1. Its Totally Unflinching
The universe of the show has a clear internal logic, and that logic can take it to some dark and icky places. Yet just as the characters must take whatever their cruel and violent world throws at them, so the creative team are braced to explore the seedy and degenerate underbelly of a Roman world mounting the precarious heights of power and self-satisfaction. They depict Italy in the first century BC, swollen with abused slaves hauled back from foreign conquests. The most promising male slaves become gladiators, their bodies honed into living weapons by a brutal training regimen, intended to risk bloody pain and death for the sake of an afternoons distraction for their Roman masters. Blood and Sands makers take that ripe reality and then heighten it. They conjure up a world of casual violence, frank sexuality, chest-beating honour and ruthless power-hunger. Then they wind that world up, like a gigantic, spiky clockwork toy, and go wherever it takes them. If the road takes them to an orgy, theyll show us an orgy. If it leads to likable characters being ground to paste by a harsh environment, theyll show it happening, unvarnished. If it leads to death, misery and unhappy endings (which it probably will), albeit with episodes of hope and heroism along the way, then so be it. If, for perfectly legitimate story-telling purposes, it becomes necessary to the plot for a mans head to be popped off by a chain, thenalright, so even I cant defend that one. In fact, the show arguably isn't as gratuitous as it first appears. Once you've got used to the gore, profanity and sensuality, these elements come to seem more matter-of-fact than blatantly attention-seeking, rising organically from the shows world. Each slash of a gladiators blade or casually-displayed set of genitals hammers home a theme or fuels the fast-moving plot, like bloody, fleshy punctuation marks in the ongoing story of Spartacus. There are moments when things go too far, and its perhaps a matter of debate when and where the creators have over-egged the pudding. Personally, I thought a grim rape sub-plot in the Gods of the Arena, and Spartacus jaunt in The Pit in Season 1 (a low-class fighting den that looked like a set from a Saw movie, where losers had their faces torn off to use as masks) were a little too on the nose. Generally however, Spartacus gets away with its depravity, and there are some
slight checks on the mayhem to avoid alienating the audience. Most notable is the gimmick of boosting the violence of the arena showdowns with ludicrous geysers of CGI blood, which are over-the-top enough to blunt the inherent horror of whats unfolding on screen a bit. A
bit.