Monica Murray Derr
The following contains massive spoilers for both seasons of The Tourist. You have been warned.
What if you had the opportunity to completely start over, begin again truly, if I may coin a phrase, unburdened by what has been? This is the question the HBO Max-turned-Netflix production The Tourist seeks to answer. After an accident, a man (Jamie Dornan) wakes up with total amnesia, unable to remember his own name, let alone what caused the accident or why he is in the Australian outback rather than his native Ireland. As the story unfolds, we learn that he was a criminal, or at least involved with criminals, and his past may not be one that he wants to remember. The more we learn about his past actions, the more pressing the question becomes: Were they his actions? If he has no memory of being this man who led a life of crime, is he still the same man?
The first season, produced by HBO Max, never stops asking this question. The man—Elliot, as we come to call him—has to find out what he did to arrive at this point because cartoonishly villainous people are trying to kill him. But the more he learns about himself the less Elliot wants to make these discoveries, lest Helen (Danielle Macdonald), the adorably naïve lady cop he befriended, decide that he’s actually not such a good guy after all.
As the episodes progress, we meet more characters from Elliot’s criminal past, including an insane and delusional drug dealer and Elliot’s ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend also happens to be the drug dealer’s former lover and she and Elliot stole a bunch of money from him. It’s that kind of show. As the crimes pile up, the possibility of redemption seems to be slipping out of Elliot’s grasp. All hope would be lost were it not for one constant: Helen believes he is a good man…
…Until season two. Now under the banner of Netflix, The Tourist’s second season is still entertaining, but it lacks what made the first season so compelling. Baddies vanquished in Australia, Elliot and Helen—now a couple—travel to Ireland to reconnect with Elliot’s family. Revelations from this predictably disastrous family reunion include Elliot’s real name (Eugene Cassidy), and that his family is embroiled in a generations-long feud. We swap the Montagues and Capulets for the Cassidys and McDonnells, but we still get a forbidden romance and retaliatory acts of violence.
The second season falters because we’re no longer asking an important question. While season one asks if you can step away from your past sins like a snake shedding its skin, season two asks if your girlfriend should have any lingering doubts. The quest to uncover the truth of Elliot/Eugene’s past is driven by Helen. He’s more than happy to leave well enough alone and start a new life with her. She’s the one who needs proof that the man who has proved himself to her over and over again really can be good despite his past. The role reversal is not as interesting as the showrunners think it is.
Now, if this were real life, I would completely agree that Helen is justified in having some doubts about a man who she truly knows nothing about. But this isn’t real life, it’s a story, and stories are meant to reveal truths about the world. The truth that this story comes so close to revealing is that, yes, redemption is possible! You can leave your sins behind and start fresh. This is why Christ died for us. He took on the burden of our sin so we can start a new life every time we confess and ask for forgiveness, as if we too are Irishmen with amnesia after flipping a car.
If the second season of The Tourist had ended seconds earlier, that is the beautiful and True Thing it would have said, whether or not its writers knew it. Alas, it falls at the final hurdle. At the end of the final episode, we find Helen and Eugene in Amsterdam, living their clean, fresh new life. But nothing popular can ever end conclusively, so we need something to tease the possibility of another season. It comes in the form of a file, filled with all the gory details of Elliot’s past actions. Assuming that all he will learn is his exact level of involvement in various crimes, Elliot decides that he’d rather not know and throws the file onto the fire. Flames lick away at the pages, like the cleansing fire referenced throughout Scripture. An apt image to end a redemption story, no? No! For, in the last seconds, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it but not really because maybe season three, we the audience learn a new secret. Before the pages completely disappear into the flames, we see that Elliot/Eugene was an undercover agent! You see, he can be a good man now because that’s what he was all along. He hasn’t changed or become a better person, he merely rediscovered the good man he already was. No redemption necessary.
In mere seconds an ooh, twist! moment takes away any chance The Tourist had of saying—in a thoroughly entertaining and widely appealing way—an important True Thing. In its final moment, it reveals that it never really believed in redemption at all. The fears about Elliot’s character that the audience shares with Helen are not allayed by his choices but rather rendered null and void because he was always a Good Guy. We forgo the exploration of an important truth of the human experience so we can get a collective gasp from the audience. We don’t need Christ’s suffering and death if our goodness is already within ourselves.
LogoSophia Magazine 