Every once in a while, a TV series comes along that doesn’t so much capture our imaginations as it does grab hold of them and give them a good old shake. So is the case with Netflix’s Kaos, a starry new title by Charlie Covell, which imagines Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) and his fellow gods of ancient Greece living it up in 2024. They relax in luxury condos, waft about in designer dressing gowns and want for nothing – largely because their tables are piled high with food, there are gifts and offerings aplenty to pore over and their bedroom doors may as well be on revolving hinges. But then Zeus gets a wrinkle, convinces himself that his reign is ending (rather than, y’know, just invest in some retinol) and becomes impossibly spiteful as a result of all that paranoia. But is it paranoia, really, if that line sets in motion a strange series of events? One which sees three ordinary humans – Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), Ari (Leila Farzad) and Caeneus (Misia Butler) – set off on a journey to fulfil their identical (potentially god-ending) prophecies?

It makes for incredibly entertaining viewing. As you might expect from the creator of End Of The F**king World, Kaos isn’t afraid to confront the darkness of its subject matter. Zeus’s wife, Hera (Janet McTeer), spitefully turns all of her husband’s mistresses into bees and demands he murder any and all illegitimate children. Women voluntarily drink poison in ritual sacrifices, believing they will be rewarded by the gods in the afterlife. Others have their tongues forcibly removed to render them forever silent, forever loyal to the deities they serve. Kaos also explores deep and dark themes around gender politics, free will and power dynamics.

In among all of this is a dishevelled-looking woman named Cassandra (Billie Piper), who we meet about five minutes into the series premiere – first in the cereal aisle of a supermarket, where she exchanges a few ominously prophetic words with Riddy, and secondly outside in the car park, where she’s being manhandled by an overzealous security guard for shoplifting (a situation which Riddy swiftly de-escalates by paying for Cassandra’s stolen cat food, only to be confronted by the sight of Cassandra hungrily scooping the jellied meat chunks into her open mouth).

“Everyone steals,” says Cassandra, by way of explanation. “Even the gods. Especially the gods. They’re stealing our souls.”

It’s a seemingly throwaway line – one which neither we the viewers nor Riddy pay all that much attention to – but such is the plight of Cassandra.

According to Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon, it was the god Apollo who gifted Cassandra the power of prophecy – but he had an ulterior motive in mind. When she rejected him romantically, his sense of entitlement was so huge and his ego so wounded that he decided to slap a curse down on her in a twisted act of revenge: she could still accurately predict future events but was doomed never to be believed by anyone with whom she shared her prophecies.

“Cassandra is telling the truth, but everybody else thinks she’s mad. And so in episode 1, the audience meet her, and she does seem to us like she’s not quite of sound mind – and by [episode] 8, you realise she’s a truth teller,” explains Covell in an interview with Radio Times.

“The idea for Cassandra was that it’s tragic – she speaks truth and no one believes her, and that’s the most awful torment to be in.”

While it’s an undeniably awful torment to be in, it’s not exactly a unique one – particularly for women in all aspects of their lives. In a 2014 Harvard Business Review survey of 270 female managers in Fortune 500 companies, more than half of these managers reported that mixed-gender meetings resulted in them being ignored, disregarded, spoken over, interrupted and challenged. So much so, in fact, that when they did manage to present their ideas, they found that they were not acknowledged until they were expressed by someone else.

There are, of course, still worse things not to be believed over. Often, when a famous man is accused of assault, for example, the go-to response for too large a proportion of the population is to assume that the victim is lying in a bid to damage a man’s reputation and career – a phenomenon the philosopher Kate Manne has dubbed ‘himpathy’, due to the fact it hinges upon masculinity being deemed more important than what women are saying. Yet, so many people still subscribe to the strange idea that women cannot be believed or trusted. 

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that we have seen many high-profile women treated like Cassandras: dubbed mad, bad, scary or sad for sharing their truths. Jameela Jamil, for example, has spoken out about how she was forced to deal with “false accusations” that she had made up her health problems and people “mocking [her] disability”.

She added: “Look at the way we treat women in the public eye […] look at Britney Spears, look at Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Thunberg – we do this to every single prominent woman.

“When we don’t like a man we just don’t learn anything about him – we don’t learn his name. We don’t follow him on the internet, we just don’t care. When we don’t like a woman, we will investigate every single thing she’s ever said, ever done [and] scrutinise her obsessively. It’s really weird.”

It’s weird, sure, but it’s sadly all too true. And we are all guilty of it to some degree, as Kaos’s interpretation of Cassandra proves with her fleeting on-screen appearances. From the very get-go, we are given the chance to listen to her warnings, but instead we make a snap judgment based on her demeanour, her smudged mascara, her clothes and her penchant for cat food. In doing so, we miss out on a spoiler that proves later to be the key to the show’s plot – something which Covell and the show’s creators are banking on happening.

“Nobody wants to know!” cries Piper’s doomed character. “Why won’t anyone listen?”

It’s a question that all too many of us should be asking, quite frankly.

Images: Netflix