The one selling point for this TV show and the uniqueness of it was the fact that you could watch any of the in-between episodes in any order and they would still make sense to the plot, but for me I don’t think that’s incredible storytelling, really if you tie up any loose ends that would confuse the audience within the same episode you’re perfectly fine.

Kaleidoscope follows a group of people who want to conduct a heist by stealing bonds from the safe of a very high profile man called Roger. The man in charge of the heist, Leo Pap, who previously before going to prison was known as Ray, would work alongside Roger in the robberies of high class people and this was the way they made their money.

Of course based on the fact that Leo wants to now rob Roger shows that there was an incident in their past that changed the future forever and made Leo a prisoner while Roger got away with all the money. Now you can watch any episode in any order, as long as you watch the first and last episodes as the first and last episodes, but if you saw the incident that caused Leo and Roger to become enemies first I think that would have ruined the whole show. To me this episode where the friendship shifted was one of the more exciting episodes and I imagine if you saw that first, all of the others would seem obsolete and boring and just not on the same level that this one was. There’s also the episode six months after the highest, which of course really is the final episode of the series, so if you watch that first once again you would be disappointed because you know the ending and everything else would seem pointless.

Thankfully with the order that I watched it in the exciting incidents of the change in their friendship happened as one of the final episodes so it did constantly build up to the why. But then watching the two episodes which talk about what happens after the heist next, before seeing the actual heist go down, was kind of a let down to me because I wanted to see the heist and understand what was going on, and not have a lot of it spoiled before we got to that point.

With heist films and TV the heist is often the main event because you want to see what happens, you want to see if everything comes together and you’re rooting for the characters so much that, that is the ending that you desire. You don’t care about what happens after, unless it’s a TV series that continues, because the most exciting part has already happened and so to have to deal with knowing that practically all of these characters survive the heist yet things go terribly wrong, meant that whatever has happened in the heist doesn’t matter that much because you already saw the ramifications of it and thus were left very anticlimactic.

I feel if this show have been done around something that wasn’t a heist it could have been a lot more revolutionary. Give me a murder mystery where you only see the night of the happening of the murder as the last episode and you’ll get to see all the happenings around it before. Give me something that doesn’t have the ending be the huge blow-up moment that’s so exciting because seeing everything that happens post that is so anticlimactic. It could’ve been so good yet fell so flat for me.

I had so many hopes for this show because you have heard so much about it in the press and everyone talking about this amazing way that they did the filmmaking, but I feel regardless of what order you watch the show in you would still feel the same disappointment that I have felt, and I think it’s such a shame because it could have been done so well. If someone else wants to make a murder mystery I am all for it because I think that would be an absolutely incredible idea, and actually work the way that I think they intended it to.

What order did you watch Kaleidoscope?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding