PIRATES & PENANCE

 

Malinin and Sandokan: Profiles in Courage

 

What do triple toe-loops on the ice and pirates in tropical Southeast Asia have in common? Well, not much, except they were both at the top of my TV watchlist during last week's frigid winter storms.

 

After a long day at the keyboard, I like to chill in front of the tube at night, with a purring cat and a glass of wine, and having opted out of the news cycle to preserve what's left of my mental health, I found myself drawn into the figure skating competition at the Winter Olympics. At the same time, I happened upon Sandokan: The Pirate Prince, an 8-episode, Italian swashbuckler now streaming on Netflix.

 

For a week, I was madly channel-hopping between the two (although there are a thousand ways you can catch up with any Olympic events you might have missed), so that the two programs became almost inextricably linked in my brain. Both offer equal opportunities to cheer triumphs, commiserate with losses, cheer on underdogs, and explore complicated personalities. And both came loaded with plenty of drama.

 

Sandokan caught my eye, because, you know, pirates, even though I'd never heard of anybody in the cast, or the source material it's based on, a series of Victorian-era adventure novels by Emilio Salgari about a Malaysian pirate battling the English during the Age of Empire. And after a fairly ripping first episode, it almost lost me as it threatened to devolve into typical romantic fodder about a hunky pirate captain and his hostage, a snippy, entitled young beauty flinging insults and vitriol about to maintain her moral superiority — in short, all the tropes I wanted to subvert when I wrote my pirate novel, The Witch From the Sea, about a woman who becomes a working member of a pirate crew for the freedom of the open seas.

 

But the heroine, Marianne, soon drops her attitude, and gets drawn into the larger story of colonialism, attempted genocide, rebellion, and liberation. (Indeed, while there's a decent amount of shipboard action, these pirates are less interested in plunder than in battling English invaders who would steal their resources and enslave their people.) There's also the evolving mystery of pirate Sandokan's true origin, and heroic destiny. Along the way, we meet salty pirates, exotic natives, spirited women, and a plethora of sinister antagonists, including the corrupt English consul (Marianne's father), and an opium-smoking British naval captain out to hunt pirates, and the ruthless, sybaritic local sultan, with a taste for torture, both of whom have designs on Marianne.

 

Sexy Sandokan is played by Turkish-Albanian actor Can (pronounced "Gian") Yaman, a formidable presence with a searing gaze, who can twirl a scimitar like a cheerleader's baton. It took a while to warm up to Alanah Bloor as heroine Marianne, but she becomes more interesting as the story gains traction. I especially liked the dance-as-foreplay motif in which their romance evolves over a couple of elaborate set pieces, a formal ball at the consulate, and later, a Lunar New Year celebration in Singapore.

 

Meanwhile, over at the Olympics, most of the drama for Team USA centered on skaters who didn't quite live up to expectations. Champion ice dancing pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates "only" won silver, and there was some whining about a French judge whose scores might have elevated French pair Laurence Fournier and Guillaume Cizeron to the top spot. Yes, the Americans skated beautifully, but so did the French; I loved the precision of their Rhythmic category performance to Madonna's "Vogue."

 

But the story of the event — possibly of this entire Olympics — was 21-year-old figure skater Ilia Malinin, from Fairfax, Virginia. The son of two Russian figure skaters, Malinin, nicknamed the Quad God, is a star on the tournament circuit; he's like the Simone Biles of figure skating, doing amazing things on ice never before attempted, let alone achieved, by any other human, like the insanely difficult quadruple axel, and back flips. 

 

He and his Team USA cohorts had already won gold as a team. But, heavily favored to take gold in the individual event, he stunned the world with a poor performance, falling down twice in his final routine. The crowd cheered him on, anyway, but as he came off the ice, completely out of medal competition, and composed, but obviously disheartened, his father and coach exchanged a few words with him, but did not hug him. There wasn't a person in America, probably the world, that didn't want to give that kid a hug right that minute, except his dad. Fortunately, his other trainer stepped up and enveloped him in a massive embrace. A few minutes later, when the expected second-place winner, Mikhail Shaidorov,  from Kazakhstan, realized he'd been elevated to gold, Malinin trotted over to give him a congratulatory hug. Shaidorov was overwhelmed, and they held on to each other for a few minutes, the only two people in the entire arena who understood what the other was going through.

 

But having lost the gold in penance, Malinin found redemption. The hottest ticket at the Winter Olympics is always the Exhibition Gala on the last night, where skaters present routines out of competition, with no mandatory elements, and do whatever they want. Malinin skated to the song, "Fear," by a rapper called NF; dressed in jeans and a dark gray hoodie, he confronted darkness, disillusion, and crippling self-doubt, landed every masterful jump and flip (on a single blade, fer cryin' out loud), and emerged triumphant.

 

 

And here's the thing: no one will ever remember the disappointing free skate that landed him in 8th place instead of on the podium in the men’s individual competition. But no one will ever forget his exhibition program — it may become the defining image of this year’s games.