation. It’s a gripping story that mixes racial politics, historical fiction, and gender dynamics, with an enticing time-travel mystery at the center. The book follows Dana and, at times, Kevin (who is white), as she continues to be flung back and forth in history, trying to understand why and how to stop these horrifying journeys. Dana, who’s Black, is immediately thrust into a fight for survival-until she suddenly is transported back to her own time period. When she regains consciousness, she finds herself in a completely different place and time: a Maryland plantation in 1815. In 1976, Dana and her husband Kevin are unpacking their new home in Los Angeles, when Dana blacks out and falls to the floor. Kindred is one of the most highly regarded and widely read books in Butler’s oeuvre, in part because of its provocative premise. ![]() Which is why it’s a bit surprising that it’s taken this long for one of her classic books to be adapted-and extra disappointing that it’s such a misfire. Still, after her untimely death in 2006, at age 58, her legacy has only grown in influence and import her Afro-futuristic touches and subversions of the classically white male sci-fi canon continue to be themselves canonized. Butler didn’t live to see any of her seminal science fiction works transition from page to screen. ![]()
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