You Should Watch: Midnight at the Pera Palace (2022)
On loving time travel shenanigans and becoming unexpectely obsessed with a Turkish drama...
Hello, hello, hello! Welcome back to The Crafty Librarian, today I’ll be introducing a new series on this blog called You Should Watch, where I’ll try to pitch you a tv show or movie that I think you should watch. I swear, eventually this blog will be around for long enough that I’ll get around to repeating concepts and actually turn them into series. I also promise I’m working on another installment of Trope Talk. It’s just hard to examine online spaces and gather opinions without wanting to bash my head in sometimes. But there’s one I’ve been thinking about doing for months and I hope to get it out soon!
Anyway!
The thing I’m pitching today is a Turkish Netflix original series from 2022 called Midnight at the Pera Palace. Now, an important disclaimer: I kinda hate Turkish series. That’s probably an unfair overgeneralization, and also in no way to be taken as a sentiment on the country of Türkiye. I’m sure y’all are lovely, and hey, there was that one guy who won a shooting medal at the Olympics this year and went viral online for looking effortlessly cool while doing it. Love that for y’all. However, when I was about 16, a Turkish drama fever overtook my country. Your mom was watching Turkish dramas, your grandma was watching Turkish dramas. That lady at the college fair who told you that you looked like Fatmagül but you were apparently the only person who wasn’t watching that show so you have no idea what to do with that information? Yeah, she was definitely watching Turkish dramas. Then that Elif show ran for 3 million years and you only know this because every time you’d turn on the tv for what felt like too long, there would be ads. Seriously, I looked it up, it has 900+ episodes. That’s wild! (Free that poor little girl with the pigtails and let her be happy, for god’s sake!)
We never really managed to sweat out that fever and Turkish dramas run on our local television channels to this day. The point here is that I fell victim to cultural overexposure of Turkish dramas with magazine model toxic men and crying women and thus, never sought them out. But, in truth, you should never judge a whole for its worst parts. Sometime last year, my sister randomly watched this show and recommended it to me. I didn’t listen until I did and BOY was I glad I did. Recently, I rewatched it in anticipation of its second season (premiering on Netflix on September 12) and I decided I would make it your problem too.
The elevator pitch
Are you familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch? It’s a concept used in the entertainment industry to refer to a short pitch, the idea being that it be short enough to explain over the course of an elevator ride. So here goes my attempt to simplify Midnight at the Pera Palace’s story in a punchy way.
While writing a story on a historic hotel, journalist Esra suddenly finds herself being transported back in time to 1919 Istanbul, where she finds a dead woman who looks just like her. In order to keep the fate of her country on track, Esra assumes the identity of the dead woman, slowly unraveling the hotel’s secrets all the while searching for a way back home.
Sound good? Ok, fine, I’ll elaborate.
Actual reasons why this show slaps:
Mystery
I should let it be known that Esra canonically loves Agatha Christie’s work. You see, Agatha Christie once stayed at the Pera Palace Hotel and so Esra is super jazzed to be visiting the place. So the show loves mystery, while being something of a mystery itself. There’s a lot we don’t know, and though we learn a lot as an audience, there’s an air of mystery that never quite leaves the show’s darkened alleyways and lightning-storm-lit scenes. Several of the show’s key players are mysteries themselves, from Peride (the woman whose life our heroine takes over), to Esra herself (an orphan whose origins are unknown even to herself), to Ahmet (the kindly hotel manager who seems to hold the key to the hotel’s secrets), to Halit (an extremely suspect club owner and possible assassin with a particular interest in Peride/Esra).
Also, political intrigue, gotta love some political intrigue. Granted, this feels like a mystery only because my knowledge of Turkish history is next to none, but it did keep me on the edge of my seat because if they’re, say, talking about assassinating a political leader, I have zero clue whether they succeeded in real life and so I have no idea what will happen next. Fun!
Time travel chaos
Are you someone who likes their time travel to lean more on the history/fantasy side of things rather than the scifi one? Well baby, this might just be the show for you! Forget about bootstrap paradoxes and time machines, all you need in this show is a key and to be at the right place (one of the hotel’s rooms) at the right time (midnight, hence the name). In fact, if paradoxes bother you I suggest you either curb your impulses or step away from this show because the story veers more toward the “I am my own grandpa” flavor of time travel. But I love chaos. It’s entertaining. Why not chuck a dead body into a time portal? Doesn’t matter when/where it lands, as long as it’s not here/now! The show’s not too preoccupied with timelines, and you shouldn’t be either. If you speak kdrama, it’s less Lovely Runner (2024) with its four plotable timelines (I would know, I did plot them out) and more The Atypical Family (2024) with its one timeline collapsing in over itself. A closed loop (if you're fussy about names) that took me 4 tries to draw in a notebook because I kept forgetting parts of it. There, as in Midnight at the Pera Palace, everything that will happen has also already happened.
It would be disingenuous of me to deny that this show fits pretty well into the Timeless (2016) shaped hole in my heart. Not perfectly, though. Timeless had a more episodic nature with a different time every episode and concentrated on the skewing of historical events which our heroes then fixed, and Midnight at the Pera Palace mostly stays grounded in the same time for the duration of its eight episodes, but the feeling is close. Our heroine is chaotic, and messy as she traipses through 1919 Istanbul attempting to fix the problems she inadvertently creates, but you kind of love her for it. It’s a nice contrast to the character of Ahmet, who is a stickler for the rules of the secret he’s been guarding his whole life. By the end, though, they both embrace chaos because, hey, as long as it gets results!
There’s a love story in my time travel?
Yup! If you’re like me and you like some lovers fallen out of time, baby do I have the show for you. The love story is wrapped up in a paradox so thick I can say nothing about it without spoiling a really great moment in episode 7. As you may have figured out, the love interest here is Halit, the aforementioned suspect club owner. Regarding possible blooming romantic interest, Esra has to ask herself very important questions such as “does this man kill people for his 9-5?” and “is that something I’m willing to overlook because of how hot he is?”. I’ll hand it to Esra, she doesn’t make all the right choices, but here she probably makes better ones than I would’ve in her situation. Also, their love affair could have major timeline implications, and not necessarily good ones, so there’s that to consider. And yet, there’s something deliciously angsty in the push and pull here.
Plus, given the time travel aspect, there are details that make you see the beginning of the story differently once you’ve seen the end. Ta-da! The writers were smart enough to include a rewatchability element. Do you like ships that match each other’s freak? You’ve got it! Let’s commit crimes in the name of patriotism and have some really charged eye contact while we do it. Maybe a kiss or two, as a treat. After all, every baddie needs a morally questionable love interest willing to risk it all for her. It makes for entertaining television, I don’t make the rules!
Some additional thoughts
One thing I’ll say. The costuming in this show is kind of all over the place. At times, a mess. Ill-fitting jackets on Esra, a party dress made with a lace so brightly red and with such a pattern that it looks like I could get it at my local fabric store, a sequined performance outfit (remember the club?) that looks straight out of Forever 21, and so on. Peride’s female relatives (except for her daughter) are all dressed in bizarre combinations of fabric, color and sparkle. Really, the best dressed one here is Halit, by a long shot, and I kinda love that about him. The man goes about his day, often getting up to serious shenanigans, dressed in a three-piece suit and an impeccably tailored coat. I have to respect the fashion game. It makes sense both with who he is as a character (especially given his background), but also because, out of our main three characters, he’s the only one who’s actually from the time period. Fashion crimes may be forgiven when it comes to time travelers, as they usually don’t know any better. For some more thoughts on the mechanics of dressing time travelers, Bernadette Banner over on YouTube made a very good video on the costumes of Doctor Who (2005). Different show, obviously, but what she said about the companion characters (often first time space/time travelers) has stuck with me when considering the costuming in other time travel shows.
Also, let’s talk about colonialism for a hot second. Yes, you heard (read?) me right. Due to its setting, this show also has the unmitigated gall to not only say “British Imperialism bad” (a message I will always co-sign), but to, for a few scenes of one episode, very briefly imagine a future where British rule over Türkiye descends into a full-on fascist regime dedicated to ethnically cleansing Türkiye of Turks. Insane? Fascinating? Scarily plausible? I love it when screenwriters go full ham. You already wrote this insane story, might as well go all the way.
Now, is the history embedded in the narrative accurate or truthful? I’ll admit to having next to no knowledge about the history of Türkiye, so I’m a poor judge in that area. However I am a librarian, and a librarian’s job is to provide people with the information they need. If they don’t have the information themselves, a librarian’s job is to direct them towards another person or resource that might have what they’re seeking. In this case, I found out that Midnight at the Pera Palace is inspired by the book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul written by Charles King. The interesting bit? The book is not a novel, but a nonfiction narrative of Istanbul spanning from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the end of WW2. I haven’t read the book, but if you’re interested in getting to the bottom of things, I’d wager that might be a good place to start.
So, in a nutshell. This is an interesting mystery of a show, with compelling characters surrounded by time-travel shenanigans and set against the backdrop of a political drama, with some angsty romance thrown in there for good measure. What’s not to love? Somehow, it checks lots of boxes on the long list of things that I enjoy in a piece of media. I hope to have done a good enough job of convincing you to watch it. If you think I haven’t, you have two options. The first one would be to disregard this entire post, which of course you're welcome to do. The second would be to hit me up and ask me to elaborate on any aspect you want and I’ll be happy to rant at you some more.
Either way, I love you if you read this far. I’ll see you in the next one!