Dear Reader,
Welcome back for another round of Trope Bingo; today, let’s look at episode two of The Regime, “The Foundling.”
To keep things fresh and account for what we learned in episode one, I swapped out some of the tropes we did see on last week’s bingo card for others. These fall into two groups:
More Tyranny Tropes: Because, why not?
OCD Tropes: Chancellor Vernham is definitely written with OCD traits, if not an explicit diagnosis. So far, it’s been a respectful portrayal—but it could go awry. More on that below.
For a review of the tropes we’ve already covered, check out the previous posts in this series:
Yoga Pants and Jodhpurs
Others have written about the crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline. What I’m here to say is that we see it on full display in “The Foundling.”
At the end of “Victory Day,” we saw Elena Vernham confronted by her bodyguard and confidante, the explosively violent Herbert Zubak, about how her OCD compulsions are being used to her ministers to sideline her from governance.
Three weeks later, Vernham is feeling great—not because she received gold-standard ERP therapy, but because she’s traded her obsessive fear of mold for an obsessive focus on health and wellness. Zubak, who comes from the republic’s poor and distinctly “Slavic” Westgate region—the epitome of the Ruritania trope—has introduced Vernham to folk remedies. Most notable are the braziers of boiled potatoes stacked around the palace to provide healing vapors.
Vernham has embraced the “alternative” cures so fully as to ban Western pharmaceutical imports—something that threatens the life of her majordomo Agnes’s son, who has epilepsy. Agnes continues to sneak anticonvulsants to her son, while playing along that black radish paste has healed him, which leaves her open to blackmail by Vernham’s ministers, who are growing increasingly concerned about her hardline turn and reliance on Zubak. In addition to banning modern pharmaceuticals, this hardline turn includes having Zubak menace a visiting U.S. senator and humiliating an oligarch live on national TV.
For as much as her interest in Zubak is called “an infatuation,” there is no indication on her side that it’s a romantic or sexual one; Vernham’s relationship with her husband is having a renaissance as they become intimate for the first time in over a year. The ministers decide to lean into Vernham’s interest by fabricating a romantic story about Zubak’s lineage—and in doing so, they inadvertently set Vernham further down the road to fascism, because obsessing over the “toxins” in one’s blood is not so far removed from obsessing over “toxins” in the gene pool.
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