Today's Episode
We watched it. Every episode covers the latest installment(s) of a different TV show.
Today's Episode
Spartacus: House of Ashur (S01E01-02)
What is dead may never die… wait, wrong show, but same concept. It’s December 2025 and Spartacus is back on Starz with Spartacus: House of Ashur, a sequel that takes one of the most hated villains in the show’s run, resurrects him from hell, and hands him everything he’s ever wanted. If that sounds weird, it very much is. On the podcast, we discuss the first two episodes, how they compare to the original series, and the familiar mix of stylized dialogue, gratuitous nudity, and slow-mo carnage. It’s a new era, so there’s a new crop of gladiators, as well as nods to those who didn’t survive. Tune in to hear our thoughts. Welcome to Today’s Episode!
Welcome back to today's episode, the podcast, where we discuss the most recent installment of a different series every show. It is Monday, December 8th, the end of the year, and it's also a very important day in history. It seems to be the end of a lot of things. In 2024, December 8th is when the Eras tour ended. Oh, the final one. In uh 2000, I think, 22, Trevor Noah ended his tenure on The Daily Show, December 8th. It was the last time that Ringo hosted SNL back in the 80s. Also the only time that he was. Yeah, I was gonna say, I didn't even know he owes it. And it was the end of Roger Maris' career on the Yankees, December 8th. That's when he was traded and was now considered a terrible trade. Uh, and then it was also the end of John Kelly being the chief of staff of Trump. And so with ends come new beginnings, and those series, or actually a few series, know this more than Spartacus. Picking up almost, or no, over a decade after the last episode ran. 2013, Spartacus has not returned. However, another main character from that series has Asher. Now it's Spartacus House of Asher. Two episodes are out. It's back on stars. We should talk about the original first.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and just as a disclaimer, Spartacus House of Usher, that's what I kept on typing into Google, and then Gemini would come back and be like, you're combining two different TV shows. So I need to remember it's House of Asher. But my first question, who would win in and fight? Spartacus or Ganicus?
SPEAKER_00:Um, I think they did fight. In the third season when Ganicus comes back, or maybe it was the beginning of the fourth season. I think it was the third season, though, is when Ganicus returns and then they have a little bit of a beef in the arena. Ganicus is sent in to kill Spartacus, um, if I remember correctly. And then the throughout uh several times they kind of compete. I personally am more in favor of Ganicus. I think he was uh uh better at fighting, but like you know, it's up to whoever wants to pick.
SPEAKER_01:Well, like we uh you were talking about kind of the the uh at the start, the premiere episode set a record for stars at the time. Uh right.
SPEAKER_00:So this was Starz flagship series. We should talk about the environment in 2009. I think the Pacific was like the biggest uh expensive show that was coming out. You had Breaking Bad. This is before Game of Thrones. It was a change in atmosphere in TV. There was prestigious television shows coming out to the small screen. However, Spartacus could be included in those in a way because they spent$30 million on this show to get it pipelined. And and it was just completely different than what anybody had seen before. They everybody compared it to 300, of course. Yeah, but it was like it took a while for it to find its footing. And it promised sex and violence, the kind that had never been seen before on the small screen.
SPEAKER_01:Could you compare it to something like Gladiator? I only saw that about two months ago.
SPEAKER_00:But like just like 300 could be compared to Glad Gladiator. They had gladiator camps. Part of that$30 million was spent on bringing everybody who was cast into these camps. They've talked about that at at length in like previous seasons.
SPEAKER_01:And what side of the aisle are you on? Because there is a stark divide when it comes to critics and when it comes to the audience. Because critics, uh, the first season got 52%, then 79%, 69%. But you look at the audience score, 88%, 93%, 86%. It's like kind of like the terminalist BMS, the boondocks, whenever you see these like high scores, because it even has an 8.4 on IMVB. I think at one point at 8.7, it was on the top 250. What did you think of it?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's a little bit more subtle than that. In fact, I don't think it's one of those ones where it's just all the audience was on board with how crappy some of the CGI could look. Uh I the end of the critics hated it. I think that it really did. People made their judgments really soon after it came out, and the first few episodes, everybody kind of admits, weren't that good. But by the end of season one, it pulled kind of a fast one. And suddenly it seemed like Andy Whitfield as Spartacus, uh, that he and the rest of like the dialogue somehow like managed to conspire to make a a really good ending script. And so, like by the end of the season one, people were really curious as to see where the with where the story would go. And unfortunately, of course, this is the weird thing. A TV show loses its main character, yeah, and usually House of Cards, that 70 show, The Office, The Walking Dead, they address it. The characters aren't the ones in the title, but Spartacus, they lost Spartacus, and then the show got, in my opinion, better. And most people say that the prequel that came out afterwards, which acted as a season two where they introduced Ganekus. I think it was six episodes. Yes, that was where I was introduced to the show. So I was back watching Netflix in the day, and uh, and there was these like they used to do it by stars, like stars were the value meter into what they guessed that you would like, like 4.3, 4.4. I don't know if it even had the night. I it was just like how far the star was filled. Right. And so, like this one had like five full red stars, and I just stared at it for a while, like weeks on end, just being like, I really don't want to click on this. It doesn't look like anything other than you know, this dumb fighting show. And so I ended up watching it though, eventually, and I was just like blown away by how good it was on its own, and I didn't even know it was a prequel at that point. So, like, this was really before prequels became even a thing. You think about Andor, Better Call Saul, Alien Earth, Endeavor, it was before all of them. And so it the first two seasons, the way that they just randomly were assembled, like they were, worked. And then after that, when they recast for Spartacus, because unfortunately Andy Whitfield died, I think the last two seasons, they they had a story to tell. They wanted to be loosely historically accurate. So they had Crixus and and uh uh Gannicus and Spartacus and everybody fighting the Romans. And Caesar. Caesar was often in there too.
SPEAKER_01:And Stephen D. Knight even said that the same people that were kind of consultants in terms of accuracy for that are like PhD professors, and they came back to also help with accuracy with this TV show.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it's apparent this TV show feels a lot like the last TV show. But what I was getting at is they had this mindset of we want to tell the story, the end of Spartacus. If you watch the House of Asher, the first two episodes, you know they kept canon at least his death. Like Spartacus has died. Oh, okay. I okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they they show us the replay of him being stabbed a thousand times or whatever through through the back. And uh, and but he does take out a hell of a lot of people, and it's a triumphant death. And he uh there were survivors at the end of it. So they could have made this show into a spin-off, um, like a straight-out spinoff. That's not exactly the route that they decided to do, but I do want to point out also the flaws. So that's one of the things that stars did was it held its, and I'm not talking about the fact that Andy Whitfield was replaced. I'm talking about more the ones that existed from season one, which was that it is gratuitous, it's a softcore porn at points. It makes uh Game of Thrones, when it was getting bashed for showing like boobs and dicks and stuff like that, it makes it look like veggie tails. Like this is so over the top that I have read so many people who were just disgusted by it and had to turn it off. And I don't blame them. There are scenes, especially in the in the first few episodes where you really don't see a story developing that you're just like, why am I watching this? I was fortunate enough, again, by the Gannekus season, it felt like there was a story developing amidst everything, even from episode one. I think six episodes were great.
SPEAKER_01:I remember, yeah, back in the early 2010s, you were talking about how violent this show was. I only ever saw the finale. I didn't watch any of the other series, but the two parts I remember most, and they were very violent, was uh was Spartacus' death, but also when the enemy was coming towards them and Spartacus was telling everyone on his side to kind of hold their uh their attack. And then underneath all this dirt, there was just a ton of sticks in like that first round of the enemy just fall and get shish kebobbed. And I was like, this is the most violent show I've ever seen. It was like when I saw the Django Unit.
SPEAKER_00:It sounds like 300.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it it honestly reminded me a lot why I saw like the Django Unchained for the first time, which was the first Quentin Tarantino movie, and up until that point, it was the most violent movie.
SPEAKER_00:I know, but the thing where you're talking about the shields and everybody waiting for that, that's 300.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it happened in the finale of Spartacus, too. Okay, all right.
SPEAKER_00:No, I remember the on Mount Vesuvius, a bunch of stuff going down. But yeah, so House of Asher is is kind of existing in a weird realm. Asher, if out of the main characters, he was one of the villains. Yes. And he was probably most people's least favorite because he was just this sniveling, conniving piece of shit who was a gladiator, but the weakest of them, and also just like was completely betraying them all the time, right? Right. And so he gets his due in the ending of On Mount Vesuvius when they decapitate him. And so in the first five minutes of this show, you're seeing him in hell. And he is. Oh, he's actually there. Yeah, he's in hell, which is weird because like as much as Spartacus does embellish, it doesn't really fall into witchcraft and wizard. Going underneath the underworld, yeah. It doesn't ever do anything, even as crazy as Game of Thrones with like the Red Witch or anything. It it it fell into fate. It talked about fate a lot, but it wasn't so much about the supernatural. Right. But here we kick off and he's in hell, and he's visited by Lucretia, who was Batiatus' wife, uh, played by Lucy Lawless, and she tells him, like, this is gonna be another form of torture for you. We're gonna send you back and give you everything you ever wanted, as if you had survived that day, and that you were the one who was one of the ones responsible for killing Spartacus. And if that's what hell is, where like after a while they just give you everything that you wanted and bring you back to being alive. That's not what she was saying. She he raped her in the first series, I think. And like he was uh, yeah, he was bad to her. So I the idea of this reward being somehow a punishment kind of is it's weird to me. And also the fact that it that we're watching a character that we're supposed to have hated so much take the mantle, also kind of a questionable choice. It's the i if you were to watch The Office and they had done a prequel series, and the character that they'd chosen to follow and give everything to was Jan.
SPEAKER_01:Like, yeah, no, that that would be kind of weird. Collider said uh Spartacus House of Usher begins with one of the most substantial recons in TV history. Yeah, Stephen cut it, his head falls off. Stephen D. Knight talked about how the biggest challenge was writing that first scene. And he had writing over and over and over again. Yeah, he said that that was the hardest part because.
SPEAKER_00:I honestly think they just did what Spartacus has done a lot in this show, which is just rip that band-aid off. You know, like it doesn't at a certain point, it just doesn't give a fuck. And it's just like, you know what? We know the show we that we want to make, and if we have to do this to get there, then that's what we're gonna do. And so they they say that Asher is now in charge of Capua and the house of Batiatis, or and now it's his Ludus, um, which is the training ground for the bodyguards. And so we're back. The green screens are back, the poetic Shakespeare on the street dialogue is back, the fight choreography, the slow-motion gore, the evil politicians, the cameos, again, Lucy Lawless. We see Gannicus' body in the second episode. It's still hanging on a crucifix while they bring it down.
SPEAKER_01:Lionsgate basically just gave uh Stephen D. Knight carp lots. And then he thought many times, kind of like I remember some of this happened in Scrubs, where he was like, Okay, they're going to obviously have a problem with this. And they were just like, nope, just do it, just show it. It doesn't matter. Right.
SPEAKER_00:As far as the boobs and dicks, there's more than ever, you know, like just so many, too many, but at the same time, it's like what you're tuning in at the like you know that's what you're gonna get. Yeah. Um, and then they also recast Caesar. I saw that in a backflash where what they did was they edited the scenes that the previous Caesar had been in and they put him over it. It was weird. Yeah. So it was like instantly, I think other people realized too. They were like, What happened to the guy who was playing Caesar? So you're saying it was like archival footage? I think the actual person, because I think they kept Marcus, but uh uh Crassus. Um, but I think that what they're gonna do is Caesar's gonna play a role later on in the season, and the other guy was all like busy with an Australian like NCIS or something. I think that's what I remember.
SPEAKER_01:Reminds me a lot of like Incredibles 2, where even though that was animated, I remember they went back to show a previous scene and they made the character different.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, by doing that though, they gave away that he was gonna be in it, right? That they were definitely going to include Caesar, because why else would they not just use the old clips? Um, like with Gannicus, it was sad they showed him, so you knew that he's not coming back. There were a few people, like I said, at the end of Spartacus who were alive, who Spartacus speaks to to try to like continue his movement. And I wonder if anybody's from there is going to return at some point. But right now, we're at the house of Asher, and uh he's got this like misfit group of gladiators. They really, really, really aren't up to par with what we saw in the first couple season seasons at House Batiatis. Like his group was there was no talking in the sand pits while they were like training. In this group, they they're all kind of just joking around. And in fact, Asher shows up and he's like, You guys are worse than I was, and I was the worst of my crew. Okay, so yeah, it was. Oh, he kills one? Yeah, he ends up killing one of his guys because the guy's like, We heard that you just stabbed Spartacus in the back. And he's like, Oh, yeah. And then he ends up killing him, which plays a role later on when he is given the he's able to weasel himself into one of the competitions, which might get him into the arena, his people into the arena. And so he says, Who's our best fighter? to the do Dotore. Um, and the Dotore is says, Well, it's the guy that you just murdered. So then they have to run competitions for the first episode. And there's clearly one dude uh who is like standing out, who they keep on giving the same Spartacus shots, like he looks at Dotore's dagger, like he at some point is going to kill Asher, like he has a grander plan. And so they try to make him into this really cool personality, he's the golden boy. And what happens to the golden boy in generation in Gen V?
SPEAKER_01:In Gen V? Oh, he dies by the end of the day.
SPEAKER_00:He dies in the first episode, and that's exactly what they do here. They go to the competition, they're in this tiny little arena. It's the same one we saw in the original Spartacus.
SPEAKER_01:Right, they shot in New Zealand, just like the original two.
SPEAKER_00:Right, and it's the green screens and all that, and and the fighting goes down. What happens is that Asher, he ends up pitted against his like arch nemesis, who just doesn't respect him as someone of worth, because even though he is under the purview of Marcus uh Crassus, like the guy who to defeated Spartacus, so he's in his favor, so nobody can really mess with Asher, he's still just not respected. So he brings this Logos guy to fight for him, and the other opponent just brings out three little people who are all brothers. I think they're called like the pharaoh brothers or the pharaohs brothers, right? And they walk out there and everybody's making jokes and laughing. Is this like the David and Goliath situation? But there's three of them. Right. And so they start fighting and they get a few swipes in there, they hurt the guy, but they hurt Logas pretty bad, but then he's like, okay, I'm gonna take this seriously. He is able to dispatch all three, like kick them around and stuff. He gets up there and he starts Obering it off, you know, from Game of Thrones. He starts monologuing. He does what everybody knows is going to get him to die. That's exactly what happens. One of the little guys jumps up and literally slaps him in the back, and then all the other ones jump on him, and then he's dead.
SPEAKER_01:It seems like that would be kind of predictable and not fun to watch in that way.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, what was fun to watch was again the fight scenes and the bloodshed. Like he gets sliced in the back uh in a way that would kill most men right then and there, and that was just like something he walked off. Uh, it wasn't until he got the knife to the throat that he was dead. Um, so what does Asher do? Asher feels like he needs to vindicate himself. He asks for a rematch, he's not gonna get one immediately because again, they're laughing at him. Uh, and so he realizes he needs a new fighter, but he also needs a gimmick, otherwise, he's never gonna get into the big arena. And that's where the most accolade comes from is if your fighter actually wins it all, you know? We saw that a lot in how Batiatus, the uh previous like owner of the slaves, uh, would treat everybody, like Gannicus or Spartacus. He really, really liked his prize picks. So Asher goes out there and he goes, tries to find another slave to buy who he can train, and uh and he runs into who? He runs into this girl.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so a gladiatrix, right? And my question is uh the I read, or at least uh the actress said that this was the first time that Gladiatrix, I have such a hard time saying it, but was shown in Gladiatrix? Yeah, gladiatrix was shown in uh the like Spartacus world. And I was wondering, do they not, did you not see any of them in like the first series?
SPEAKER_00:In the first series, what they did was that there were sex slaves, um, or part of the house of Batiatus, who like the gladiators would sleep with or the uh heads of the house would sleep with. And one of them, I think, becomes like a serious gladiator type fighter because she goes to like prison and she gets really, really tough. And then she's the one who actually kills Asher. Um, and I think that she survived. She was Crixus's wife, if I remember correctly. But yeah, we do see women fighting. We just don't see them ever as part of the gladiator like brotherhood. Right. And that's a big deal. Because like if you think about and if you take it like look at sports today, there's not a lot of sports where we mix genders because just the way that like people are built, biologically, it's kind of difficult for a woman to have to compete, especially on like a gladiator field. There were women gladiators, but they would fight themselves for the most part. Right. And the character that you're talking about is Achillea, right? He changes her name. So at first it starts with an N, but then he's like, that's no good. We're gonna switch it over. And she tries to kill him. Um, but then he's like, Hey, if you win your freedom, you you are you're good to go. And if you kill me, then everybody's gonna want to hunt you down. So you should try to win your freedom. So in episode two, that's what she's doing is she's trying to show that she can be as good a fighter as any of the guys, if not the best, because that's what really what they need from her, isn't they don't they need the gimmick in order to, and they need a good fighter at the same time. The problem is she hasn't really proven that to anyone. And so they're constantly doing like sexist barbs and stuff like that. And even the Dotore just thinks she's a joke. And so uh she's just like stuck, you know?
SPEAKER_01:Right. And I I'm waiting for one scene in particular. Is it one that happens with her? It was one that's probably at the end.
SPEAKER_00:Are you just talking about so like she's busy training and at the same time there's an orgy going on inside underneath the uh layer of the household? They're drinking and partying, and these two guys come up there who've been like mean to her and they start to try to rape her, which is kind of similar to the other series that we're gonna be reviewing uh pretty soon where they abandons, where where there's a girl who like someone tries to rape. Right. And then how does that end up? And the abandons. Well, he ends up dying. Yeah, he ends up dying. And in this, I would assume the same thing, but like she is in the process where she is being held down and she manages to break out of that and grab the guy's dick and balls and just rip them right off. Yeah, and you see it, right? Like it's not it's funny, you get desensitized to Spartacus like sex, and at a certain point, you're just like, these are all fakes. Like even the organs that they're showing, it's like they gotta be set pieces. But reading, but reading about it, like in what she's doing. He dies immediately. Yeah, it's just it just seems like it would be so gross. It's it's it's just along with the same territory that we're used to seeing. The guy dies, and then at that point, everybody wants her to die. The brotherhood runs out there and it's like, You killed Baba Bah. We need you're you're gonna die now. And so the Dotore, who's the old guy, but also like the main fighter who who had won his freedom a long time ago, he challenges her. They fight a little bit. Seems like he he he strips her of her sword and he's about to kill her. And then he realized that in the fight, she actually drew blood from his cheek. Like it was like the tiniest. Nick. And from that alone, he says, You are worthy to be here. None of the other guys could have done that. So, did he look at the dirt and see that there was a droplet of blood, or did he just basically it was something like she he was about to slice her head off or something, and then like the drip just happened and hit and hit the dirt. Um, there's a lot of scenes like that where you just see blood hitting dirt. Uh, and so he defends her. The brotherhood has to go inside. She's now technically one of them. And Asher, throughout this whole episode, is trying to leverage his way back into the arena, get his fighters back in there, saying, I've got this new fighter. Her name was Nephera, now it's Akeelah, she's the goddess of death, she's gonna be great. Um, and she gets invited to a dinner party with Gabinius, who is a friend of Crassus. Um, and uh, and they have a little chat because Gabinius's wife hates, absolutely hates Asher. Well, the funny thing is he's not being a weasel in this series. He is actually the play character you're supposed to be rooting for. A little bit his house. Anti-hero or protagonist? Uh a little bit protagonist because there's really no one else to root for. Um so people are against him, and he's having to show himself. And if you want the gladiators in his uh Budus to succeed, then you have to root for him. He is told straight to his face, um, you're not respected. And uh like even if when you were a gladiator, you were a little bit more respected than you are now, but you're never going to get these people to align with you unless you like absolutely like made everything, like if you manipulated the entire system. And so maybe that's a way of inviting him to change a little bit to being more of what we've seen before in the past. I I don't know. But that scene between him and Gabinius was actually the best part. It felt like one of those kind of like succession moments where uh you or breaking bad moments where you have the two kind of characters who really lean into that Latin that they do. And it's it's just a fun understanding watch.
SPEAKER_01:Kind of like the Daredevil Born Again when you had uh two bad guys.
SPEAKER_00:It was just Well, no, when you had Charlie Cox and you had Wilson Fisk and they were talking. Oh, or something like Westworld, I guess, right? Yeah. Yeah, in the early seasons. Yeah. So he leaves that and he's got all these different things running through his head, but but then we just don't see him again. Um I guess we could talk about the fact that Achilla has uh there's someone who's trying or thinking about killing her, and that would be one of the people that Asher sleeps with, like one of his two main girls. And um, I'm sure I'm missing other storylines. All the gladiators, they they need to have something that like you can remember them by. Right. And so, like the guy who gets his dick torn off, he was like an asshole. He was always trying to cause fights. But it wasn't just that, right? Doesn't she stake his dick up his ass? That's what I read. She may have, like that might that happen so quickly. Okay. But I really they concentrate on the tear and like showing his genitals after that. And she got all of it, you know. And so and it also like I don't think you see as much dick in the first Spartacus. You may have, like, again, I did I don't remember, but I feel like they did it so that later on they could tear one off. Like they were like, just so so many of them, so we have the right to, yeah. Right. So there's there's other stuff always going on. Caesar doesn't like uh Asher that much, so he's the one who caused the entire gladiator camp to spend a day clearing off all the dead bodies of the previous Spartan or the um Spartacus like loyalists, and uh and that was about the the joint of the first two episodes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and okay, so like if you had to say what the dialogue is mostly like. I said like it's a mix of Latin, Shakespeare, like but Shakespeare on the street. Yeah, so what D Knight said was that it was a mashup of kind of like contemporary Shakespeare because of more profanity, and Robert E. Howard. Robert E. Howard was the one who created Conan the Barbarian.
SPEAKER_00:It's it's genius, honestly. Like that part of it, it's crazy how you get like again the bad sex, the crazy bad CGI, the really cool fight choreography, the cheesy explosions. It's like there would be, I think, times where the stands would all collapse in the arena. And if I remember correctly, in season three and season four, it looked so like it just looked like it could have been shot through a fog of glass, like stained glass or something. They it I'm sure they could do better now with uh AI.
SPEAKER_01:So were the first two episodes as good or better than the Spartacus first two episodes? Because the first two episodes in the original series are the only episodes that have sevens on IMDB. Every other episode in the first season.
SPEAKER_00:I if you're just asking though, is this series on par with the previous ones? I can tell you this. It's got all the stuff. And that includes Asher, because Asher, he's played by Nick E. Terabe, right? Yeah. And I saw him, I didn't like his character in Spartacus, and then after that, he showed up in Expanse, and he was actually a good character there. So he sort of redeemed himself. He showed that he had range. And so now seeing him back in Spartacus playing a more tolerable, tolerable version of himself, that's cool.
SPEAKER_01:Um he loves the character. He said, even if he was doing another show when Stephen D. Knight called him, he would have like quit that show or movie and just done this.
SPEAKER_00:But I hated, like you were supposed to hate him because he was in the Gannicus storyline. He was he he betrayed his like best friend or something. Then later on, we see him just lining up with all the evil dudes. Like he was the one who was like, Yeah, put us back into slavery. Like, get us and just give me props for this. Is he like Ramsey from Game of Thrones? No, no, you're giving him way too much credit. Like Ramsay was cool. Ramsey was a badass. He could kill people, like he was terrible. He did terrible things to Sansa and stuff, but he was like the best villain because he was perfect in like a killing machine. We saw him at numerous times just like hunt down Theon, like it was nobody. So you're talking more manipulate.
SPEAKER_01:You're talking more about like Uncle uh Theon's uncle, that that type of character where you weren't supposed to like him at all.
SPEAKER_00:Uh uh Theon's uncle is closer, but he had at least like uh some moral code that he lived by. Like he thought he was doing the right thing. Right. And I don't know how to explain that, but like, no, this guy was way worse. Asher was the worst of the worst, and uh and they gave him the show, but that's not the reason I didn't like it. Because in the end, I didn't like the show. Personally, there's no point in watching all the gratuity that I've been talking about if you're not rooting for the characters. That was the greatest thing about the Gannicus, Spartacus, and I'll include both versions of Spartacus, I don't care. Uh uh Animeus, who was the uh uh the Dot Torre, Batiatus, Lucy Lawless, I forget, so um, Lucretia, um, really most characters, including like later seasons, Caesar and stuff like that, Crixis, they all of them were great. Like they it may take a while to like understand them, but they were all really good. And in this show, it feels like we're playing catch-up to that, like we're trying to get there. But because the gladiators don't even really act like gladiators quite yet, it's it's really hard to be okay with any of their personalities. The only one I'm good with is Chorus, and Chorus is Dotore. Um, he's pretty he's a good character, but like I watched two episodes and I just feel like I don't feel like watching any more. Well, it also seems like you haven't mentioned like talked about Kososhia.
SPEAKER_01:She's the character. The main character, right? Well, uh oh no, no, that's that's Anika Davis. Kind of funny because she was a briefcase model in Deal or No Deal, and then she ended up gaining that show. But I'm talking about like Claudia Black, that's the name of the actual actress, Kosocia.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think I I did mention her because she's um the wife of Gladius or whatever his name is. Okay. Uh Galadius. They all have the crazy names. But she's she constantly is just giving the evil eye to Asher. And so they have a thing going where like it they may end up together. Who knows? What about Mesia though? Messi, uh, again, that's a Okay, so Messi is um, I believe, one of the two people on his arm. Uh, it could be. Like, there's like he always has two women on his arm, one of them is trying to kill Achilla, and the other one is doing her own thing. And then one of them is uh another main female character is having sex with one of the main gladiators. They're not memorable quite yet.
SPEAKER_01:So it just seems, yeah, it just seems like kind of what you're saying is that Asher was at least kind of a better character in this show than he was in the other one. But all the characters aside from that really, even though they're trying to give them quirks, it just all hinges on Achilla.
SPEAKER_00:Because if Achilla was just this amazing warrior lady that we could root for throughout, she was the Spartacus who the problem, I think, was the fact that they killed off the first guy and then they brought her in to replace the best. And it's like you just went to a random slave hold, you found one girl who sh who punched a more a Roman in the face, and you assume that she was better than all of the gladiators you currently have, based on what? Also, yeah, you're women fancy. This would have been a better show. Had Asher, because he was sort of he was he wasn't a gimp himself, but he definitely was like, again, the weakest of them all. If he had been kind of stuck with a bunch of really big misfits, and I'm not talking about the crew that they have there, which is just bad gladiators, people who can't really fight as well as the old guard, but like people who he, if he had had the Ferox brothers in his thing, the the three uh little people, if he had amputees, if he had people who are too young and too old and out of shape, and then maybe a woman, like, and then it turned out throughout one or two episodes, like the the best of the gladiators ends up being her, and then she ends up going against the other people, like legitimate gladiators who are in the arena all the time, and she beats them too, and she's just becoming the sensation. And Asher is like, Wow, yeah, this is my this is my team, you know? And so, like, he because he's so crafty in his his dumbness, in his his weasley way, that he makes a team gladiators of of people who are misfits.
SPEAKER_01:So you're saying that like that would have made a fun show. They shouldn't have fast-tracked it, they should have kind of like taken time.
SPEAKER_00:For some reason, his character just 100% jumped into the the uh idea that she would be able to beat up all his gladiators, and we just haven't seen that in even in the choreography with her. Like, I'm not buying the fact that a 400, 350-pound, like huge colossus of a dude who we saw in the first few seasons in the pits, like that that guy wouldn't just stomp on her.
SPEAKER_01:Like there's there's a difference. I know that that that always does sound kind of seem to be a thing in this TV shows. I know that like all the actors had to really go through boot camp.
SPEAKER_00:So you're not gonna watch Gannicus and Spartacus, you could believe with the grueling regiment that they had to go through that they would be beating up people even in the pits by the end. Her, she's an incredible shape. But I she even right now she's complaining about having to hold a shield. Like, can you imagine if Spartacus? I guess that they're trying to push the idea that she's gonna be quicker than all of them. But if you look at like races, you look at Usain Bolt and then you look at the fastest female runner, that they're not on comparable times. So I don't I don't know. So, what would you give the series overall then? Five out of ten. I mean, it was still nice seeing all the nostalgic moments and and kind of being like, oh, this show, it's come back to its roots. Um, it's ridiculous as always. Um, but yeah, five out of ten.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, it has a 5.9 on IMDB, but only 678 reviews. And just to compare that with the other show, the other show had 291,000. So I don't think you can really take anything from that. But the critics have actually really liked it. I think they've liked it even more than Spartacus. It has 100% on Ron Tomatoes. Variety said like its predecessors, uh, Spartacus, House of Ushers, absolutely bursting. Asher, yeah, see, with sex and violence. Overall, the show is a dynamic follow-up to the previous chapter. The rap called it a welcome edition. Hollywood Reporter was also very uh keen on the characters. Did they see more episodes than we did?
SPEAKER_00:We just saw two episodes. I think that it I'm not sure. Because, like I said, first few episodes of the other series uh may not show what it is. So if I find out at the end of this, if I if I read some article that's like Spartacus House of Asher turned into like one of the best shows, then I'll come back and tune in and realize that I I've judged it too harshly. But uh, for right now, I just don't feel the gravitation towards any of the characters and seeing them succeed yet. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one. Bye. Bye.