Warning: Spoilers. (Kinda.)
For a show about chess — a game that depends upon your ability to do something your opponent does not anticipate — The Queen’s Gambit sure telegraphed its ending.
The seventh and final episode of Netflix’s limited series ends exactly as anyone would have expected: Elizabeth Harmon gets a little help from her friends, and in doing so she manages to stave off her various addictions and elevate her game to beat her arch-rival, Borgov.
It’s cutesy and saccharine and entirely predictable but also it’s TV that people want right now: According to the streaming service, The Queen’s Gambit was watched by 62 million households in its first 28 days, the most ever for a scripted limited series on Netflix.
That’s understandable: The show is irresistibly charming, thanks largely to the performance of Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead role.
But like so many Netflix productions, it plays largely on human emotion without connecting in any significant way to the human struggle. The triumph ultimately feels empty because of it.
One of the show’s most glaring flaws has already been pointed out elsewhere: It’s utter fantasy to believe a woman would have been allowed to make it in chess the way Beth Harmon does in the 1950s and 60. More than that, The Queen’s Gambit insidiously beckons us to imagine a world in which there had been young women good and smart and determined enough to make it in chess. Ah, what a time it would have been! If only women had mustered the sass and courage!
Yet here we are, more than half a century later and just now getting around to electing a woman as vice president.
There’s another part of The Queen’s Gambit that doesn’t feel even faintly realistic. Critics seemed to adore this series because it attempts to offer serious consideration of difficult issues. It’s not just another sports movie. But it only faints at reconciling the long tail of mental illness, childhood trauma and addiction — then wallpapers over them when it’s time for a happy ending.
After a long period of sobriety following the death of her mother due to alcohol, Beth falls into a bender at the end of episode 6. It happens seemingly out of nowhere; she’s working on studying old matches and discovers her fridge void of food. She takes herself out to dinner where the waiter offers her a drink. At first, she declines. Then she says yes, and the final 15 minutes of the episode have her at the bottom of a bottle, completely broken.
It can happen that way. Anyone who’s been around an addict will relate to that sudden turn. It’s what happens next that feels like a lie: Beth’s best friend from the orphanage shows up unannounced. Seeing the messy house and empty bottles, she confronts Beth. Together they mourn the death of the janitor who taught Beth chess. They excavate some of her past life. Then, after a game of squash, The Magical Black Orphan Friend tells Beth that she’s not there to save her; she’s there because in this life people need to lean on each other.
That evidently is enough. Beth travels to Russia, turning down a nip out of a flask on the plane. She glides past hotel workers delivering champagne bottles to other rooms. Says “nyet” to an offer of vodka. And ultimately flushes the tranquilizer pills she’s been addicted to for half her life, ever since they were used to tame her and the other children at the orphanage.
She admits to D.L. Townes, her Magical Gay Friend Who Surprised Her By Making The Trip, that she’d gone to inquire about finding more drugs, but ultimately didn’t. Serious and clear-eyed, she wins the event by beating Borgov and then breaks free from her State Department chaperone and walks through a park in Moscow, where the chess players fete her and ask her to play — a harkening back to those humble childhood games in the basement.
“Every time we finished that sequence, I would just burst into tears, because I was so happy for her,” Taylor-Joy told Refinery29. “She has found this sense of contentment. Where she wasn’t in pain or fighting something so intensely.”
That’s trim and tidy and wholly unrealistic. My guess is that the people who’ve struggled with addiction or seen loved ones ruined by it will find the whole thing rather flippant. Addicts so rarely get those moments — and when they do they’re earned through diligent work, not because the reassuring words of an old pal helped them draw on previously untapped reserves of willpower. Addicts don’t simply lack friends to rely on, or have some inability to understand how to let themselves be propped up by those who love them. It’s never that clean.
Addicts — and those who stand by them — would also never believe the fight could end or the contentment could last. It never does.
Beyond that, the physical toll of addiction is completely absent. Hungover Beth, we know, struggles to get it together. But there’s not even passing attention to what it would mean for her body to go through full withdrawal from those pills.
In the end, it feels like a lost opportunity. Beth is to that point a convincing addict; the pain in the eyes of her trainer-turned-lover Harry Beltik when he leaves and tells her to be careful feels all too real. He later confides in her that his own father was an alcoholic, though not the raging, messy kind. Rather he sank into himself each night. That’s powerful nuance — a raw look at how the disease can settle in like rot.
Instead of digging into this in any way, the show simply lets it all flit away. It’s one thing to not know what it was, exactly, that killed all those people in Bird Box; the death plague was just a plot device meant to set up a situation that would reveal something about the characters. There was no need to reckon with it. But simply smoothing over Beth’s addictions and childhood trauma is a disservice to the quality of the acting and possibilities the story presented.
It’s a perfectly American thing to re-write history we are ultimately ashamed of, and to obscure the reality of things we’d rather not face. Maybe once we’d ricocheted into a realm where an exceptional woman was allowed to excel it only made sense to detach the rest of the story from the grimy truth, too. Avoiding that temptation, though, might have allowed The Queen’s Gambit to resonate beyond a few of the darkest weeks in a pandemic, when imagining all the resounding ways that simple solutions might actually work was the exact comfort we sought.