Critique: Domina

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

This made for an interesting watch. Simply, it was fascinating.

 

The plots and intrigue carried out by Livinia and Antigini were so, so clever.

It does get them in a tangle a few times but then they unknot themselves with another plot. Outcomes in the distant future are often as thought through as those in the short-term.

She married her enemy, the reason why the republic her father favoured fell and became an empire. Everyone thinks she’s betrayed her father. But it was all a plot to be close to power and then revive the republic.

Livinia’s dad freed Antigini to please Lavinia. Plus he had her educated, something that made a lot of men uncomfortable around her. Indeed, as one of Caesar’s friends said, “Your wife is cleverest man in Rome.” So her ability to manipulate the men of Rome is fully believable.

 

Honestly, the first episode should have been its own series.

The amount of time that went by, the amount of events that happened and the amount of characters that had to be remembered were simply too much. It was almost like the first episode was an hour-long catch-up of the programme so far. It was disorientating.

Also I preferred Livinia’s younger actor to the actor we get in the rest of the series so it was a shame to only get her in two episodes. Plus the older actor had a completely different accent to the younger one which seems a massive oversight concerning continuity.

 

Tiberius is creepy in a sexual way towards his mother.

He watches her have sex and goes to touch her breasts whilst she sleeps. He even asks a prostitute to be his mother! I wanted to vomit so much.

When we next see that prostitute, her throat had been slit, showing that Tiberius wants his mother dead. This doesn’t come as a big surprise, considering how his mother talks to him/treats him, and how angry he was with her that episode. This seemed to get it out of his system, however, because he then agrees to help her.

 

There were too many scenes of people using the toilet than I would have liked. It could be presenting the completely different attitude Romans had to privacy and bodily functions. The fact that doors and walls had series of small patterned holes so perhaps privacy wasn’t a real, major concern for them? This is all conjecture on my part and I don’t care enough to do research. Still, personally I’d not have so many toilet scenes.

 

The older a piece of history is, the more intriguing I find it. Yet the history within the Italian peninsular has never grabbed me (in regards to Europe, I’ve stuck with British and Greek, mostly). So trying out the history of Rome itself was new for me. Whilst Domina is fiction, it’s nonetheless been a good introduction for me.