TV Review: NAUTILUS Episode 5, ‘Anguille Fumée'

Geek Girl Authority

6 days ago

Season 1 Episode 5 of Nautilus begins with the ship in free-fall as every effort to dislodge the giant electric eel they picked up in the previous episode fails. Worse still, soon after, the crew starts acting strange. An unlikely hero must rise if the crew is going to make it out of the depths of the ocean.
I found Episode 4 of Nautilus underwhelming, but the team behind this AMC show comes back swinging with its fifth entry. In 'Anguille Fumée,' the show brings out its most tense episode yet in a locked-room horror mystery. This was like watching some of our favorite Star Trek horror episodes, but set in the deep in a submarine. Nautilus, Season 1 Episode 5, 'Anguille Fumée'
With so much of the episode taking place in the submarine itself, I felt we got to see more of the Nautilus crew in this episode. We still don't know any of their backstory, but more screen time with the supporting crew is always enjoyable. Their quirky personalities cut through all the tension.
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Elsewhere with the East India Mercantile Company, the stakes rise as captured Nautilus crewmember Jagadish Ghosh (Chum Ehelepola) is in dire straits while being confronted by Captain Billy Millais (Luke Arnold).
The creative team has been dropping hints throughout the show that there's more to Millais than he can let on. And Arnold has been quietly capturing this intrigue in his performance. I am looking forward to seeing where they take his character.
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'Anguille Fumée' is spectacularly tense. The ship is in danger; the crew is at their wits' end, and danger is at every step. They're in uncharted waters—literally and figuratively—and trust isn't high. Anything and everything can set off a fuse, and this Nautilus episode plays with that concept while leaning into classic horror imagery and story beats. The Accent Issue
An issue that hasn't cropped up before is the accents. I can't assess the other accents on Nautilus , but several characters speak Hindi, and one character speaks Bengali in this episode—the actors speaking Hindi are very obviously not native to India, because it's heavily-accented.
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Nemo actor Shazad Latif is a British actor with Pakistani heritage. Shabana Azeez, who plays Nemo's wife Renouka, and Samara Wheeler, who plays their child Mya, are both Australian. They're playing Indian characters in an era where hardly anyone traveled, they shouldn't have anachronistic accents when speaking their mother tongues.
And the gentleman speaking Bengali—not an Indian character or actor—kudos for trying, but I couldn't understand a single word he said. I had to read the subtitles.
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But the accent issue is a negligible problem on Nautilus . The actors are doing their best, possibly in languages they aren't familiar with. I can't fault them. I'm someone who grew up in India, and I speak regional languages with an accent because English is my first language. And I watch way too much TV, which has affected the way I speak. Nemo and Humility
We get a little more of Humility Lucas' (Georgia Flood) backstory. It's nothing we haven't seen and read in a ton of stories about women in the past who tried to break the mold. But for young viewers, they'll find Humility's chaffing and belligerence against a sexist world a mirror to their own fight against the patriarchy.
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But an ongoing issue is that the creators of Nautilus are so intent on positioning Humility as the 'underestimated woman with brains' that they keep forgetting Nemo is the brains behind the ship's design. He would, therefore, know something about engineering and science.
Nemo spends far too much time stultified by the science, while Humility is always saving the moment with her scientific knowledge. The story and their connection would be far stronger if they worked together. They can disagree on their methods—which briefly happens in this episode—but they're always at odds, or underestimating each other. Five episodes into Nautilus , their dynamic seems to be standing in place.
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If Nemo and Humility spend too much time tearing each other down, the eventual bond that the writers have undoubtedly written for them won't be believable.
But I have faith that the show will right that issue, if by doing nothing else but leaning into the chemistry that Latif and Flood have easily built over five episodes.
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This is one of the best episodes of Nautilus yet, but, perhaps because it's so engrossing and enjoyable, the show's issues were amplified.
Nautilus airs every Sunday on AMC and AMC+.
TV Review: IRONHEART Monita has been championing diversity, inclusivity, and representation in entertainment media through her work for over a decade. She is a Tomatometer-Approved Critic. She writes for Bam Smack Pow and Geek Girl Authority. Her bylines have appeared on 3-time Eisner Award-winning publication Women Write About Comics, HuffPost, Reactormag.com (formerly tor.com), Soundsphere/Screensphere, FanSided's Show Snob, and Vocal. She was also a TV/Movies features writer at Collider.com. Alongside her twin, Monita co-hosts the pop culture podcast Stereo Geeks.