This is a mostly spoiler-free review for all 10 episodes of Messiah: Season 1, which is currently available to stream on Netflix.
Netflix’s Messiah is a new geopolitical drama about the End Times return of Jesus, the Islamic “Isa,” and how this individual would truly be received in 2020.
Who would instantly believe in such a person? Who would eventually, over time, come to see their power? And, on the flip side, who would instantly doubt this figure? And what would their presence actually do to society as a whole? Needless to say, it would be pretty disrupting and damaging.
In fact, one of the most interesting themes explored in Messiah — from Mark Burnett and Roma Downey (who brought us The Bible miniseries) and Michael Petroni (who co-created 2003’s Miracles) — is the idea put forth by Michelle Monaghan’s CIA agent Eva Geller, which is that al-Massih (Mehdi Dehbi) is an agent of chaos being funded and handled by a foreign enemy looking to hack away at America’s already-fragile citizenry. In this era of “Fake News,” this is the first series to make this kind of horrifying extrapolation, looking ahead at what could happen if — you know — someone actually wanted to fake the return of Christ in order to throw the world into upheaval. “State-sponsored social disruption,” is the term used.