Emerald City - 'The Beast Forever'

Left to right: Elizabeth (Roxy Sternberg), Toto(1), West (Ana Ularu), Jack (Gerren Howell)(2), Glinda (Joely Richardson), Anna (Isabel Lucas)(3), Small Child Monster Who Has Seen Lard and is Friend of Somebody, the Wizard of Oz (Vincent D'Onofrio), Dorothy (Adria Arjona), East (Florence Kasumba), Eamonn (Mido Hamada), Lucas (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and... some other nun in a fantastic habit. Damn that's a lot of cast (and a surprising amount of diversity.)

This is not your grandfather's Oz. Honestly, it's not your father's Oz, either, nor your older brothers, nor that of any member of your maternal line. This is Emerald City.

"While I queue this up, can we discuss the hat policy?"

Twenty years after being handed over to a pair of Kansas farmers to be raised, Nurse Dorothy Gale is contemplating whether to make contact with her recently returned mother (a brief appearance by Leverage's Gina Bellman,) when a storm whips up out of nowhere, a corpse appears and her injured mother tells her not to involve the cops or ambulance (presumably because she's shivved a fool, or because something something magic princess(4), I guess.) When a police car does turn up, Dorothy is threatened with a gun (because a girl out in a storm is clearly about to start some shit?) and leaps into the car for cover, which is whipped up in the storm and lands in another place, bringing a hapless police dog with her. She the car crashes down, it hits a woman who seems to step in front of it. It soon emerges that the woman she hit and killed is the Witch of the East, which is not good.

"Ding dong the witch is dead?"

She is captured by the Munja'kin, who reckon her for bad news. The other Witches and the Wizard of Oz are going to be mad as hell that she ran over East; besides, having killed the Witch means that she must be one too. Apparently these are the rules. Therefore they vote to kick her off their territory and send her to the Emerald City to tell Oz that she is very sorry. Meanwhile, Oz is looking for her. His acolytes inform him that her arrival is the first sign of the return of the Beast Forever - and in their huge radar wimples they look like they ought to be tuned in to the frequency of the universe - a sort of colossal force that appears in many forms to bring badness upon the land; sort of like Gozer the Gozarian, but without the whole 'choose the form of your own destruction' bit. Fearing the implications for his magnificent and totally real hair(5), he sends a guy named Eamonn who practically has 'ruthless enforcer' tattooed on his forehead to look into things.

The straw is presumably meant to suggest the Scarecrow, but
actually just hints that it isn't mud he's covered in.

Dropped off at the border of their snowbound territory by the Munja'kin leader (whose wife, we learn, has been trapped in the mud of a cave for possessing magic, I suspect this will become important,) Dorothy soon finds herself in the desert, where she encounters a man on a crucifix. He's an amnesiac, and despite her protests he browbeats her into naming him Lucas (after her home town in Kansas.)

Elsewhere, the Wizard visits West, a Witch who appears to have retired to be a drunken brothel madame or something; possibly just a drunk. Regardless of her state of dissipation, she realises that his supposedly chaste ADC has been knocked up. Eamonn reaches the Munja'kin village, where not only is Dorothy gone, so is the Witch's body. Perhaps Dorothy was not Witch enough to kill her after all.

"There is no charge for fabulousness."

Sure enough, East is not dead and catches up with Dorothy, trapping her and Lucas in an illusion of a muddy pit, apparently holding a grudge for the whole getting his with a car thing. She goes through Dorothy's stuff and finds a pistol, and as only a witch can kill a witch, Dorothy misleads her into shooting herself in the head, which... is apparently not as much of a kicker for Dorothy as you might expect.

West gets all psychic traumaed and the Wizard sends Eamonn after Dorothy while giving a speech promising to protect the land from the Beast Forever.

Directed by Tarsem 'Style Over Content' Singh(6), Emerald City may be the fix I've been needing since the end of Season 1 of The Shannara Chronicles. It's pretty, flashy and not too complex (yet), and has a lot of excellent visuals to illustrate the review with. The cast are decent (a cut above Shanarra, I would say,) and so far they aren't mining an alternate interpretation that anyone has done before (in, for example, Wicked, Wicked the Musical, Tin Man, Oz the Great and Powerful.) There are also a couple of really interesting bit, including the winged monkey drones and the way East's powers work, making Dorothy and Lucas believe that they are trapped with no ability to get free rather than actually moving them. The power of suggestion, I guess.

(1) I didn't get the actor's name, and even 'toto' is just Munja'kin for dog in this one.
(2) Character not in the first episode, also holy shit it's CBBC's Young Dracula!
(3) Character not in the first episode, also I'm assuming that's not blackface...
(4) Dorothy has a tell-tale a) birthmark, or b) tattoo given to her in infancy, in the shape of either a) a load of dots, or b) a constellation. This sort of thing is always highly indicative of destiny.
(5) It is revealed in-universe to be a piece.
(6) In fairness, a lot of his content is pretty good, but his style is peerless.