I thought Queen’s Gambit was just okay

Derek Eppinger
3 min readDec 16, 2020

While Queen’s Gambit tells a satisfying coming-of-age story with compelling characters, especially with its incredible performance from lead star Anna Taylor-Joy, the show's drama fails to make chess a compelling activity for its narrative.

However, before I discuss the problems I have with the show’s plot, this show's presentation is perfect. I obviously wasn’t alive during the show's time period, the 1960s, so I can’t speak to its accuracy, but my eyes definitely enjoyed the colorful, retro wallpapers that decorated each interior that frequently complemented the character costumes and the gorgeous cinematography. I also found myself really enjoying the diverse setlist of songs the show choose to include using Shazam multiple times to discover song titles.

Our protagonist, Elizabeth Harmon, a sharp chess prodigy attempting to become the greatest in the world, grows up surrounded by tragedy, grief, and addiction. She’s an extremely dynamic and creatively written character that undoubtedly is the hook of the show. This is also attributed to actress Anna Taylor-Joy that displays the character’s courage in her decisive mannerisms as well as her perceptiveness and curiosity seen in Harmon’s fast-moving, wide eyes. Most of my engagement watching the show came from the many unique character relationships a pensive, female chess master would find herself in as she progresses deeper and deeper into a male-dominated activity during the 1960s. These dichotomies between other characters provided thoughtful character development for Harmon through the show's brief season of seven episodes, and there was also a surprising amount of character development for the show's side characters I unexpectedly ended up caring about.

However, when the show focused on her main journey of actually playing chess I found myself extremely bored. It’s important to note that I don’t actually know how to play chess, but that should be irrelevant. You don’t have to know how a sport or activity is played to enjoy a show that uses the sport/activity as a vehicle to create drama. I didn’t know anything about basketball or Micheal Jordan and The Last Dance is one of my favorite shows ever, and different animes such as Haikyu or Kuroko no Basket this all the time. It’s the show’s job to make the source material accessible if it wants to appeal to mainstream audiences. With each episode running at an hour-long, it could have easily taken time away from pointless tournament montages to create more drama throughout the actual chess matches themselves whether through explaining general strategies, using inner monologue, or by creating more external drama between Harmon and her opponent. I just rarely felt the intensity throughout important matches that the show clearly wants you to feel. She wins frequently and sometimes she loses, and that's pretty much all I can say about them. When she loses, it’s certainly interesting to see how that failure affects her and her relationships, but the show never dives deeper into how she actually lost or similarly how she won. The show just relies on the fact that she is naturally an expert at chess and at getting better at chess, and rarely reflects on how Elizabeth Harmon is sharpening her skills to become better. Again, it certainly did not ruin the show, but this area could have heightened the suspense to make the plot and consequently the show, exceptional. I finished the Queen’s Gambit because it was only seven episodes but if it was any longer I’m not sure I would have. Then again, I just finished the emotional rollercoaster that is Ozark so this may just be a personal problem.

Let me know what you think.

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