Apple’s See arrived in November 2019 with a striking premise and a star who could sell it. The show is set centuries after a virus wiped out most of humanity. Fewer than two million people survived, and all their descendants have lost their sense of sight. Sight is not just gone — any mention of it is considered heresy. Then twin sighted children are born in a mountain tribe.
That is a strong hook. See runs three seasons and 24 episodes on Apple TV+, created by Steven Knight, and it never earns the idea it starts with.
Trailer, via Apple TV.
The Alkenny Tribe and Baba Voss
Jason Momoa plays Baba Voss, chief of the Alkenny. He has been unable to father children. He marries a pregnant woman named Maghra, played by Hera Hilmar, and adopts her children.
Their biological father is Jerlamarel, a sighted man wanted by the Queen of the Payan Kingdom for the heresy of being “sighted.” Word spreads of Jerlamarel siring children. A witch hunt follows. Baba Voss must protect both his family and his tribe against the Queen’s army.
The setup has a clean engine: a father, a secret, an army. See spends its first season not building on that engine but grinding it down.
Blindness Training and Joe Strechay
The production did real work here, and it shows in the movement. The cast mostly consisted of sighted actors. Before filming, they underwent a month of rigorous “blindness training” with blindness coach Joe Strechay.
The actors sometimes wore sleep shades. They learned how to move sightlessly and to develop their other senses, including the rudimentary ability to echolocate. Movement director Paradox Pollack also trained them.
The goal was to avoid common clichés of blindness, such as characters constantly feeling each other’s faces. A few blind and low-sighted actors were cast in supporting roles, including Bree Klauser and Marilee Talkington. Blind actor Adam Morse had a small role in season 2 as Frye, a Witchfinder serving under the character Toad.
That is the part of See worth respecting. The body language is specific. People navigate by sound and touch and memory. The camera work is patient about it. For a while, the blindness reads as a culture rather than a gimmick.
A World of Kanzua and Trivantes
The show takes place in territory contested by two rivals. The Payan Kingdom rules from its capital, Kanzua. The Trivantian Republic rules from Trivantes.
Society has found new ways to interact, build, hunt and survive without vision, at a much lower economic level. Humanity has returned to tribal hunter-gatherer and medieval-type societies. Knowledge of the old, sighted world has become lost or distorted. Metal, concrete and plastic are believed to have been created supernaturally by gods. The concept of vision has become a myth.
This is where See should be richest, and where it is thinnest. The worldbuilding is asserted more than dramatized. We are told knowledge of the old world is lost or distorted, but the show rarely makes that loss feel like a wound. Kanzua and Trivantes are names on a map, not places with texture.
Queen Sibeth Kane and the Cast
Sylvia Hoeks plays Queen Sibeth Kane, the Payan ruler driving the hunt. Christian Camargo is Tamacti Jun. Archie Madekwe and Nesta Cooper play the twins, Kofun and Haniwa. Eden Epstein is Wren, Olivia Cheng is Charlotte, Tom Mison is Lord Harlan, Michael Raymond-James is Ranger, and David Hewlett is Tormada.
Alfre Woodard has a leading role, and Yadira Guevara-Prip is in the main cast. Dave Bautista joined for season 2 as the brother of Baba Voss. Adrian Paul was announced for a role named Lord Harlan, though Tom Mison ended up taking that role.
The cast is not the problem. Momoa is credible as a man who leads by presence and force. Hoeks commits to a queen who is cruel and theatrical. The trouble is that the scripts give these performers speeches instead of scenes.
The Schedule That Killed It
See’s rollout was slow, and the gaps did it no favors.
| Season | Premiere | Finale |
|---|---|---|
| Season 1 | November 1, 2019 | — |
| Season 2 | August 27, 2021 | — |
| Season 3 | August 26, 2022 | October 14, 2022 |
Nearly two years passed between the first and second seasons. The third and final season ran from late August to mid-October 2022. Three seasons, 24 episodes, and a conclusion that arrived after the audience had already drifted.
That schedule is not an excuse for the writing. It is a fact about how the show was positioned. A high-concept genre series needs momentum. See was asked to hold a viewer’s attention across long absences with characters who never deepened enough to justify the wait.
What See Gets Wrong
The central flaw is that See treats its best idea as a limitation to overcome rather than a world to inhabit. The show keeps reaching for the familiar: chosen ones, prophecies, a throne, an army, a chase. The twins are born with “the mythic ability to see,” and the series immediately makes them the object of a standard-issue power struggle.
The blindness training and the echolocation and the sleep shades were the interesting part. The witch hunt is the generic part. See leans on the second and treats the first as set dressing.
There is also a tonal problem. The show wants to be grim and grand at once, and it lands on neither. Queen Sibeth Kane’s cruelty is staged for shock. Baba Voss’s devotion is stated in dialogue rather than shown in choices. When everything is a heresy, nothing feels dangerous.
And for a series built on the absence of sight, See is oddly dependent on what you can see. The spectacle — the battles, the vistas, the costumes — carries scenes that have no dramatic weight underneath.
The Score
See is a 4 of 10. The premise is one of the better genre hooks of its era. The cast is game. The blindness training gave the show a physical vocabulary most series never bother to build. None of it coheres.
Three seasons, 24 episodes, and a final season that concluded on October 14, 2022 — that is a lot of running time for a show that never figured out what to do with its own central fact. Apple TV+ had a genuinely strange idea here. See kept sanding the strange parts down until what was left was ordinary.
4 of 10.
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