John Wick: Chapter 2, the best film in the series, shatters everything we thought we knew about the underground world of assassins at the center of the saga with the introduction of one character: The Bowery King, a self-appointed monarch who rules over the unhoused people of New York City with a loving-but-firm hand, creating a network of spies, messengers, and killers that comprise the secret power structure beneath and beyond the secret power structure that runs the world of John Wick. And, best of all, he’s played by Laurence Fishburne, which is both a meta-nod to his role opposite Keanu Reeves in the Matrix movies and an opportunity for him to really stretch his legs and chew the scenery and—in a purposeful contrast to Reeves’ taciturn Wick—just have a goddamn blast in general by single-handedly filling the franchise with more personality than most movies have in their whole cast.
Peacock’s not-entirely-unsuccessful John Wick prequel miniseries, The Continental, pays homage to The Bowery King with a character named Maisie. But like every other instance of the show directly nodding to things in the movies, it feels weirdly misguided and needlessly cheapens the movies for basically no reason—and that extends to the central character of the show, a younger version of Ian McShane’s Winston played reasonably well by Colin Woodell. The show answers the question of how Winston came to be the proprietor of the eponymous hotel, a safe haven for assassins where absolutely no “business” can be conducted, but that’s not a question that the Wick movies have ever demanded an answer to. A lot of the fun of John Wick is introducing some ridiculous thing with no explanation, and then having everyone treat it like it’s totally normal, which obviously doesn’t lend itself to the overly explanatory nature of a prequel.
And The Continental is mostly good about that. There aren’t too many of the “whoa, that’s how so-and-so got his such-and-such” moments that tend to make prequels overly cute, which is why the few “get it?” nods to John Wick feel so out of place and desperate. One of the first comes at the end of The Continental’s opening episode: After a daring escape that goes wrong, Winston decides to take the fight to the people who wronged him, and what do you need for something like that in the John Wick universe? “Guns. Lots of guns.”
That’s what Winston tells some arms dealer buddies, and many years later it’s what John Wick will tell the older Winston in John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum when he finds out that The High Table is sending an army into the Continental to kill him. But young Winston is not John Wick, so it comes across as more than a bit phony. And part of the reason for that is that the line itself is a reference to The Matrix—Keanu Reeves’ Neo says it before he and Trinity gear up for the big lobby shootout. That’s an earned reference that plays off of the audience’s existing knowledge of the other movie where a guy played by Reeves gets into a big shootout in a lobby.
But The Continental could be forgiven for a little Easter egg like that if it were the only one. It’s a cool quote from a John Wick movie, so what if it’s actually a cool quote from The Matrix? Well, another one of the show’s Easter eggs feels a little more random and meaningless: Near the end of the show, after a standoff with a bad guy, a character gives Winston a “this isn’t over” look and drops another familiar line: “Be seeing you.”
That’s a running bit from John Wick: Chapter 2, where it is exclusively deployed by Ruby Rose’s character Ares in sign language, most notably right before her death. (Wick signs “Sure” in response, and it’s great.) But that was a reference to the last words of Viggo Tarasov, the villain Wick kills at the end of the first movie. In The Continental, it’s just a wink wink, get it? nod to the movies that doesn’t have the weight that it does there.
And then there’s Maisie, the show’s stand-in for The Bowery King. She’s a woman who has, if not in any official capacity, rallied together the city’s unhoused people to create an army of sorts that doesn’t play by the rules of the people at The Continental or at The High Table. The secret power beyond and beneath the other secret power.
But when The Bowery King introduces himself in Chapter 2, he explains everything that brought him to that point: He was just another killer who stood in John Wick’s way, many years ago, until John snuck up on him and put a knife in his throat, giving him the choice to either put pressure on the wound and live or draw his own gun and die. He tells John in Chapter 2 that he chose to live and vowed to never let anyone sneak up on him again, so he united the forgotten and ignored of his city and fashioned himself into their king. It’s all self-mythologizing and posturing and showmanship, to sell John on the idea that he’s in control and he’s always in control. It tells you everything you need to know about The Bowery King, both in terms of what he’s literally saying and how he’s saying it.
The idea that someone else laid the groundwork for his kingdom undercuts everything about the character. Every overly dramatic line reading, every little monologue about his royal domain... it’s all lessened simply by the implication that he’s overselling it. In this, The Continental bizarrely chooses to commit the worst sin that a prequel can commit: It cheapens the original story, incentivizing the audience to disregard the prequel for the sake of the original, and rendering the whole exercise unnecessary. It’s like if The Phantom Menace had revealed that Obi-Wan Kenobi was just some guy.
The worst part is that it would all be so easy to avoid by just not doing these things. It hurts the movies and this show all at once, just so The Continental can do a plot point and a couple of quotes that are already in the movies. Again, a lot of the fun in John Wick is introducing a thing and not explaining it, and the best parts of The Continental are when it’s doing its own thing and not overly explaining (or cashing in on) its connection to the movies.