____twoism

It's a little crass to turn this type of tragedy into a TV series, but I thought the first episode was pretty decent. I think they gave Vernon Howell a fair shake in terms of presentation, if only for dramatic purposes - I think it would be hard to do this and not attempt to make both sides in the situation at least a little sympathetic to the viewer.

This episode is purely setup, mostly focusing on Ruby Ridge and the general day to day life on the compound in Waco, but by the end, you can see the threads that Howell's little utopia isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and that the ATF is looking for an easy win in the eyes of the public following Ruby RIdge.

I think Far Cry 5 takes inspiration from Waco Siege

Opothecary wrote:It's a little crass to turn this type of tragedy into a TV series, but I thought the first episode was pretty decent. I think they gave Vernon Howell a fair shake in terms of presentation, if only for dramatic purposes - I think it would be hard to do this and not attempt to make both sides in the situation at least a little sympathetic to the viewer.

This episode is purely setup, mostly focusing on Ruby Ridge and the general day to day life on the compound in Waco, but by the end, you can see the threads that Howell's little utopia isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and that the ATF is looking for an easy win in the eyes of the public following Ruby RIdge.

That does sound remarkably balanced in reality. Maybe not accurate in my eyes, but balanced.

The majority Demonize the Davidians whilst glorifying the "Brave" ATF and the rest, usually lower budget documentaries, tend to do the exact inverse. They were all human at the end of the day. Dehumanizing anyone is always a negative.

Michael Shannon's Koresh was about as close to the real thing as you can probably get. Pretty impressive job there. I thought this dramatization was mostly well done and I give it credit for trying to have a balanced perspective by drawing from books written by people on both sides.

Josh wrote:Michael Shannon's Koresh was about as close to the real thing as you can probably get. Pretty impressive job there. I thought this dramatization was mostly well done and I give it credit for trying to have a balanced perspective by drawing from books written by people on both sides.

Michael Shannon was Gary (FBI negotiator), he's pretty solid in everything I've seen him in too. Taylor Kitsch played Koresh, I thought he was great, I don't think I've seen him in anything else before.

They really did give the Davidians about as fair a shake as could be asked for in their portrayal, maybe a little too fair in my book. I'm all for consenting adults wanting to go live in a commune and be left alone by society (an agnostic version of that actually sounds pretty great to me), just not with a predator who is going to turn your kids into child brides, you know?

FYI this is on Netflix now (at least in the US).

So far I like that the miniseries doesn't portray the ATF as just some saints that went to take down a spooky cult. I was expecting it to just be completely Anti-Koresh, but it's balanced. I really like that.

Sigh. I just finished it. Wrote this up on the BOC FB group:

I liked this in the beginning, then didn’t as it went on. I get that the miniseries tries to justify corruption on both sides, but they made Koresh out to be this mild-mannered man of God who just happened to think he’s a prophet, rather than the manipulative and abusive cult leader that he was.

Hell, for most of the miniseries I was like “David isn’t really that bad!”

He’s that bad.

So are the ATF and the FBI in this instance.

They downplayed SO MUCH in this show to try to find the middle ground and sucked the life out of what happened for some watered-down government v. religion narrative.

Dude who played Koresh was spot on though.