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Netflix's Evil Genius is your next True Crime Binge

4 Tense episodes

· writing,TV,netflix,crime

This is undoubtedly a bizarre crime for the books.

A pizza delivery guy walks into a bank with a bomb around his neck and robs the bank for a piecemeal amount of money, not the $250,000 that was in the note, gets stopped by police and the bomb goes off. They even have the documentary footage from the police of the explosion and the ensuing chaos as they try to find out the culprit behind the neck bomb. There's something for everyone in this series, the morbid curiosity at the gore and the crime committed, the documentary fact-finding and nitpicking that comes with crime stories, and lastly the purported evil mastermind behind it all, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, whose hawkish face glares out at you from the opening scene.

Not to give much away, but as a writer. I do admire the structure of each of the episodes and their titles.

EP1: The Heist

EP2: The Frozen Body

Ep3: The Suspects

Ep 4: The Confessions

As much as they want to keep focus towards the topics of each of the episodes, I do wonder after watching it all, if the writer had already made up their mind about who was the true mastermind. Bearing in mind, the focus was mostly on Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Bill Rothstein as the two perpetrators of the Heist. However, the nice twist during episode 4 helps give the audience focus away from them both for a while, but then reinforces it with the confessions.

As with all crime shows, this show tries very hard to give us the sort of ambivalence needed for us to come back at the end of every episode, and it does this sort of well, but I did get a bit tired during Episode 3, as they started to push in new suspects on the board, which I felt should have happened earlier in Episode 2.

On a whole, I think what stands out for this series is the absolute magnetism of Marjorie. It is fascinating to have actual documentary footage of her in her engagement with the originator of this documentarist, Trey Borziellieri, who features in the calls that he has with Marjorie and interviews with other people surrounding the case. Marjorie's demeanour at times feels very deliberate and calculated, and I don't know if that is just editing or this entire series is already prefacing her as an evil genius, but you can hear the tension in Borziellieri's voice when he talks to her and her quick glare before she goes into a tirade as if her thoughts were moving faster than her mouth. Whether or not she's the culprit, there is no doubt that she is the main star and she has me captivated.

'Evil Genius' is worth a tense watch.