By: Alex Tilton

I tried for a long time to come up with a suitable description for this show. My wife and I binged it together and eventually we settled on “It’s more good than stupid.” But to be absolutely clear, there’s plenty of stupid. Spoilers ahead.

DotJ revolves around some billionaire oligarchs paying an absurd sum of money for the best assassin in the world (the Jackal) to kill another billionaire oligarch named Ulle Dag Charles, who goes by the initials UDC. UDC is about to release some software (called ‘River’) which will, (somehow) make all financial transactions in the world completely transparent. This in turn will (somehow) enforce economic fairness on the entire world, and the billionaires will (somehow) be forced to stop hoarding wealth. Mercifully the show makes no attempt to explain how any of this will work. The characters all just agree that if this app is launched, it will indeed do everything UDC says it will do. They also agree that killing UDC will (somehow) prevent this. The plot follows the efforts of an MI6 officer named Bianca to identify and locate the Jackal, as well as the Jackal’s preparations for the assassination. 

We’ll start with the good stuff. For the most part I thought the show was well directed, well-acted, and very addictive. We binged the entire thing over a weekend. The cast was (mostly) excellent, as were the action scenes, the locations, and a lot of the dialogue. The pacing was mostly good but got bogged down whenever the show shifted gears into a character development interlude. Eddie Redmayne was superb as the Jackal. The plot was easy to follow and (mostly) made sense. The problems begin when this show forgets to stay in its lane.

Bianca and the Jackal each have a tedious subplot about their personal life. Bianca is slowly alienating her husband and daughter by being away at work too much. It’s boilerplate, but it does at least fulfill its purpose and it makes sense. The Jackal’s family subplot is too asinine and annoying to adequately summarize here, but amazingly enough, it does manage to humanize him. In spite of not being criminals themselves, the Jackal’s wife, brother-in-law and mother-in-law come across as so incredibly unlikable (and stupid) that you do actually feel bad for the sociopathic contract killer. 

The main plot moves forward with UDC and his team, and every intelligence agency in the world, being fully aware that the Jackal is on the hunt. UDC’s behavior is stupid enough, disconnected enough, and arrogant enough that in spite of his good intentions you don’t feel bad for him when he does eventually get killed by the Jackal. It’s hard to, because if he had the tiniest grain of sense he wouldn’t have gotten killed. He all but actively cooperates with the assassin who is out to get him. It was frustrating to watch and I felt like it let the air out of the ending. But then an interesting thing happened.

Whenever a movie or novel is adapted into a TV show, you can expect them to deviate from the source material because if they don’t then everyone knows exactly what will happen and you probably can’t have a Season 2. But one thing I definitely didn’t expect was for the Jackal to kill Bianca and her partner in the finale, escape detection yet again, and go off in pursuit of his family. The show leaves some room for doubt about Bianca’s fate. Right after the Jackal drives away following his shootout with her, someone rams his car and the camera fades to black. We get a quick scene where Bianca’s corrupt boss tells her other, not-corrupt boss that Bianca is dead. The show then cuts to another location where the Jackal reappears walking to a meeting with one of his contacts who asks him “how did you survive that?” He makes no answer, and tells her that before he goes after the oligarchs who hired him to kill UDC (and stiffed him on the check) he has to find someone first. If I had to guess, I would say Bianca is coming back and she will work with the Jackal to expose her corrupt boss. That would be the obvious move anyway, but this show does seem to enjoy a swerve.

To the surprise of no one, Season 2 is already confirmed. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll watch it, but Season 1 was certainly a painless way to kill a weekend.

Image Sources:

RottenTomatoes.com and PeacockTV.com