Hijinks at the End of the Underground Railroad

The plot of Washington Black sounds like historical hijinks. As a youngster in the 1830s, the title character escapes slavery in Barbados with the aid of an eccentric inventor, before making it to Virginia and becoming further entangled in the strange world of nineteenth century science. In practice, Esi Edugyan’s best-selling 2018 novel is a good deal bleaker than the events suggest, not only showing the vicious side of slavery that is perhaps familiar to many, but also dealing with estrangement and loneliness. Black himself channels his pain and depression into his love of science, yet ultimately doesn’t even find that to be a particularly satisfactory outlet.

The new Washington Black miniseries on Hulu that begins streaming on July 23 leans into the hijinks far more than it does into the human misery. Which can be good and bad. Adaptations need to make decisions about their sources and, indeed, the Hulu version of Washington Black does feature improvements. The change of the vessel in which he escapes slavery in Barbados from merchant boat to a pirate ship greatly elevates a mostly forgettable part of the book, and does a lot to force both Black (Ernest Kingsley Jr.) and his mentor Titch (Tom Ellis) to deal with some new types of social situations.

This innovation pays off in other ways too, as the actors rise to the occasion with some of the series’ best performances coming in episode 2, with the pirate ship. Black — oblivious in childish wonder to the danger of the situation — accidentally manages to defuse a crisis with his earnestness, and then accidentally foments a new crisis when another character trusts him a little too much.

The high of this episode only makes the third episode that much more of a letdown, though, as it takes place entirely, and confusingly, in a flash forward to Nova Scotia.

There are seven distinct locations in the novel and it is difficult to tell why each location couldn’t just have its own episode. While the novel was told in chronological order, the TV show jumps between the chronological start and the Nova Scotia portion of the story, presumably to establish the adult Black from the first episode.

Washington Black simply doesn’t have any good reason to be told out of sequence like this. Indeed, by privileging the Nova Scotia part of the story, the writing team obscures and minimizes the more scientifically and socially diverse premises of other episodes. Titch is put to work on a stolen prototype engine on the pirate ship, only for that whole plot hook to be forgotten halfway through. Besides that, Nova Scotia doesn’t really function well as Black’s base. It’s his in-between point straddling adventures, and a fairly low one at that. Nova Scotia is a sad, depressing, lonely place in the middle of nowhere that functions more as a prison of Black’s own making than a literal prison, because he’s lost every tie he had in the world and now lives, paradoxically, in fear of losing his own freedom. By providing Nova Scotia with a vibrant community that feels like Black’s home, there’s not really any good reason for Black to leave.

Enter the love story, which serves a very different purpose here. The love story in the novel was circumstantial rather than epic, a sort of sweet quiet depiction rarely seen of two lonely souls connecting over a fairly arbitrary subject — in this case marine biology. For Hulu, this romance becomes epic to a degree even the characters themselves recognize as improbable, because an intense romance is necessary to justify Black leaving Nova Scotia. But a lot of the new material has nothing to do with Black story at all, not even in parallel. Other Nova Scotia subplots involve arranged marriage, landed gentry, and somehow, underground fight clubs. This is less Nova Scotia, more Bridgerton. I would have been less annoyed if the Nova Scotia subplots took up less than half the runtime — after all, the whole point of Nova Scotia in the book is that it was a very boring place.

I should iterate that the changes in the Hulu version aren’t necessarily bad, even when they veer to the goofy. The extended cameo for famous rebellion-leader Nat Turner in Virginia is a bit of an eye-roll, but his very presence as a violent alternative to the slavery problem makes its point where it matters the most- in terms of Black’s bildungsroman, and his coming to appreciate an ever more complex world. Titch, too, gains depth in ways that the book does not imagine. While the show initially paints him in a positive light, as time goes on and we meet other characters we see that Titch’s brothers, racist though they may have been, correctly identified Titch’s flaws in ways that are exploited in subsequent adventures.

All this good material is still in the Hulu version, once you have waited through hours of tedious Nova Scotia. It’s worth noting that Washington Black was not a real person, although part of the charm of the book’s prose is that it leans just close enough to plausible that it’s easy to imagine him as one. But by replacing the book’s regular drama with melodrama, Washington Black on Hulu loses a lot of its magic, feeling more like a cheap parlor trick than a moody story about how while science can answer some questions, it can’t answer all of them.