Review: Black Earth Rising Is Congested with Underdeveloped Subplots

The show’s compelling core narrative can become overwhelmed by tangential storylines.

Black Earth Rising
Photo: Des Willie/BBC/Netflix

There’s copious exposition in Netflix’s Black Earth Rising, which, though clunky, provides necessary context for the show’s estimable historical scope. As the series follows the work of a legal investigator named Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel), the Rwanda-born adopted daughter of war-crimes prosecutor Eve Ashby (Harriet Walter), it demands an understanding of the Rwandan genocide, namely the nuances of the decades-long tension between the country’s Tutsi and Hutu that led to the civil war, and the legacy it left behind. While the delivery of that information is occasionally cumbersome, Black Earth Rising successfully yokes Rwanda’s tortured history (and the scars of colonialism at large) to Kate’s personal identity as she unearths secrets regarding her childhood there.

Kate spends much of her time with Michael Ennis (John Goodman), Eve’s colleague, and it quickly becomes clear that Michael and Eve are part of a small group of lawyers, diplomats, and politicians who’ve been guarding a secret, shameful event that occurred in the years following the genocide—and one which also concerns Kate’s family. Everybody who knows the truth is, or becomes, significantly ill as the story wears on—reflecting the show’s view of secrets as toxic and truth as a salve. Black Earth Rising withholds that truth until the final episode, after ceaselessly hinting at it in conversations between Michael, Eve, and the others. These moments can feel overly contrived, namely when characters stop conversing like real people and speak in needlessly opaque platitudes, which exist only to service the show’s plot. Yet throughout, the mystery coalesces around Kate, whose complexity and emotional vulnerability contrast the guarded nature of nearly everyone in her life.

Coel modulates her performance to reflect the various literal and figurative scars that Kate carries with her at all times. Kate is a proxy for all of Rwanda, but the show’s writers also shade her emotional torment with specificity—from her survivor’s guilt, which pushes her toward self-medication, to her ethnic identity crisis, which complicates her relationship with her white mother. Coel thoughtfully attends to each of Kate’s component parts, allowing the character’s stresses to manifest without blending into a vague cocktail of hurt and victimization. When Kate is frustrated with Michael or Eve, Coel is soft-spoken and sardonic, and when the young woman, who’s a Tutsi, defends the righteousness of a disgraced Tutsi war hero, Coel froths at the mouth and spins like a top. Her performance provides Black Earth Rising with connective tissue, drawing together national tragedy and personal trauma.

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As the show’s storyline becomes more byzantine, the relationship between Michael and Kate has a grounding effect—at least until a sorely misconceived romantic subplot between the pair is jarringly introduced and, thankfully, quickly cast aside. That awkward development is symptomatic of a larger trend in Black Earth Rising, which is prone to congesting its narrative with underdeveloped subplots that crowd out the central mystery about Kate’s past.

Kate and Michael’s legal investigations threaten to become impenetrably knotty as revelations about Rwandan history and current international affairs emerge. And the show’s other stories, from one regarding the sitting Rwandan president to another about the mysterious background of Michael’s daughter, feel extraneous. Nonetheless, the series maintains a clear view of Kate’s emotional fallout as she reckons with her country’s past, as well as her own. The image of her weeping uncontrollably in a Rwandan church is heartrending despite the busy plot that precedes and follows it. Another breakdown, spurred by Michael’s secrecy, reveals the Kate’s rage as she begins to grasp exactly how much she doesn’t understand.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Kate was adopted into an affluent white world, and by people who chose to withhold the truth about her history from her in order to manipulate her actions; throughout, the series never loses sight of the influence of colonial exploitation in Africa. As such, the truth of Kate’s childhood isn’t as shocking as Black Earth Rising’s writers seem to believe it is. The series effectively defines both the real villains of its story and who Kate is, so much so that what she is, by the end, feels poignantly immaterial.

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Score: 
 Cast: Michaela Coel, John Goodman, Tamara Tunie, Noma Dumezweni, Harriet Walter, Tyrone Huggins, Lucian Msamati  Network: Netflix

Michael Haigis

Michael Haigis's writing has also appeared in 411MANIA, Goomba Stomp, Cloture Club, and Screen Rant.

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