Amazing Science Fiction: Vagrant Queen

Back in February, in my review of Netflix’s Another Life, I described it as “unoriginal”. Upon reflection, that was groundbreaking compared to the derivativeness of this show. I know this series is based on a comic book, but it felt like a bad fan fiction of Firefly, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Trek combined. There is a group of people in a ship going across the galaxy fighting bad guys. Sound familiar? Elida is a broody, troubled hero with a dark past, but is good at heart and a natural leader. Oh, she also drinks hard liquor in shady bars. Does this sound like any other character you know? If you answered no to either of these questions, you’ve never seen a TV show or movie ever. Every character is like this. You get the sarcastic sidekick, the quirky love interest, and the moustache-twirling, flamboyant villain. The main antagonistic faction is The Galactic Empire from Star Wars with different costumes.

It’s also hard to tell whether or not Vagrant Queen was meant to be a parody. It has not been called a parody in any source I checked, but maybe they all got it wrong. There are hints of satire. That being said, it being a parody doesn’t make it good, the aforementioned satire is poorly executed. I’ll admit, there were places where I chuckled, though not many.

The show’s universe felt like they took Guardians of the Galaxy’s universe and changed nothing. I get that shows take inspiration from other works, but this is beyond that. Saying Vagrant Queen took inspiration from Guardians of the Galaxy would be like saying Robin Thicke took inspiration from Marvin Gaye in “Blurred Lines”.

I said before that this show is almost a parody, and the dialogue would support that. This series is chock full of jokes. Most of them don’t hit, but they’re there. The show does have darker scenes; that’s when you see how bad the dialogue is. The show’s written like it’s supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not. Emotions are exaggerated, and it feels like a punchline is consistently incoming, even when a character is about to die. Some of the comedy is good. When this happens the dialogue works. But oftentimes it is not. The acting doesn’t help. The characters’ emotions are exaggerated in the dialogue, so the acting is exaggerated as well. I doubt the director ever said, “tone it down”.

The cinematography isn’t noticeable at most points, but sometimes it’s so terrible you can’t look past it. For example, there was one scene right before a major battle where there are multiple freeze frame shots for no reason whatsoever. You can tell it was a conscious decision, just a bad one. The fight scenes are terrible as well. They could barely keep my attention, which is especially bad for a show with so many action sequences.

While all the characters look like they’re from Guardians of the Galaxy, some of them talk like they’re villains from a nightmarish children’s TV show from the early 2000s. Hearing some of the characters talk would be more effective of a torture method then waterboarding.

I’ve been pretty harsh on this series, but I do think there are positives. This show cannot be taken seriously, but if you’re either heavily intoxicated or sleep deprived, I imagine this would be fun to watch. There are serious moments, but there’s also a lot of comedy. This show would be hysterical to the sleep deprived brain; all of the jokes would be funny. I’ve been doing finals recently, and have needed things to watch after I’m done studying and before sleeping. This show could definitely help with that. There’s also a female protagonist, which is always good to see in the male-dominated realm of sci-fi.

For whatever reason, the political system of an absolute monarchy is idolized in this series. The protagonist is a queen and The Republic is people-led. If the reigns of Henry VIII and Louis XIV have taught us anything, it’s that monarchies should not be idolized. People should not have power because they were born with it, they should have to earn it. I thought that was pretty self explanatory, but this series made it seem like monarchies were A-okay.