It’s a great surprise that Leviathan ends as conclusively as it does. For one thing, it’s a Netflix series, and those are notorious for never ending. But it also has a lot to do, pitting our heroes against a mad Nikola Tesla and a superweapon known as Goliath to determine the outcome of World War I. Will Alek and Deryn end up together? Will geopolitical lessons be learned? Is Mutually Assured Destruction really the best path to peace? All this and more in Episode 12, “Under the Same Sky”, which you can tell just from the title is redolent with the show’s painfully simplistic underlying philosophy.
Oh, I should clarify a couple of things first. Leviathan is adapted from Scott Westerfeld’s World War I alt-history trilogy; the final book spans the final four episodes. It’s a patronizingly broad and kid-friendly adaptation, with the Central Powers reimagined as the steampunk “Clankers”, and the Allies as the neobiological “Darwinists”. The dramatic core is a burgeoning relationship between two characters on opposite sides – Aleksandar von Hohenberg, the son of recently assassinated Austria-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Deryn Sharp, a Scottish teenage girl cosplaying Mulan-style as a boy named Dylan in order to become an airman in the British military.
Towards the end of the series, the big conflict revolves around a superweapon designed by Nikola Tesla dubbed Goliath. This thing can end either the war or all of humanity, so it’s kind of a big deal that the matter is dealt with by Alek and Deryn, who fly to New York in the hopes of talking Tesla out of a madcap scheme.
Mutually Assured Destruction (Sort Of)
Leviathan has a habit of very lightly addressing big things through interpersonal drama, and the finale opens up with this playing out between Alek and his stern mentor, Volger. Volger represents the idea of staunch, unflinching nationalism and how that kind of national pride and singular focus can allow totalitarianism and tyranny to flourish unchecked. Alek, the idealist, understands that it’s not enough for him to be in charge and Austria to be safe – allowing the Central Powers access to a weapon as terrible as Goliath is a net negative for humanity.
It only takes a brief sword fight to convince Volger of this, because he realises how easy it is to hurt someone he has sworn to protect through his stubbornness. Point proved. But he’s only one small example of this kind of dangerous thinking. Tesla takes a similar idea to its most extreme. Through his Goliath weapon, he plans to achieve peace by keeping every nation on Earth in terror of being wiped out at a moment’s notice. Peace is a nice idea, but if you can only achieve it through threats of extreme violence, I’m not sure it really counts.
This idea of the ends justifying the means is embodied by the Germans, too. When Tesla threatens to destroy Berlin, they seem to stop in their tracks, but as soon as they think Goliath has been powered down, they attempt to capture Tesla alive so that he can recreate it for them. Berlin may get destroyed in this effort, but it’s a price they’re willing to pay for the power that would be afforded by Goliath. This is why Alek is the “hero” of the story; he’s the only person who realizes that peace is more valuable than power.
A still from Leviathan | Image via Netflix
A Heroic Effort
Alek gets the chance to prove his commitment to the cause by serving as the targeting point for the Leviathan, which was struggling to target the tower in which Goliath was housed, thanks to the inclement weather caused by the weapon. Alek is willing to put his neck on the line since he doesn’t buy Tesla’s logic that killing a load of Germans will frighten every other nation into backing away from conflict – and rightly so. But Leviathan isn’t the kind of show to end on the death of its hero.
Thanks to the efforts of his various allies, including the hatched Loris and Deryn, Alek enables the destruction of Goliath and escapes the ensuing blast. American warships also arrive to destroy the German U-Base. These two developments don’t bring an end to WW1 – though, if real history is adhered to, that isn’t far away – but they do prevent the world from teetering on the brink of mutually assured destruction, which is a win either way.
It’s not exactly sunshine and roses for Alek and Deryn, though, who steal a smooch but don’t get their happily ever after because of their respective responsibilities. Alek has a country to rule, ideally peacefully, and Deryn joins Nora on an expedition to Antarctica. Speaking of which…
Setting Up Leviathan Season 2 (Maybe)
Leviathan’s ending is, I’d argue, pretty conclusive. The main threat is dealt with, Alek and Deryn both end up in completely different but entirely logical places than the ones they started in, and the thematic point, sophomoric though it might have been, has been proved. But there is a loose end left dangling that could be tugged on by a second season, depending on the success of this one.
This involves Deryn and Nora’s expedition to Antarctica, where further reports of weather disruption imply that an escaped Tesla may already be at work on another Goliath – or something similarly terrible for mankind. A villain not being vanquished in a season generally means that they’re being kept around for potential shenanigans in the future, and while there aren’t – to my knowledge, anyway – any more books to adapt, Netflix could nonetheless take creative license to continue the story in whatever way they see fit.
This could involve Alek and Deryn reuniting to take on Tesla once again. But it’s hard to imagine Leviathan being well received enough – or there being enough meat on the bones of that idea, narratively speaking – to justify a second go-around. Stranger things have happened, though, especially in the streaming world. We’ll just have to wait and see.
