Summary
Episode 5 is the best-organized chapter of Kaos thus far, and each seemingly separate narrative strand is becoming more and more intertwined.
Episode 5 of Kaos introduces a unique framing device, with the story being divided into three distinct but interlinked parts titled “Part I: Furies”, “Part II: Hera and the Tacitas”, and “Part III: The Dead”. They’re all introduced with a chyron and organize the episode’s events very neatly, with Prometheus’s narration threading through the whole thing. It’s easily the strongest episode of the season thus far structurally, and also dramatically, with Janet McTeer having an Emmy-worthy moment out of nowhere.
For ease, I’ll break this recap up in the same way as the episode. But first…
Prologue
Everything is coming together along the lines described and planned for by Prometheus, who we now know is working with Atropos, one of the Fates. It was with her that Prometheus discussed the plan to kill Charon and send him on his Underworld mission. It was the only way to take down Zeus.
Everything is part of a greater plan, even if not everybody knows it. There are unwitting participants like Agatha and Nax, but others who know their roles and what it will mean if they fail in them. Success requires everyone to do their bit, and anything can go wrong in the meantime.
These are the kind of stakes we want in the back half of a season.
Part I: Furies
As we learned in Episode 3, Ari can see the Furies. In Kaos Episode 5 they take her to a motel, where they show her the truth of what happened to her brother, Glaucus.
Presented as a kind of bizarre sitcom, the story plays out on the motel’s old TV. Ari sees her father, Minos, being given the presidency by Poseidon, who lays out some of the particulars. His first job is to let a lion loose from the zoo since it will entertainingly kill people. His second is to sire an heir, but Minos has a problem with this on the grounds of his prophecy.
Minos’s prophecy reads thusly:
“Your end begins in the marital bed. The first child to draw breath will kill you dead.”
Needless to say, this is not the prophecy that Minos has subsequently described to Ari. Poseidon’s solution to it is for Minos to have twins and simply kill the firstborn. Minos agrees and eventually instructs Daedalus to kill the infant, but Ari turns the TV off before seeing it through.
Ari is stunned by this information since she didn’t even know Daedalus was a prisoner, but she knows deep down that it’s true. When she confronts Daedalus he confesses in a roundabout way, revealing that his son, Icarus, built his wings to escape what his father had done (and died after flying too close to the sun, as per the usual mythology.) But Daedalus has another surprise. Glaucus isn’t dead – he’s the minotaur.
Kaos | Image via Netflix
Part II: Hera and the Tacitas
The second part of Kaos Episode 5 is devoted to Hera and her affair with Poseidon. With Zeus now enacting the terrible plans for humanity we saw he had drawn up in Episode 4, his midlife crisis is rapidly worsening. Poseidon is Hera’s only confidant, although the tacitas know and preserve her secret since they lack the tongues to be able to reveal it.
It’s one of these tongues that reveals what Hera has been doing to Zeus. When she’s out, he listens to people’s confessions, incapable of resisting the pull of doing something he’s forbidden from doing. He’s shocked to discover that one of the tongues warbles with his wife’s moans of pleasure.
To get to the bottom of things Zeus kidnaps and tortures a tacita, scaring off Dionysus, who had only just told a bee – he hoped that it was his mother, but it’s difficult to tell – that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Zeus has no such issues, and when Hera gets home, the dead tacita is waiting for her.
Zeus confronts Hera about the affair, demanding to know who she has been sleeping with. This is Janet McTeer’s big acting moment, and it’s very impressive, even for Zeus, who buys Hera’s excuses despite the fact that he must know deep down what he heard. However, she compels him to believe that his recent state of mind led him to imagine it, and the two make up on the floor.
But as Prometheus’s narration and the final scene of this sequence make clear, Hera is not going to forget about what happened here.
Part III: The Dead
The third and final part of Kaos Episode 5 takes us back to the Underworld, where Riddy and Caeneus have discovered a terrible secret. Hades has been turning the dead to stone and keeping them in the giant cavern under Asphodel. We see him bestow this same fate upon Nax.
When Nax screams, only Riddy hears it. She passes out and Caeneus drags her outside. Medusa sees them leaving.
It remains slightly unclear what Hades has been up to, but Prometheus’s narration suggests it was what Zeus told him to do. And now it is Riddy and Caeneus’s job to undo it. A tragedy on two fronts.
At the end of the episode, we see Orpheus wash up on the shore. All roads must converge sooner rather than later.
RELATED:
