Hey everyone. Before we get started, I just wanted to give out a big thanks to Joshua Ott for sponsoring this review with his Patreon donation. (At the $60 a month tier, you are allowed to pick anything up to an including a 13ish episode series to be reviewed–which is released in addition to the one article a week I normally put out here on BiggestinJapan.com.) However, this time around, we’re not doing an anime but rather the first season of Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego.
As a kid, I was in exactly the right age group for the Carmen Sandiego franchise. I watched the original Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game show every day after school. I spent countless hours on my local public library computer playing Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? I even watched the Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? cartoon show–though I might have been a bit too old for it by the time it came out.
What set Carmen Sandiego apart from other media at the time was that it was centered not around the hero–be that the player, the kids on the game show, or Zack and Ivy–but rather on the titular villain: Carmen Sandiego. She traveled across the world stealing the unstealable with her legion of V.I.L.E. henchmen (each sporting some sort of pun-based name) and was all but uncatchable. She wasn’t a gun toting-killer, willing to get the job done no matter the cost–she simply enjoyed the game of cat and mouse between her and the authorities. Sure, the hero might foil her plans and retrieve whatever she had stolen, but she’d inevitably get away to try again another day.
While for decades we’ve been working to find out “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?,” the new Netflix series Carmen Sandiego focuses on a different question: “Who in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” What would mold a person into the greatest thief the world has ever known?
To answer this question, we begin with Carmen’s origin. Found on the side of the road as a baby, she was taken to the V.I.L.E. thieves training school. With no name of her own, she was given only a code name: “Black Sheep”–marking her as an outsider among the criminals who had arrived on the island by choice to further their own goals.
It’s there that she grew up, surrounded by prospective world-class thieves with the teachers acting as her surrogate parents. Thieving and fighting were her childhood games, so it was no surprise that she would enter the thieves academy. However, all that would change when she stowed away on an actual V.I.L.E. mission.
It’s here that she literally learned that thieving wasn’t all fun and games. The theft of historical relics hurts people on a cultural level–making the whole world poorer in perpetuity. But with V.I.L.E. it didn’t end there. They were willing to do anything to get what they wanted–including murder.
Carmen, with her sheltered life on the island, had only seen V.I.L.E. at its best–at how it treated and nurtured its own. And so her morals were based on that–and on her long term relationship with “Player.”
Escaping V.I.L.E. island, she threw away her code name at the very moment it defined her best–for by being the only person to turn her back on V.I.L.E., she truly became the organization’s black sheep. It’s then that she picked a new name all her own: Carmen Sandiego.
Carmen Sandiego is a symbol in a battle of ideals–hence the insistence on the red trenchcoat and fedora. She wants V.I.L.E. to know who it is that’s coming after them–who keeps beating them again and again. But she’s not out for revenge. Rather, she believes that the way they are doing things is wrong–that it harms the world as a whole. So she’s going to punish them for it. And she knows just where to hit them: in their piggy banks.
This version of Carmen Sandiego straddles the line between anti-hero and anti-villain. Sure, she has a strict code about not killing, but she has no problem breaking other laws to achieve her goals. Moreover, while she does steal only from V.I.L.E. and returns any cultural treasures she obtains, she has no issue using the cash she steals for her own personal indulgence–even if she does give a healthy helping to charity. This makes her quite different from past incarnations of the character who have been criminals either for “the love of the game” or for simple greed.
But Carmen is not the only one reimagined: Player, Zack, and Ivy appear not as the heroes chasing Carmen but as her loyal friends joining her on her quest to destroy the shadowy organization. Player supports the team by providing hacking skills and looking up information. Meanwhile, Zack and Ivy share in the legwork. After all, as good as Carmen is, she’s only one person and can only do one thing at a time.
Several recognizable V.I.L.E. villains reappear but others are completely new–namely, the ones who were Carmen’s friends at the Academy. But the most enjoyable reimagining is that of A.C.M.E.’s Chief who is based on the original game show’s Lynne Thigpen yet always appears as a hologram like the Chief in Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
If one thing has been consistent across all versions of Carmen Sandiego, it’s been the focus on educating as well as entertaining. The Netflix series does this in an effective yet somewhat clunky way. Most episodes have an infodump in the beginning in the form of a dialogue between Carmen and Player (and sometimes Zac and Ivy) that details the physical setting for the episode–i.e., what the location is famous for, who lives there, etc. Each of the items mentioned in the infodump will have some sort of major role in the episode to come. In other words, the knowledge is learned and later on reviewed to make it harder to forget.
While many of the episodes are relatively self contained, there is an overarching plot across the season. This involves the V.I.L.E. top brass attempting to deal with the threat that Carmen has become–and V.I.L.E. and A.C.M.E. becoming aware of each other. It all comes together in an excellent finale filled with twists that redefine much of what has come before–both in character development and story.
But what’s most entertaining about the season finale is that it establishes the status quo going forward–the status quo we should have been expecting all along. Due to misinformation and coincidence, A.C.M.E. comes to believe that Carmen is the mastermind behind V.I.L.E. and sets their sights on her. Thus if we take A.C.M.E.’s point of view, it appears the same as in any of the games or TV shows before it.
However, because we’ve spent the season by Carmen’s side, we know there is much more going on than meets the eye. The question is can A.C.M.E. discover the truth before V.I.L.E. destroys both Carmen and A.C.M.E. both?
Carmen Sandiego can be seen on Netflix.
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