#three percent

I just finished watching the show and I truly loved it. I have some issues with the worldbuilding (namely, just how many people live on the Inland and Offshore? What exactly do they work on? How do the people of the Inland survive if they don’t even have plants? How do they travel walking from place to place so fast?), but I thought the political themes of the show were really interesting.

One of these themes is the idea of meritocracy. One of the things about capitalism is that it claims to be a meritocratic system. However, we know this isn’t true: depending on how you were born, your social status, how wealthy you were born, your skin color, your gender, etc, some people will have advantage over others in this “competition”. So here’s where the Offshore philosophy comes in: they claim to be meritocratic because they can’t have children, so every person that goes to the Offshore is supposedly deserving. Therefore, they claim to have “solved” this injustice. However, the show destroys this notion, and shows that it’s not as simple as ending hereditarity to end injustice:

First, the show shows how even if everyone was subjected to the same “tests”, not everyone had the same conditions going into this test: some people were able bodied, others were disabled; some people were rich and prepared for this moment their entire lives, while poor people were at disadvantage. So truly, this illusion of “equality of conditions” was just that, an illusion. As the show says, “equality is a convincing illusion”.

Another way in which the show destroys the idea that you just have to have “merit” and you will be rewarded by the system is with the test where Marco starts attacking everyone. In this test, they figure out how to pass and show cooperation to do it. In the end, everybody passes. So theoretically, everybody is worthy, right? Everyone has merit, so everyone will be rewarded by the system, right? No, the organizers of the Process have to change things in order to eliminate people, even though everybody passed. And here’s where the injustice comes: supposedly, if everyone has merit everyone should be rewarded, but in a system in which a few are absurdly rich and wealthy, some have to be poor. Meaning that it doesn’t matter that everyone is worthy and has merit, not everyone can win. And this obviously shows the injustice of the system.

Then, we have countless examples of how these tests are ridiculously arbitrary. I mean, sure, some tests are meant to measure intellect, cooperation, etc, but people who steal other people’s cubes are still able to pass. So what is the standard here? Should the agility and attention of the thief be more valued than the honesty of the other candidate? What skills, personality traits, moral traits should be valued? What does a person need to be "worthy"? All of that is incredibly subjective, and as Michele realizes after she organizes her own Process in the Shell, it will never be just, because tests are made by human beings and human beings are fallible.

Even the last test in season 4, the one meant to decide everyone’s destiny, was arbitrary and relied a lot on luck. Joana proposed the test because she needed to find an alternative to end the bloodshed, but that didn’t mean the test truly determined how worthy people were, and it didn’t mean the test would give people justice (I mean, the people of the Offshore could have easily won, and if that had happened, no one would have truly had justice).

complex characters with interesting backstories

good representation (lgbt characters never being questioned, poc characters in the main cast, disabled characters)

the plot is about people rebelling against an inegalitarian system based on a test to judge your mental capacities and if you pass you go to this utopic island

top tier costumes and decors

also you’ll be supporting the first ever Brazilian Netflix series