Messiah
Created by Michael Petroni
Starring Mehdi Dehbi as Al-Masih, Tomer Sisley as Aviram Dahan, Michelle Monaghan as CIA Case Officer Eva Geller, John Ortiz as Felix Iguero, Melinda Page Hamilton as Anna Iguero, Stefania LaVie Owen as Rebecca Iguero, Jane Adams as Miriam Keneally, Sayyid El Alami as Jibril Medina, Fares Landoulsi as Samir, Wil Traval as Will Mathers
It’s still only January, but Messiah (Netflix) is already possibly the best dramatic series I’ll see this year. Still, lots of TV to go, and some of it will be as brilliant as this.
The story begins in Damascus, under siege from ISIS, where a street preacher (Dehbi) appears at the Temple Mount in front of the Golden Dome. More on that in a minute. The preacher assures an indifferent crowd that it is not the Will of Allah that the ISIS terrorists should take Damascus, and that they will be saved. Before he has finished speaking, a titanic dust storm appears and blankets the region for 40 days, by the end of which the ISIS forces, debilitated, starved and thirsty due to the storm cutting off their supply lines, withdraw and Damascus is saved. The preacher has attracted several hundred followers in the wake of the deliverance he prophesied, and he leads them into the desert. They now refer to this nameless preacher as Al-Masih, or The Messiah. They walk, without food or water, to the Israeli border (40 miles away, of course, because everything is 40 in the scriptures) at the Golan Heights, where Al-Masih steps calmly across the border and is promptly arrested.
Israeli intelligence reacts in the person of Aviram Dahan (Sisley). A master interrogator, he starts trying to find out who this strange character is, but finds the tables are turned because while he knows nothing of his captive, the captive reveals lots of personal information he knows about him. Dahan returns the next day to continue the interrogation, only to find Al-Masih has vanished.
Al-Masih reappears a few days later in the town of Dilley, Texas (New Mexico) where he saves a young girl, Rebecca Iguero (Stefania LaVie Owen) from a tornado. The image of this is on video, and word rapidly spreads that the daughter of a small town preacher has been saved by a miracle worker although the town itself is utterly destroyed. Well, miracles are like that, aren’t they? “God spared my tire business, pity ‘bout the orphanage down the street! Thank yew, Jeezus!”
So he has a huge following developing in both the middle east and the US, and governments start to notice. In the meantime, he, for mysterious reasons, leads a increasingly long caravan to Washington, DC. Pity he didn’t fly, and land at the old airport. I would have loved to title this review “Dehbi Does Dulles,” more’s the pity.
The story proceeds from there. Al-Masih, an Iranian, isn’t identified with any particular faith, but does match the end-of-times antichrist-like Messiah that many Christian, Jewish and Islamic followers subscribe to.
I thought that the show tipped its hand early on when it had a cameo by the Amazing Randi who spoke of endless religious con-artists and scammers, and declared that Al-Masih would be a magician, except magicians are honest. Classic Randi, and I couldn’t see him appearing in a program that declares He Has Returned.
The show doesn’t do that, but the final episode is a masterpiece of ambiguity.
Given the explosively controversial nature of the subject matter, I expected blow-back from various religious elements. Indeed, the Temple Mount, the scene of Mohammad’s supposed ascension, is a very holy place, and the one you see in the series is a scale-model replica built for the series. A lot of Israeli scenes were shot in Jordan, and a lot of Washington scenes were filmed outside that city.
Critics also didn’t like the series, complaining it was too slow-paced and had too many sub-plots. You know: less talking, more idiots, anvils and explosions. (There’s a reasonable number of idiots and explosions in the series, though). It’s a complex story that needs its own time to tell itself, and the subplots all illustrate the affect Al-Masih is having on the lives of others, a microcosm of a greater world which can’t be shown other than in simplistic crowd shots. It focuses on reaction among individual Christian, Jewish, Sunni and Shi’ite families and organizations.
The writing is exemplary, deftly moving from one plot to another almost seamlessly. Similarly, the acting is outstanding. I found it riveting, and definitely worth a re-watch before the yet-to-be-announced second season.