The Chosen S4 Eps 1-3 – a few brief thoughts

Death, dreams, dance, and more as the show's middle season begins.

Famous last words? John the Baptist (David Amito) is ready for his close-up in The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3.

From the better-late-than-never pile, a few brief thoughts about The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3, which ended its theatrical run last week. No detailed analysis or formal review, as such, yet; just various points that occurred to me. I hope to say more about these episodes in the future, after I’ve had a chance to revisit them.

Fair warning: I will get into spoilers here, but I’ll comment on different aspects of the episodes more-or-less in chronological order. So if you’re only up to, say, Episode 2, you can read my comments about that episode without worrying about spoilers for Episode 3, etc.

Episode 1

• This is the episode that depicts the execution of John the Baptist, who has been in prison since Season 2. (He spent another, separate stint in jail during Season 1.) The episode begins with a flashback to 4 BC, when John’s mother Elizabeth was still pregnant with him, and it ends with a sequence that cross-cuts between John’s dedication ceremony as an infant and his execution as an adult some 30-odd years later. I have to say, this sequence resonated for me, because when I was a kid, I sometimes fused the birth and death of Jesus in my mind (I sometimes thought about the baby having holes in his hands and feet…). I think my imagination went there partly because Christmas and Easter were only a few months apart, but I was also intrigued by the continuity between past and present selves in general, and I was especially conscious of the idea that Jesus had come to Earth as a baby so that he could die when he grew up. John’s death wasn’t foreordained in the same way—it wasn’t prophesied, it served no larger purpose (if anything, it went against the expectations that were raised by being “the new Elijah”, because Elijah is one of only two figures in the Old Testament who never died)—but I appreciated the way it was juxtaposed with his birth here.

• Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah are, of course, visited by Mary, who recently became pregnant with Jesus. This is Sara Anne’s fourth appearance as the young Mary, following two Christmas episodes and a flashback in Season 3, and if you count ‘The Shepherd’ as part of Season 1 and ‘The Messengers’ as part of Season 2, you could argue that she has played young Mary in all four seasons of the series so far.

• On a related note, it’s kind of funny that Ms Anne is at least six years older now than she was when she first played Mary, because her scenes in this episode take place before her appearances in all the other episodes. The character is the youngest she’s ever been here, but the actress—who was a teenager in ‘The Shepherd’ and is now in her mid- to late 20s—is the oldest she’s ever been. (And if she keeps appearing in flashbacks right to the end of the series, she’ll be getting very close to the age her character was when Jesus went missing at the Temple as a boy. Vanessa Benavente played Mary in that scene in S1E5.)

• The first scene after the prologue shows Salome rehearsing her dance for Herod Antipas’s banquet. The dance here is unlike anything I’ve seen in a movie about Salome; the emphasis is on gymnastics and athletic perfection, like she’s performing for an Olympic judge, and not on eroticism. Most films have assumed that Herod Antipas was sexually attracted to Salome, and that he made the rash decision to give her anything she wanted (even up to half his kingdom!) because he was turned on by her dance. But in this episode, it’s harder to see why he would make that offer. (Yes, the idea that Antipas would be turned on by Salome is kind of icky because she was his niece and stepdaughter, but the Herods were an incestuous bunch; in fact, Salome’s mother was his niece, too.)

• Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot are doing laundry down by the lake. Judas thinks they should get someone else to do the work so that the apostles can do important apostle-ing. But Simon says they need to do their own laundry to “appear relatable”. The idea that the disciples cared about their appearance—and, by extension, that modern Christians, especially those in ministry, should care about how they appear to people—is… interesting.