Previewing No Man's Land

 
No Man’s Land opens up with what may be the longest string of title cards I can remember.  Five pages lets the views in on what the show is going to focus on, basically giving you a quick rundown on the Syrian civil war and highlighting on a predominately female voluntary militia that is fighting ISIS.  Maybe this lengthy diatribe is just setting up Americans to read because I would guestimate that seventy percent of the dialogue is in a foreign language (the show is co-produced by ARTE France) and thus subtitled.  On a side note, those three years of French in high school did not help at all for me here.  But Americans may want to keep the closed captioning on because even when the Fresh and Syrian speak English, it is still sometimes hard to understand.

But I got to say, a female militia fighting ISIS sounds pretty cool.  Except if there is a lead on the show, it is a dude which is kind of a bad look.  Seriously, No Man’s Land is a great title for a show about an all-women’s militia if there were not any, you know, men around.  This would be like if the upcoming FX (possibly on Hulu) show Y, the Last Man ended up having a bunch of dudes.  But anyway.  The narrative starts when Antoine is watching a newscast of the Syrian Civil War and spots a woman putting her hair up just like his dead sister did and is convinced it is her.  Either this is a pretty absurd plot devise or I am a pretty horrible brother who has zero idea how his sister ties her hair.

So after seeing this video and being convinced that it is her, Antoine, a constructional engineer (which actually comes in handy at one point), heads to Syria to hunt down a person with the only lead of where she was a couple days ago on this broadcast and the belief that it is his sister who has been dead for two years and had not seen her for two years prior to that because of some family drama.  Since this is an eight episode season, this go horribly wrong in this search before ending up in the hand of the female militia that is very suspicious of this foreigner. 

Though if you put aside all the reading, the silly plot devise, and the show spends the most time on a dude for a show about females fighting ISIS, No Man’s Land is pretty compelling in late seasons of Homeland kind of way but without the political intrigue or the crazy people.   There is also a tinge of Lost with certain character’s getting flashback episode.  But one of the female militia members does not get a flashback episode until the back half of the season.  But there is one episode that is almost entirely flashback.  At least an actual female is the subject of that episode.

All episodes of No Man’s Land premiere today on Hulu.