When you get particularly good at chess, so good that you're able to compete at the level of the various emotionally stunted grandmasters in Netflix's The Queen's Gambit, the chess moves you make can start to feel second-nature, inherent, fundamental, even rote. The moment one player moves their white pawn (white always goes first), the next player simply files through their Rolodex of follow-up moves at a split-second pace, causing a similar reaction, and on and on until someone's knocking over their king in resignation. The trick to win, then, is to utilize these strategies, these "tropes" if you will (see where I'm going with this metaphor yet?), as a base reality of comprehension to jump out from, to surprise, to zag right when you expect your opponent (the "audience") to zig. We see tons of these game sequences play out over the miniseries' seven episodes, the lessons therein constantly reminded to us by a series of grimly intoning chess masters — but we never see this lesson learned by the miniseries itself.

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Image via Netflix

Based on the acclaimed novel by Walter TevisThe Queen's Gambit stars Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon, who begins this slice of her life undergoing the traumatic loss of her parents in a car accident. In her oppressive, ultra-Christian orphanage, she discovers the game of chess through a janitor that works there (Bill Camp) and instantly becomes hooked. From there, she's adopted by a troubled mother figure (Marielle Heller) and begins rising through the ranks of the chess scene, annihilating tournaments, getting global national attention, and meeting all kinds of colorful players along the way. But as she comes of age with the only outlet that gives her control, she must wrestle with a serious set of inner demons, including drug addiction and alcoholism.

There's just so much juicy potential rife in this premise, and the initial trailers for the miniseries truly had me jazzed as hell to devour this dramatic descent into the chess underworld. So what went wrong? Part of it might be an inherent form issue — co-creator, writer, and director Scott Frank, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay twice in his career, likely would've struck a leaner, meaner shade of gold had he cut the material to the bone in the form of a film. Instead, over seven hour-long episodes, Frank makes the same points over and over again, perversely interested in slamming on the brakes and cutting away just when any sense of momentum is felt, filling every ounce of bloat with handsome, dead air. I want to see this character shot through the narrative like an arrow; I want to see her change from A to Z, especially since we know this is the only season we have with her; I want to see things happen and see those things mean something. By the end of the miniseries, and especially its out-of-nowhere saccharine final episode, I was literally talking out loud to my television, "What does this mean? Why is this happening? What is the point of this show?"

Okay, so The Queen's Gambit is so dramatically bad from front to back that it made me yell at my TV like Elvis, right? Not entirely — and that's what makes it doubly disappointing. The front half of the miniseries features a fair share of compelling enough drama, in an appealingly "slow-and-low prestige simmer" that gave me Mad Men vibes. It's satisfying to see a young Beth (played with boring eyes by Isla Johnston) discover and obsess over the strategy of chess, to see an older Beth make purposeful, dramatic decisions to feed her inner beasts of addiction and domination (including what I can only describe as a "pill heist"), and especially to see Heller inhabit the role of Alma Wheatley with startling emotional desperation, desire, yearning, and attempts at control. Frank's scope of the series often extends beyond Beth's journey, painting a subtly effective picture of what growing up through the turbulent, ever-changing 1960s must have felt like, especially for women.

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Image via Netflix

Heller links to this purpose of the text the most effectively, delivering the breakthrough performance of the series, which is unfortunate news for Taylor-Joy, our leading performer whom we spend the majority of our time with. I think Taylor-Joy is a phenomenal actor; her work in SplitThe Witch, and Thoroughbreds proves as such (and I suspect she'll make a perfect Furiosa, too!). But there is a gulf in her choices and what the material keeps telling us about her Beth that I simply can't surmount. The miniseries tells us, constantly, what a firecracker of a player and human Beth Harmon is. She's too impulsive, she doesn't plan, she gives in too fiercely for her demons, she has to live a life beyond chess! And yet, Taylor-Joy tends to play this character at an arms-folded, detached, deadpan/forlorn pitch. The choice works toward the beginning of the series, particularly as we see her figure out the calculated joys of chess, while not quite understanding the visceral joys of human interactions and pleasures of the flesh. But when the series shifts into its back half, and literally every character around her keeps hammering into her how over-indulgent and destructively spontaneous she is, her decision to stay in this arms-folded mode teaches us the lesson of showing being more powerful than telling in practice. By the time Taylor-Joy and her miniseries allows the character to more explicitly give into her "sins," it's nearly the end of the miniseries, and feels like an over-campy "too little too late."

The Queen's Gambit stayed rattling around my brain despite (because of?) its many faults. The production and costume design are lush, the editing techniques are tantalizing and unique, the simple thrill of watching someone be incredibly good at a sport of skill remains pleasing. But it's telling, and troubling, that the miniseries' staying power remains its potential, rather than its execution. I keep replaying what a 90-minute feature take on the material might look like, much like Beth keeps replaying games she's lost until she finally cracks it. Perhaps the show's reliance on the same narrative beat over and over again, its need to run the playbook with no surprise, its comfort in empty moments of non-energy for no sake proves that certain chess strategies remain better dramatized, rather than applied to a filmmaking mode itself. "Alma's not pathetic, she's just stuck," says Beth about her adopted mother. I can't think of a better way to summarize this unfortunately arrested miniseries.

Grade: C-

The Queen's Gambit is now streaming on Netflix.

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Image via Netflix