Great Pretender spoiler talk

So Netflix just dropped the first 14 episodes and couldn’t help but binge it.

Should you watch it? Short answer yes. Long answer it’s about con jobs and somehow they got the rights to Great Pretender by Queen as the ending song. It pulls you in with it’s great characters and plot. Each scheme has as many twists as a M night movie. The twists are genuine twists I honestly couldn’t foresee most of the plot.

And I’m going to spoil the last case so please watch the show and come back. So the last case deals with the art world, general culture around france, and a love story. The story goes to Cynthia’s perspective and it’s all about her time with Thomas her painter ex-boyfriend. I believe that this case was all about finding out the real thing, the genuine article, the real Mccoy, etc. Not in the tangible sense but in something like love. There is an ongoing dialectic between real vs fake.

So what makes something real? The show would have us believe the art could only be found out real by a dealer, James Coleman but we quickly find out that he does deal with fakes and passes it on as real. He also fakes his relationship with Farrah Brown who buys up the art he peddles.

But I have to take a moment to praise the writing. We have a version of Cynthia in the beginning and we are met with so much detail about her past. The character feels so real that it hurts when she throws away the ring at the end. You really want her to be happy at the end but it just shows how complex and different she is compared to her younger life. You really believe that if things happened differently she would have been happy to eat cheap food with Thomas forever.

The show argues intention as one of the main tells. While Thomas’s painting is a fake by all other purposes of the story. It’s a genuine piece of art in the eyes of Cynthia. In a troupe way it’s Thomas’s last painting before he vowed to never paint again due to painting fakes. In a way it’s a fake but at the same time a real painting. In a Hegel sense it depends on the viewer. You can argue that all of Thomas’s works are genuine since the originals are lost. Only James and people who know Thomas can tell but without them they are just as good.

In the C plot Edamura takes a job as a sushi chef and the show presents food in the same way of discerning between genuine Japanese food vs fake. In an absurd way the framing was a sushi restaurant in France, made my Chinese chefs, being criticized by a sleazy french art appraiser. Also Edamura the only Japanese person there is learning from said Chinese chefs about making sushi. And then Edamura takes Abigail to a chain ramen restaurant. I think the show is making the argument that chain ramen is better and more authentic but in a way it’s not discounting the sushi chefs either. It’s a small thing but it reinforces the themes of the case.