Some time in the next month or so, an new series will premiere on AMC called “Into the Badlands.” I only know a few facts about it:
- It’s set 500 years in the future
- It’s based on the Chinese tale “Journey to the West”
- It’s a martial arts show with some big-name fight choreographers
Besides that, America (I’m guessing this is set in America) is apparently a dystopia… sorta post-industrial, with old cars and motorbikes rather than speederbikes and starships, and society is run by way of an aristocratic system of barons and the like. Well… meh, I guess.
But where I think there might be something interesting: the Evil Aristocratic Tyrants have somehow successfully gotten rid of all firearms in order to prevent the peasants from rising up. Setting aside for a moment the sheer impossibility of clearing all firearms out of the US, the idea of a major TV series being based on the idea that “no guns” = “overbearing totalitarian dictators reducing the populace to the status of serfs” seems rather remarkable to me. Is this going to be like “Firefly,” a show created by a left-wing extremist, but that somehow created one of the great right-wing heroes of fiction in the way of Mal Reynolds? Will “Into the Badlands” wind up showing a right-wing worldview by showing the result of five hundred years of leftist policy?
We shall see, I suppose.