Motherland: Fort Salem

Narrative bagginess swallows all the story’s oxygen and blows it out as stale air: It squanders precious opportunities to develop compelling antagonists—and that lack of complexity is even more unfortunate given that the three leads are so charismatic and well-cast.

At its best, the series is wildly ambitious and gorgeously otherworldly, with flying drug trips, strength-enhancing orgies and brilliantly novel aesthetics, especially in its marriage between military chic and Goth motifs. But it is rarely at its best. Fort Salem leans early and heavily into its most familiar, least interesting storyline.

The types are all pretty obvious and plot turns are telegraphed well in advance, yet the show fails to clearly explain what is going on in this alternate America. The witchiness of the young women is even underplayed to a frustrating degree until late in the premiere episode.

Those more pertinent narratives are nearly crushed inside the margins by shoehorned subplots such as a mishandled suicide storyline, necromancy, and pretty much anything regarding the elder witches in their command station.

“Motherland” combines too many ideas in order to make one wildly confusing show that, despite its insistence otherwise, struggles to understand what “empowerment” actually means.