Nautilus Finished Its First (and Only) Season Just as It Got Started - Reactor

What do you call a horizon when you’re underwater?

That’s not entirely a rhetorical question, because as Nautilus, the not-exactly-a-prequel adaptation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea wraps up, it casts an eye towards an uncertain future.

The series completes its 10-episode run on AMC with its two final episodes, and while they’re marketed as a “season finale two-parter,” they are distinctly different, and only tied together by the overarching narrative of the entire series.

That narrative, if you’re just diving in now without having gotten your feet wet from the beginning, is fairly straightforward: Nemo, formerly prince Dakkar as it has been revealed, is a rebel on the run from the Company, a stand-in for the British East India Company. Alongside a ragtag crew made up of people colonized or otherwise harmed by the Company, he is seeking a treasure that will allow him to fight back.

Throughout the series, they’ve mainly been on the defensive, first fleeing with the titular Nautilus, a submersible designed by Nemo and Benoit, one of his crewmates, and then getting sidetracked by various incidents. These challenges gave the series a 90s-esque “problem of the week” vibe, while retaining the prestige TV quality of a continuous narrative that streaming audiences are more used to.

AMC picked the show up from Disney after the latter produced it and then yanked it before it even aired, and AMC also was canny enough to pick up on this episodic style, releasing episodes on a weekly basis rather than all at once. As such, regular viewers would be treated to a different challenge each time—a giant eel, a tyrannical maharajah (played by a delightfully scenery-chewing Richard E. Grant), and even, possibly, a clue to the fabled city of Atlantis.

Unfortunately, the two styles—episodic and ongoing narrative—ended up butting heads with each other, and this becomes an issue by the way the series wraps.

In episode nine, “Ride of the Valkyrie,” Nemo and the crew finally arrive at the rumoured resting place of the treasure of Halvar, a Viking trove of plundered riches. The Pillars of Halvar, huge stone formations that overlook the area, were mentioned as early as the season premiere, making this the proverbial macguffin driving the plot.

And unfortunately, it doesn’t amount to much more. It turns out that there are still several female guardians looking over the treasure, led by Revna, played by Anna Torv (The Last of Us, Fringe), who feels horrendously wasted in this role. These “valkyries” quickly capture the crew, and are set to execute them before Nemo pleads for a hearing.

Here’s where the issues of serialization come into play. Literally last episode, the crew mutinied, and when Nemo calls for character witnesses, it doesn’t take long for things to devolve, as crew members like Ranbir, Boniface, and Kai each awkwardly admit that they don’t have a lot of love for their captain.

The only person who seems fully committed to speaking on Nemo’s behalf is Humility, and it’s fair to say her motivations for doing so are tied up in an awkward, fumbling attraction (and who can blame her? He’s played by Shazad Latif).

In fact, the defence is so limp that Revna goes ahead with the executions anyway, and here is where things get really rocky. Nemo had made some good points in his defence, including that among the treasure of Halvar were items plundered from his homeland. That’s a compelling argument, and Revna seems moved by it. For her to then attempt the death sentences anyway makes her character ring hollow.

It also doesn’t help that Nemo’s crew pretty easily escapes—every single one—with only Cuff, the duplicitous “former” British soldier, lightly injured. This has the effect of rendering Revna and her valkyries impotent, and their reaction to defeat is to trigger a self-destruct system in the pillars.

The resulting action sequence is pretty cool to look at, and it is admittedly nice in that it makes Nemo’s crew finally, totally, act together, competently functioning as a team to steer the Nautlius out from the resulting tsunami of the falling pillars. But the whole affair just feels anticlimatic, and Revna and the valkyries are reduced to a footnote.

With no treasure, it’s left to Nemo to come up with an alternate strategy in the season finale’s confrontation with the Company, entitled “Too Big to Fail.”

Instead of clashing head-to-head with his adversaries, Nemo and his crew adopt a new strategy: economics. The Nautilus team plots to sabotage the Company by attacking its holdings. First, they insert market rumblings to make the shareholders anxious, causing Company Director Crawley, the chief antagonist of the series, to hold a shareholders’ meeting to calm them down. Then they go after the three largest shareholders: Two of them we have never met before, but the third is Lord Pitt, Humility’s betrothed, who has been taking part in the pursuit of the Nautilus.

The other confrontations with the main shareholders also prove personal in their own ways, though. First, Nemo has a genuinely fun moment of subterfuge at a gentleman’s club, which leads to a delightful reference to Phileas Fogg of Jules Verne’s other great work, Around the World in 80 Days. Then, Boniface and Jiacomo infiltrate an asylum where a cryptic doctor, the second major shareholder, seems to be creating… supersoldiers? And Jiacomo was one of them? We don’t find out all the details, but Jiacomo opts to let himself be captured by the doctor’s guards, hoping to learn more of his mysterious forgotten past. It’s a strange, unresolved thread—one of many, but we’ll get to that later.

That leaves Humility to confront Lord Pitt, and she easily dupes him into signing over his shares to her with the promise of finally marrying him.

From there, it’s a pretty satisfying showdown at the shareholders meeting, where Nemo finally grows into his leadership role and, rather than pursuing a violent clash with the guards present, literally has them disarmed when he points out that he effectively owns them now.

Unfortunately, someone in the writers room must have felt this was cheating the audience of action, and so there is a somewhat-contrived battle between Nemo and Captain Millais (Luke Arnold), whose final reveal is undercut by hasty exposition and confusing payoff. Latif and Arnold give it their all, but the fight choreography is a little silly (especially Nemo power-slamming Millais through a table, WWE style—BAH GAWD) and the stakes just feel deflated, coming as it does after Nemo has effectively neutered the Company.

What does work, and should have received more attention, is Crawley refusing to give up. The character has displayed a kind of mania before, and here it manifests in him holding the one noble British officer at gunpoint, forcing the now-unemployed Company soldiers to pursue the Nautlius in the Dreadnought. It’s a fun chase sequence and an explosive finale involving London Bridge—and if you know your nursery rhymes, you can probably guess how that shakes out.

But as final as that resolution is (and the denouement with Crawley and Cuff being even MORE final, as Cuff reveals his true allegiance, and a hidden knife, to a defeated Crawley), there are many, many more dangling threads.

Nemo and Humility finally admit their feelings for each other, but then Nemo, displaying the mercurial temper which hampered his character in earlier episodes, suddenly orders her away. She pursues the Nautilus to shore, but Humility and Loti are left behind (much to the consternation of Kai, who had, if we’re being honest, a far more charming romance with Humility’s French maidservant). Jiacomo is never seen again after being captured.

And lastly, and perhaps most compellingly, Nemo recovers another stone like the one he found in episode six—probably the series’ best installment, where Benoit was lost in his pursuit of Atlantis. A brief vision overtakes the captain as he brings the two stones together, and he becomes convinced Benoit is still alive, and in the fabled underwater city.

Cuff, meanwhile, draws a similar conclusion, and his masters set him on a similar path.

This, then, is the main plot thread that a potential season two would draw on: the search for Atlantis. Losing Humility, Loti, Cuff, and maybe even Jiacomo would be unfortunate, though, particularly for the first two. The usual misogynistic pap was spewed online at the inclusion of new, female characters, but they brought energy and diversity not just of gender but of character to the table, and their absence would be keenly felt going forward.

It’s a bit unfortunate that we’re about as likely to get that season two as we are about as likely to find Atlantis in real life. Disney produced Nautilus in 2022, and it lingered in unreleased limbo for years. 

This all works against Nautilus‘ future, and that underwater horizon remains uncertain.

It’s a shame, because what season one had working against it could be remedied. Season one was uneven because it clearly wanted to emulate 90s adventure, episodic and fun, while also being serialized and deadly serious. In tone and story, it was often at odds with itself. Doing away with the heavier stuff, fully embracing the fantastical and going all-in on a rollicking adventure to find Atlantis seems like a better fit for the Steampunk show. 

Will it happen? Who can say.

In terms of what we got, there are diamonds in the rough. You just have to dig down deep to get to them.