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The Chosen One, a new Netflix series shot in Mexico’s Baja California Sur, had a problematic production; actors Raymundo Garduño Cruz and Juan Francisco González Aguilar were killed in a traffic accident, causing production to temporarily shut down. Sometimes a tragedy like that completely derails a production, but other times the actors, director and crew rally around and become even tighter. Which one happened here?
Opening Shot: We see a wall clock ticking as a woman attempts to get away from a violent attacker. A baby is crying in the foreground.
The Gist: The woman, Sarah Mitchell (Dianna Agron), manages to knock the attacker out, and she grabs the baby and drives away from the motel where they’re staying. She gets stopped by a cop, but something impels the cop to let her go on; she crosses the Mexican border into the Baja California peninsula, and at a hideout, she burns what looks like her passport.
In 1999, 12-year-old Jodie Mitchell (Bobby Luhnow) continues to have a dream where a spirit tells him “come”; the spirit is in the form of an aquatic humanoid, and there are drops of blood in the dream. But when Sarah asks him if everything is OK, he just chalks it up to a bad dream.
At the local festival in Santa Rosalía, Jodie meets up with his friends: His neighbor Magda (Amelie Siordia) and buddies Wagner (Alberto Pérez Jácome) and Hipolito (Jorge Javier Arballo Osornio). They get some fireworks from a food vendor named Elvis (Elvis Zamora), who is a friend of Sarah’s; after the blow up a barrel, Hipolito defends Magda from the advances of a local bully named Angelo (Patricio Serna Meza).
Their friend Tuka (Juan Fernando González) tells them that his uncle didn’t come back from work as a fisherman that night; he ends up showing up, but looks like he’s been through a wringer. He tells Tuka that a siren caused him to abandon his boat; he even got a lock of the siren’s hair. The group all agree to venture out to the ocean to retrieve the boat and search for the supposed siren. Hipolito knows that if they follow a pipeline across the salt flats, they’ll reach the sea.
Before they set off, Jodie gets some advice: If he sacrifices something important to the desert, the desert will give back. It comes into play when the group gets lost on the second day of the hike; he sacrifices the pendant Sarah gave him, cut his hand open to let out a bit of blood, and suddenly a seagull appears.
The group finds the water, as well as Tuka’s uncle’s boat, but a much bigger miracle is about to happen when the group makes their way back to town.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Chosen One plays out like a Mexican version of Stranger Things, married to the spiritual themes from The Chosen.
Our Take: The Chosen One is based on the graphic novel American Jesus by Mark Millar and Peter Gross; Everado Gout produces and directs the series. At times, the show has supernatural vibes, at others it dives into spirituality and religion. But for the most part, it feels like a coming-of-age drama, albeit one where the person coming of age may be the second coming of Jesus Christ.
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What we know at the end of the first episode is that Sarah had to run to Baja California Sur in order to escape whoever wanted baby Jodie in their clutches. We also know that Jodie has powers of some sort, but we’re not sure what they are. When he spies an eagle on the walk back from the ocean, a truck driver spies the same eagle and drives the truck over the edge of a bridge. It falls on Jodie but he somehow comes out of it not just alive, but unscathed. In the second episode, word of the “miracle boy” gets around town, getting the attention of Pastor Cruz (Carlos Bardem), who seems to have split off from the Catholic church to start his own congregation. But then Jodie starts to perform actual miracles.
But that progression is couched in Jodie trying to just figure out who is as a person. Sarah refuses to tell him about his father; he has had a crush on Magda since they were kids, but he isn’t able to act on it; bullies like Angelo terrorize him for being a gringo. It’s that coming of age style that evoked Stranger Things for us; in the middle of the supernatural goings on are a bunch of kids growing up fast.
That chemistry among the friend group is what attracts us to the show. The relationship between Jodie and his mother Sarah, who speak English to each other even though they both are fluent in Spanish, is also key. Agron shows once again that she can do a hell of a lot more than what she showed for all those years on Glee, playing Sarah as in control, even in the face of Jodie rebelling against the odd, nomadic life she set up for them. But, like Winona Ryder’s Joyce in Stranger Things, Argon’s Sarah is better when she gets significant plot time but whose story doesn’t overshadow what the friend group is doing.
One thing that we hope the show continues with is the path where Jodie is trying to figure his life and history out while he figures out the power that he actually has. This way, the miracles he commits won’t need to carry the story. So far, that’s the case, and that’s fine with us.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: In the darkness under the wrecked tractor trailer, we see Jodie open his eyes.
Sleeper Star: Lilith Amelie Siordia Mejia’s Magda is a calming presence in Jodie’s life, despite how tumultuous her life is; her brother went missing a few years prior, and her family life has never recovered. But we can see in Mejia’s performance how much she cares about Jodie and how she wants to be there for him. It’s a very mature kind of love, despite her relatively young age.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Jodie comes to the defense of Tuka, getting bullied by Angelo for being a Native, Angelo pulls a knife on Jodie. We get that the scene shows how violent Angelo can be, which might foreshadow something later, but in real time it feels like a bit of a gratuitous scene.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Chosen One takes a bit of time to get to the heart of its premise, but the ride there is made easier by the chemistry between the members of the friend group and between Luhnow and Agron.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
