Season Review: Interrogator Season One

This has been one long helluva long wait for the finale of Interrogator. April 20. That’s when this nine episode season began, and with two month long breaks, I finally got to sit down and write this review. On what fucking planet does it take five months to fully release a nine episode season? . This is the first detraction of Interrogator. As I’ve mentioned numerous times over the run of the season, it’s been a weird way to keep the interest and momentum going for what was going on. Here’s how it really broke down. There was an episode every other week. Then, there was a month between episodes three and four, and six and seven. This is fucking rough.

Every episode in this type of release schedule needs to be a banger. You need episodes to carry you over two weeks, and give people something big to talk about. In a vacuum, it was full of great moments. However, watching Interrogator from week to week dragged. There were highlights, for sure. One episode even got a perfect score, with “The First Rule.” In a vacuum, most of Interrogator was great on an episode by episode basis. Sure, some were not that great like “Famous Last Words,” all the way to the almost flawless “A Corpse Like All the Rest.” However, nothing really made me want to wait two weeks to a month between episodes. Games Workshop, Warhammer Storyforge, and Sun and Moon all need to work on a better release schedule…especially when Interrogator was announced almost two years before it premiered.

That said, there were a lot of positives. The mostly black and white film noir motif is unique. Especially when compared to the hyper-colored shows out today, even on Warhammer TV. Listen, if you put something visually unique I’m automatically interested. The story also fit, and made want to start watching classic film noir movies. Shit, I went looking at prices to buy Dick Tracy. You never see anything like this anymore, and the Warhammer Storyforge giving us a film noir story in a Necromunda setting was fantastic. Most of Warhammer 40K content is dealing with the grim dark big scale wars revolving around the giant wars between the Imperium of Man, the armies of Chaos, and the various Xeno factions. Thank Abaddon the Despoiler that this is on such a smaller scale.

The characters are out of this world. Bellona was the biggest part of Interrogator, yet she wasn’t even a character that was alive during the show. Every single action, every single death, every single bullet, all came about due to the one snippet of a possibility that Bellona may be alive. She was the most important character, and you got next to zero information about her or her actions until the final episode. The fact that Jurgen was so fixated on his version of Bellona during the entirety of the first eight episodes, and that we only got his version of Bellona until episode nine, was masterful. Getting the earth shattering clusterfuck that was Bellona’s master plan only after one-tapping Heroth. The main antagonist (only in Jurgen’s mind, mind you) because all he knew was Heroth caused the death of Bellona.

Let’s talk about that. Jurgen followed Bellona like a puppy. He believe in the fake plans she had…that she was bringing justice to planets that needed it. All of the death Jurgen witnessed let him right to Heroth. Even Jurgen’s inadvertent killing of Baldur let him to get everything he needed from Heroth. The way this was laid out all throughout the season was obscenely good. You went on a full journey with Jurgen thinking his perspective was everything, with zero chance that there’s anything that could change. I have a lot of shit to say about the release schedule, but that finale made a lot of the wait worth it.

Speaking of, let’s talk about Jurgen. This was the antithesis of what a main character in today’s animated serial show environment is. This man was very obviously flawed. He was an addict. He was a drunk. This man was everything you’d expect a nameless grunt to be. Throughout the story, you see what other people think of him, ranging from cautiously optimistic hope with Baldur, devolve into borderline abhorrent contempt. Other people who’ve been around him just treat him like the piece of shit he really is. However, after the death of Baldur in “The First Rule,” his perspective shifted, and he acted more, to the point. He knew Bellona isn’t coming back, and went for revenge.

Ultimately, do I think that Interrogator is worth the watch? Yes. 100% yes. If you have the ability to digest every episode in as close to one sitting as possible, go for it. It’s probably the best show on WarhammerTV. Rewatching Interrogator at my leisure was more enjoyable than dealing with the crap that was this release schedule. Getting more at once is definitely the right way to go, because you get to ingest more. You can’t fix basic flaws in the production, but it’s a well put together show, and definitely worth the dive into the Necromunda setting. Go check it out. It’s fucking worth it.