Kindred Adaptation Falls Short of Octavia Butler’s Original Novel

My Thoughts

The novel delves into a lot despite its fairly straightforward plot. The complexity is in the subtext and the themes, such as the large and small acts of resistance, the lengths people go to survive, how anti-Blackness is built into the fabric of American society, the ways enslaved people maintained some semblance of agency in a world designed to strip them of it, and the “pick the best of bad options”-type choices enslaved and free Black people made (and still make). In the novel, Dana is the character around which everyone else orbits. In the show, everyone orbits around Tom in the past while in the present Dana is constantly pulled into the gravity wells of other people, like her white neighbors and her aunt. Because the show spends so much time away from Dana and the enslaved Africans on the Weylin plantation, we don’t explore those themes very deeply, but I hope we’ll get into them more as the series progresses.

For the rest of my review, head over to Tor.com.