See review – Jason Momoa guts people for fun in Apple TV+'s lethal, sensual saga

A strong contributor to Apple TV +’s day-one roster of original dramas, See wisely doesn’t attempt to explain its premise via awkward dialogue. Instead, opening captions dive straight in, so let’s do the same: we’re hundreds of years in the future, but life has been medieval ever since a 21stcentury virus killed all but a couple of million humans. The survivors were not only left blind, but passed this on to their descendants, who have come to believe that human sight is a heretical myth. Now, in a humble mountain community hemmed in by trees and ravines, a child, fathered by a mysterious stranger, is about to be born …

Leading that community – the Alkeny – is Jason Momoa, a virtually inevitable piece of casting in the role of fearsome warrior chief Baba Voss.

Nobody sports braids, scars and a viscera-flecked calfskin cape with as much hairy authority as Momoa. When he blows a bone-horn, it stays blown. And the Alkeny are going to need all the help they can get, as they’re about to be forced out of their alpine hideout and into the wider world where strangers’ first instinct is to hack at your throat and steal your womenfolk. They also have a traitor or two in their midst, and a doozy of a parenting dilemma on the horizon.

See, then, is a saga about fragile

bonds and instinctive violence in a place where civilisation is behind our current reality: it has echoes of Frontier (in which Momoa also gutted people for fun), but with more primitive brutality and a dash of the hilariously intense mysticism of Sky’s Britannia, all of it taking place in an alternate reality where universal blindness lends every scene a frisson of otherworldliness.

Viewers can choose whether to play the “would a blind person really do that?” game: although it’s probably better to be forgiving when, say, a sighted actor doesn’t quite hide that they can see the person they’re talking to, there are moments where more rigour would have made a significant difference. One sequence involving massed hand-to-hand combat, for example, is full of suspiciously accurate running and punching.

It’s also better not to find out, before going in, how this world communicates, prays, dispenses justice or travels, since much of the fun of the early episodes is in building this picture up. Be warned, though, that not being seen has destroyed humanity’s ability to tastefully display affection towards partners – we’ve become dismayingly tonguey – and prepare to shed shameful tears at the news that plastic bottles are among the few 21st-century objects still in evidence. If that ecological message is not subtle, nor is the developing theme of mankind fearing that it might, once more, be about to acquire knowledge it cannot control, at nature’s expense – the character of nature here being played by a succession of awesome forests, mountains, plains and waterfalls, expensively shot with chilly crispness.

See is at its best when it introduces yet another terrifying nomadic gangster, at which point you can tell it is the creation of Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight, or when Momoa gets up close and ruthless with a foe who wants to threaten his people. Baba Voss wields a sharpened club, and has at least two extremely memorable ways of killing people with it. There are enough of those thrilling set pieces, blood spattering the camera lens, to compensate for the ponderous longueur in between.

Hope for a grander narrative comes from the rare appearances – at least, they’re rare in the three launch episodes, which critics were shown for preview – by Sylvia Hoeks as future antagonist Kane, a lethal, sensual, capricious queen in a Game of Thronesstyle. Her interactions with Momoa will determine whether the initially impressive See can survive.

confronts visitors with pictures of people yawning and, if they can’t resist following suit, they will be captured mid-yawn.

More ingeniously sleep-inducing still is Tracking Transience, Hasan

Elahi’s decade-long project to bore viewers with data. It originated when Elahi was wrongly identified as a terrorist and submitted to a six-month FBI investigation. “Viewers can see exactly where I am and what I’m doing, not to mention all sorts of details such as my telephone calls, my banking records, my flight data, as well as a few more things of a personal nature that I feel I should disclose to the FBI so they can know me a little better.” Time-stamped photos flash by on screen showing halfmade beds, every toilet he’s ever used, every meal he’s ever eaten. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone without an edit function.

There are 70,000 images to explore. “After all, the FBI wanted to know everything about me and I’m all about full disclosure,” Elahi says. In an age where privacy cannot be allowed, Elahi has brilliantly turned the tables on the data miners. At the same time, he has found what we need more than anything in our sleepless age: a surefire cure for insomnia.

• 24/7 is at Somerset House, London, 31 October to 23 February.