Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol [Complete]

Within five minutes, Peacock’s Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol does something fairly smart, something that will also immediately alienate much of the show’s intended audience.Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol Season 1 Download

Symbologist Robert Langdon (Succession and Manhattan veteran Ashley Zukerman) is lecturing a Harvard class, and it’s one of those lectures intended to instruct not the gathered group of fictional students, but rather the show’s viewers. He touches briefly and rudimentarily on the power of symbols and continues, “It’s all superstition, but people can believe what they want. Right? It’s a free country. At what point, though, do their convictions and your pursuit of happiness become mutually exclusive? When do benign symbols become malignant.From there, Langdon goes on to discuss the symbols that bind alt-right groups and fringe conspiracy theorists. He notes that these groups have created or appropriated imagery, gestures and slogans and built QAnon-style movements around misinterpreted and out-of-context clues. This, to some not insignificant degree, is the primary legacy of Dan Brown’s wildly popular novels and the infinite conspiracy-baiting fictions they’ve emboldened.It’s a clever thing for creators Dan Dworkin and Jay Beattie to acknowledge at the beginning of their streaming conspiracy thriller. It has nothing specific to do with the book they’re adapting, and, through the rest of the three episodes sent to critics, it has nothing to do with their TV show. If the property’s journey from NBC to Peacock inspired any hope that something perplexingly ambitious might come out of this airport potboiler, worry not. After that initial Langdon lecture, The Lost Symbol settles into a polished, decently acted rhythm that follows the plotting of a Dan Brown novel. But it never finds an enjoyable way to interpret Brown’s trademark reliance on a main character whose superpower is mansplaining.