In Washington Black, an unwieldy structure hampers an otherwise moving adventure.
Based on Esi Edugyan's Giller Prize-winning novel of the same name, Hulu's latest miniseries follows its titular character, George Washington "Wash" Black (played at different life stages by Ernest Kingsley Jr. and Eddie Karanja), on his journey from enslavement in Barbados to scientific expeditions in the farthest reaches of the globe.
His voyage, with its fanciful steampunk aircraft and emphasis on the natural world, carries touches of Jules Verne. Yet it's also deeply entangled in Wash's search for freedom, making it not just a globe-trotting romp, but a rousing quest of self-discovery. It's a shame, then, that Washington Black often impedes that quest with its frustrating time jumps, as well as a perplexing focus on side characters that distracts from Wash himself.
What's Washington Black about?
Created by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and showrun by Hinds and Kimberly Ann Harrison, Washington Black introduces Wash at two points in his life. The first is his childhood as a slave on a Barbados plantation. The second is as a free young man — and aspiring inventor — in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
As a child, Wash catches the eye of Christopher "Titch" Wilde (Tom Ellis), the brother of cruel plantation owner Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt). A scientist and inventor, Titch recognizes Wash's brightness and enlists his assistance in creating a flying device known as the Cloud-cutter. However, when Wash is implicated in a crime on the plantation, he and Titch flee Barbados and set out on an odyssey that will take them from pirate ships to the Arctic itself.
Flash forward several years, and we meet Wash in Halifax, with no Titch in sight. He's working on creating a flying machine of his own, with the hopes of making it into the Royal Science League. He might just get his chance when RSL member Mr. Goff (Rupert Graves) and his daughter Tanna (Iola Evans) arrive in Nova Scotia, hoping for a fresh start, or some major new discovery that will bring them status back home in London.
Washington finds a kindred spirit in the brilliant and inquisitive Tanna. She is mixed-race, her mother still living in the Solomon Islands, but she is able to pass as a white woman. As such, her father has forced her to push away any connection to that aspect of her identity, all in the hopes of keeping up appearances of whiteness.
Washington Black balances heavy themes and high adventure.
Discussions of Tanna passing — and needing to pass, according to her father — are among the careful ways Washington Black reckons with the racism its leads face. In the show's early plantation scenes, Wash weathers verbal prejudice from Titch's brothers, yet the series is very deliberate in not lingering on or making a spectacle of any physical trauma Black slaves might face. Instead, it implies it through conversations Wash has with people he encounters on his journey, from pirate Barrington (Miles Yekinni) to real-life historical figure Nat Turner (Jamie Hector), who led a four-day slave revolt in Virginia in 1831.
Barrington and Nat encourage Wash to push back on any kind of bondage, serving as mentors and guides on his voyage. Contrast them with figures like Mr. Goff, who acknowledges Wash's brilliance but will never let him claim credit for his work due to his Blackness, or Titch himself. The latter claims to be an abolitionist, but does he challenge the workings of his family plantation? No. Titch certainly cares for Wash, going out of his way to hide him from the slave hunters hounding them. Yet he has blind spots and an inability to understand (or even acknowledge) Wash's experience, something the protagonist only finds with people like Barrington, Nat, and Medwin Harris (Sterling K. Brown), the leader of Halifax's Black community and the closest thing he has to a sustained father figure.
As much as Washington Black deals in heavy themes, it manages to find light in the darkness that Wash faces. Scenes of flight in the Cloud-cutter soar with whimsy, while Titch and Wash's time in the Arctic creates the opportunity for beautifully bleak set pieces. Elsewhere, Wash and Tanna's joint love for marine biology delivers one of the show's most memorable moments: a romantic boat ride accompanied by bioluminescent sea creatures. These sequences are all rooted in reality, yet seen through Wash's young and curious eyes, they take on the quality of breathtaking fantasy.
Washington Black's flashbacks and side characters can make the show feel overstuffed.
Still, that fantasy begins to wane the more Washington Black jets it viewers back and forth through time, alternating relentlessly between Wash's past and present.
These flashbacks work on a thematic level, highlighting how Wash's past is always catching up with him — a concept made literal in the present timeline with the arrival of menacing slave hunter John Willard (Billy Boyd). Yet they also create an odd stop-start pace, one that threatens to stifle the momentum of younger Wash's adventures while older Wash remains static in Halifax. Thankfully, as older Wash begins to embark on travels of his own, it becomes easier to reconcile the two halves of the show, as they finally feel like one whole.
While Wash-centric flashbacks make sense given that he's the focus of the show, Washington Black stumbles when it dives into the pasts of other characters, like Medwin or Tanna's betrothed, the wealthy white dock owner William McGee (Edward Bluemel). Often, these trips to the past feel like unnecessary asides — especially when it comes to McGee's story, a character created solely for the TV show who basically vanishes from the series just when he becomes most interesting.
These non-Wash flashbacks and numerous side plots threaten to overstuff Washington Black. Still, the actual meat of the story — Wash's journey — remains solid, balancing contemplations on freedom and identity with adventurous flair. So if you're in the mood for a new summer TV escape, why not take to the skies with Washington Black?
