Hot Skull (last TV of 2022, just posted late)

Hot Skull is, obviously, a Turkish TV dystopian drama. Couldn’t you tell from the title? One of the things I love about Netflix is that they bring shows from other cultures to us. Squid Game, Dark, Lupin, Cracow Monsters, Biohackers, Sexify, Dark Desires, the Rain, Queen of the South, 3% and more are all shows I’ve seen and largely enjoyed from around the world courtesy of Netflix. Even when they haven’t necessarily been great TV (I’m not going to name names here), it’s usually great to see how other cultures create their stories. In particular, four of those, along with Hot Skull are dystopian series (I might have a type, and Netflix might make good predictions of that) but once you strip away the “this is our disaster, this is how we’re coping” there is still a chunk of “and this is how (in the case of Hot Skull) Turks view a dystopia that is different to Germans, Poles, Danes, Koreans and, of course, Brits (and in cases not listed Americans).

To me those differences are fascinating, hopefully alongside good TV. Hot Skull is, at one level, a story that follows from Covid. It’s clearly post-pandemic, although the pandemic is called jabbering and it spreads by literal word-of-mouth - if you hear a jabberer for more than a few words without wearing headphones, you become one. That gives us social distancing by effective deafness. However, given the way Türkiye, and particularly it’s president, are currently exerting none too subtle control over the media, and attempting to control social media too, it’s really tempting to read this as a coded commentary on the inability of Turks to talk clearly to each other and to have their messages received as well. Different cultures, different views of dystopia.

We have a nice mix of story arcs, oddly personal ones with Murat seeking a cure for the titular Hot Skull that makes him immune to jabbering. Sule, a gorgeous woman that wonders into his life, becomes his friend and confidante, but is also working for Plus 1, a resistance organisation. She is open about her affiliation and works with Murat on a quid pro quo basis, but she’s an ally with her own agenda.

The AEI are right out in the open but they’re constituted as a secret police force, using fear and misinformation about the jabberers to control what’s left of the population. In common with a lot of such organisations the AEI are shown as corrupt in all kinds of ways. They beat people up for no good reason other than they can. They break the rules so they can protect their families from the isolation laws. They have secrets, which form spoilers, and those in authority turn underlings into jabberers to protect themselves. The list goes on and on. One of the fun little touches is that one of the more senior AEI officials bends the rules to have chocolate smuggled in and you can tell how badly things are going for him by how much chocolate he is eating.

Watching Hot Skull can be hard work. It uses dream sequences, hallucinations, drug trips and more as well as more traditional storytelling devices like flashbacks. I didn’t mind these once I’d got used to them, and there are visual cues that let you tell them apart after a while (I guess once you get used to them) but even by the end of the season I’m not sure most of them added to the overall story. On top of that, Türkiye, is a hugely patriarchal society. Sule is (maybe has to be) open with Murat to be trustworthy but he can just say “go home, trust me” and she does. Frequently. There are times where I think I might have done the same in her shoes, or at least it didn’t grate, because it wasn’t quite that abrupt and it seemed like a sensible call, but far too often it was just that abrupt. There are other examples, too many to count, from Murat and other male characters to the women around them. I can cope with knowing that, given it comes from an Islamic country, we’re not going to have good LGBTQIA+ representation, but when the female romantic lead is 23, a model and beauty pageant winner and the male romantic lead is 20 years older (almost to the day) and (although I have no complaints about his acting) looks like he’s spent some of his life sleeping rough… that’s hard to take. I know we almost always have appreciably older men with younger women in film, a bit less so in TV, but this felt extreme even for that. (For those of you that remember Wolf with Michelle Pfeifer and Jack Nicholson from (OMG really) nearly 30 years ago when she was 36 and he was 57 - it felt like that. Wolf had the possible saving grace that she was shown very much as choosing him and being in control of the situation, he was the bumbling idiot trying to come to grips with it all, which is a rather different dynamic.

Hot Skull also does some fun storytelling things that personally I enjoyed but were odd from a western perspective. They made for some of the more touching moments of TV I’ve seen and playing these little, odd, arcs over six or more episodes lead to these big payoffs in ways we wouldn’t see but it was still odd during the build up as we were left to wonder what was going on. It’s much smaller than Babylon 5 obviously, but it had hints of those long-term seeds that pay off much later than you expect for me. Included in that was a final episode that didn’t disappoint but, although it ran longer than the previous episodes, felt rushed. It sort of wrapped up a lot of things, planted seeds for a second season and more, but it felt like the “more” was extra story that didn’t comfortably fit into either of those categories and could, maybe should, largely have been spread out over earlier episodes. That left the extra time feeling a bit like bloat rather than adding value, at least for me.

Despite all of those issues, I remained interested in both the story overall, most of the arcs and Turkish views of a dystopian future. I also liked the moments of humour. I suspect there are some that didn’t translate but the ones that did were all the more surprising and funny because of that.

This really won’t work for everyone but if you like dystopian fiction it’s got a lot going for it. Enough that if Turkish TV make a second season and Netflix make it available, I’ll watch.

Bechdel Test: Fail. There are certainly episodes that pass, and pass well. But there are a lot of episodes that don’t, so overall it’s a fail.

Ko Test: Null. It’s originally in Turkish, obviously, so a test designed for Hollywood isn’t applicable.

Russo Test: Fail. There is one character that they suggest might be bisexual but, given who she is, it’s possible she’s just fucking with their minds the morning after rather than having fucked them both the night before. I’m pretty sure that ambiguity is part of it being a Turkish show. In terms of the sexual content it’s almost PG (probably just a 12A), while it would verge towards a 15 rating for violence and certainly get a 15 rating for the drugs references. Even if we say she’s definitely bi, she’s rather peripheral so it’s never clear she passes all the steps of the test and she’s only in six of the episodes. If she was more integral to the story I might be more generous about the other points but because I’m not sure she’s bi either and she’s not in every episode, I just can’t. In the review of the year, I’m counting her as bi because I think she’s carefully coded to avoid censorship, so she’s part of that “was present but not passing” percentage.