The journey West begins.
Full spoilers for Taboo continue below.
There were extreme highs and disappointing lows in Taboo's Season 1 finale, which brought the London-based story to a close, killed off a lot of central characters and sent James Keziah Delaney off to claim his birthright in the Americas.
First: the good. Taboo has been building toward a massive confrontation between the various forces at play: the Crown, the Americans, the East India Company and, of course, Delaney. The payoff there was fantastic, with a big shootout in front of Delaney's hard-won ship that had real stakes. The action sequence was well shot, but more important was how it had so many of the central characters in the same place at the same time. It felt like a real culmination of everything we've been working toward.
Similarly rewarding was watching Delaney's plan play out after the last episode spent so long setting it up. He really did think of every possible angle (except the one potentially most important one, but more on that in a a bit). Like with the shootout, this was a real culmination of everything Taboo had been building toward all season. He got his revenge, and didn't leave a thread hanging, dotting all his I's and crossing all his T's. Stuart Strange got the explosive farewell he deserved, Chinchester got his proof and Mark Gatiss's take on the Prince Regent continued to be a terrifying prosthetics masterpiece.
Of all the characters on the show, it was Lorna Bow who had the most gratifying arc over the course of these eight episodes. Her relationship with Delaney proved to be the heart of the show, and seeing her really come into her own was a highlight of the finale. Taboo wasn't a show interested in diving deep on character relationships, but Lorna owning up to being James' "mother" was a really neat moment, especially considering his fraught memories of his birth mother and the repeated question of what he and Lorna were to each other. I hope she survives the journey to Nootka Sound after her gunshot, because she was one of the highlights of this series so far.
Unfortunately, Taboo's treatment of the other most important woman in James' life left much to be desired. I kept waiting for Taboo to do something interesting with Zilpha, and goodness but it let her down. I'm not quite sure what the show was trying to achieve with her character, but it never invested enough time in what her relationship with Delaney meant for the show. She got her first true moment of agency several episodes ago when she killed her awful, abusive husband. But when she killed herself to be set free from her "cage," Taboo didn't stick the landing for what that meant before, or what that meant for her brother/lover.
Her suicide seemed to be less about her character and more about Delaney not being able to get everything right with his plan. Even his moments of grief over her suicide weren't as effective as they could be, and didn't tie together various story arcs as much as they tried to. Overall there were a lot of missed opportunities for character development for both her and what she means to Delaney, and ultimately that entire arc was a letdown.
It's unclear if Taboo will stand on its own as a mini-series or get renewed for a Season 2, so we still don't know if Delaney and his league of the damned will ever actually arrive at Nootka Sound. Did this serve as a prequel for a series that ends up being about settling in America and starting a new life in a land ripe with opportunity? Or is Season 1 meant to stand on its own? If it's the latter, I'm not sure that it succeeds. Taboo never ended up making a point or taking a stance, even though it flirted with the idea plenty of times. Delaney wasn't out for revenge for the slaves who died or trying to make a better life for his family; he only served one master, and that master was himself. While that does make a great acting vehicle for Hardy, it didn't do the story any favors.
The Verdict
Taboo had some great moments in its season finale, including a thrilling shootout and tense execution of James Delaney's plan. It fell short of perfection with some of its character development though, particularly with where it took Oona Chaplin's Zilpha Geary. How we view this season in hindsight will depend on whether or not Taboo gets a second season, but for now the show was a gorgeous if uneven new period drama.
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