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Is NatGeo’s Saints & Strangers a Show to be Thankful For?

Is NatGeo’s Saints & Strangers a Show to be Thankful For?

Last updated on: November 21, 2015 at 5:43 pm by Paul Asay

Is NatGeo’s Saints & Strangers a Show to be Thankful For? 2015-11-21T13:58:47-06:00 Paul Asay

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Saints & Strangers. Photo courtesy National Geographic Channel

Thanksgiving is, in some ways, America’s most devout holiday. There are no bunnies or men in bright red suits to distract us, no stockings or baskets filled with candy. It’s not necessarily a sacred day: You don’t need religion, after all, to be thankful. But there’s still something deeply, perhaps inescapably spiritual about it. For when we offer our thanks for our many, many blessings, we’re almost forced to asked what, exactly, has blessed us. Who, exactly, are we thanking.

Saints & Strangers, the two-night, four-hour “movie event” airing tomorrow on the National Geographic Channel, takes us back to the time surrounding the first Thanksgiving—when the population of New England was a handful of squabbling English settlers and a bevy of wary, warring tribes.

When I was a boy and learned about Thanksgiving, I think I assumed that the Mayflower was completely populated by pilgrims, where all the men wore hats with belt buckles and all the women looked a little like nuns. They set up shop around Plymouth Rock and nearly all died during a terrible winter. But then some friendly Indians came by and showed them how to plant corn and several months later, the Pilgrims invited the Indians back for a nice meal and, perhaps, an afternoon watching football. But as Saints & Strangers tells us, it wasn’t quite so simple.

Saints & Strangers. Photo courtesy National Geographic Channel

There are other folks sailing the Mayflower, it seems. Other settlers, whom the pilgrims call “Strangers,” share the ride. They’re nominally Christian too, but they have no problem patching the ship up should it threaten to sink on a Sunday. They celebrate Christmas—a holiday that the Pilgrims conspicuously shun. And when the settlers land on Plymouth and begin to explore the surroundings, the Strangers have no qualms of pillaging a seemingly deserted village for corn.

“What if they plan to return?” protests William Bradford (*Mad Men’*s Vincent Kartheiser), a pilgrim and eventual leader of Plymouth. “We have stolen their very sustenance and disturbed their graves!”

“Well, surely we were meant to find this, were we not?” Stranger Stephen Hopkins (Ray Stevenson) counters. “All part of God’s plan.”

“No doubt,” says pilgrim Edward Winslow. “The question is are we meant to take it.”

Ask that question to the Nauset people—the folks who lived in that village—and their answer would be pretty clear. Their leader, Aspinet, believes the English settlers should pay for their theft. But they are far from the only people surrounding Plymouth. Several tribes claim nearby land, and they know, from terrible experience, that the English tend to bring with them disease and death. Even if these strange settlers come in peace (and given their bristling weapons, there’s no guarantee of that)—they’re still dangerous. But there’s no consensus as to what to do: Attack now? Let the winter cull their numbers? Leave them be?

Only Squanto favors helping them—even though he has lots of reasons not to. He’d been taken against his will to Europe (where he learned English). His entire tribe was killed by the English plague. Yet he believes that these strange English settlers might eventually become powerful allies against the area’s native bullies, the Narragansett.

“They are hungry,” he says. “We could teach them to farm.”

Saints & Strangers. Photo courtesy National Geographic Channel

While the idea of watching a show about the first Thanksgiving might feel, to some, like brushing up on one’s multiplication tables, NatGeo’s Saints & Strangers is a well-constructed and surprisingly engrossing yarn. It’s a rugged, grim retelling with nary a belt-buckled hat anywhere. Here, the motives are often mixed and the alliances uneasy, and it seems like the whole area is always just one step away from all-out war.

But even as we see that the lead-up to that first Thanksgiving wasn’t all chips and dip, NatGeo does justice to the sincere, fervent faith that powered the pilgrims—portraying them as devout servants of God rather than as frightening religious extremists.

Their faith had a lot to power through. The ride across the Atlantic is horrific. More suffering awaits them at Plymouth, where about half of the settlers die during the first hard winter. Bradford’s own wife, Dorothy (played by *Pitch Perfect’*s Anna Camp) is killed before the settlement’s first foundation is laid.

And yet the survivors don’t lose their faith. They keep their eyes pinned to God, trusting He has a plan for them.

“I am alone again,” one woman says. “But I have the Lord, and so I have purpose. Everyone else can vanish in an instant, but He is constant.”

Watching Saints & Strangers, and it’s easy for folks like me to see God’s mysterious hand at work. As much horror and hardship as the settlers suffered, it seems like a miracle that anyone survived at all. But—no spoiler warning here—they did. And they, like we, have much to be thankful for.

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