I never got into chess playing. I learnt both the Chinese chess and the Western chess as a kid, played it for a year or so but never went back. For me, I was a restless kid, and the chess pieces look a lot duller than other boardgame pieces. But the most important part was I didn’t have the patience or ability to sit still and wait for the game to be played out.
When ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ first debut on Netflix, I looked at the trailer, found out it was all about chess playing, I lost interest immediately. In the following months I saw a lot of friends posting how great the series is, and I thought probably they are chess players themselves. I am just not the one cultured enough to understand it. Until I chatted with another friend and she was raving about it. I asked, ‘Do I need to understand chess to watch it? Because if so, there is no way I would waste my time on it’. Her response was, the chess playing was only the premise for the story. It does have chess related materials but they are for the progression not for you to learn and understand. It is more about the story of a girl struggling with addiction while marvelling at something that was dominated by men at her time.
So, I decided to give it a go on the night my online game was going under maintenance.
To my surprise, I watched five out of the seven episodes of the series in one night. I just couldn’t stop my desire to find out what happened next with the cliff hanger of each episodes. Also, the fact that I am not familiar with most of the cast members made the series even more believable for me. My friend was correct, chess was the premise, but the series was so much more than that.
Although at one point I did feel that a child prodigy falling into addiction or spiralling out of control was a bit cliché as a plotline, the series did address that the causes of the issue were logical – the tranquilisers were from a common practice at the orphanage during that period, and the drinking later was because she saw it as a way to remember her adopted mother. The series also dealt quite extensively with mental and social issues that super talented people suffered with a sound foundation. Beth’s (played brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy) friend Jolene (played memorably by Moses Ingram) once said to Beth, ‘You super talented people have no idea what we ordinary people went through’, hinting that her talents had clouded her judgement about the world to a point that the world was completely distorted. The fact that Beth thought no one could understand her was because she did not want to be understood by people whom she felt were not on the same level. It was a great and moving friendship moment between the two. That friendship did not have lots of screen times but was extremely powerful and prominent for the story being told by the series.
One of the things I really enjoyed watching was Beth’s visualisation of chess games on the ceiling. I thought that was an extremely ingenious take to explain her understanding of the game and her desire to improve at every opportunity. In the last game shown in the series, her looking up at the ceiling causing waves among the audience and the commentator was extremely funny, as it reflects that nobody could really understand what was going through her head.
‘The Queen’s Gambit’ is a period piece set between the 1950s and 60s, so inevitably it touched on a lot of period social political issues – how gay men were hiding from plain sight in the society, how Christian establishments trying to ramp through agendas through sponsorships, how the Western world tried to use a sit still sport to forward political agendas etc. However, for Beth, her way of dealing with these issues was she couldn’t care less about these people because all she wanted, and all she thought she had was chess, even when she was at odds with the Chess Federation. For me, what struck me most was how human organisations could easily corrupt something neutral and innocent. And sometimes how hard it is to fight against them and how high the price was when you were being forced into becoming one of them. These free country agents might think they are protecting people’s freedom but at the end of the day, they are just two sides of the same coin with the Soviet Russia that they tried to beat.
For me, apart from the friendship between Jolene and Beth, I really enjoyed watching the evolution of Beth’s relationship with her adopted mother Alma (played by Marielle Heller). From a very mutually distanced, respected and not really knowing each other relationship, circumstance had them beginning to watch out for each other and became an even more solid mother-daughter relationship than Beth’s own birth mother. Watching how Alma slowly evolved from a woman moaning for the lost of her birth child and thus adopting Beth to hopefully to drown out her sorrow, to become more and more understanding of this child prodigy, and transformed from a dead-end housewife to an extremely capable manager was refreshing. Her influence on Beth was prominent – both positively and negatively.
If there is one thing I learnt from ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, it will be – Chess might not be for everyone, but humanity, humility and human relationships are universal.
