Red Queen, on Prime

Antonia Scott is literally too smart for her own good. She is not merely a socially awkward detective, like Sherlock or Monk. When she starts thinking too rapidly, her brain essentially overheats, causing weird hallucinations. It is all the fault of a shadowy crime-fighting organization, whose initial training turned out to be somewhat overzealous. Not surprisingly, she is always reluctant to accept a new case from “Mentor,” the mastermind who recruited her, but she can be begged and cajoled into investigating particularly urgent and awful crimes. A recent string of high-profile abductions (and likely murders) will qualify in creator Amaya Muruzabal’s Spanish series Red Queen (a.k.a. Reina Roja), which premieres today on Prime Video.

As the series opens, the unstable Scott is considering multiple suicide options. She has had a rough go of it. In addition to her visions of angry monkeys, her husband lies comatose in the hospital, with zero prognosis for recovery. It will be the hulking, wheezing Det. Jon Guttierez’s job to convince her to venture out into the field again. As a devout, gay Catholic Basque who snitched on corrupt fellow cops back in Bilbao, Guttierez was never really accepted by the Madrid force. However, his outsider status will give some credit with Scott. That still doesn’t mean she will be friendly. She is the organization’s designated “Red Queen” for Spain, after all.

One business titan’s grown offspring was brutally murdered and another mogul’s privileged daughter has been kidnapped. Madrid’s conventional cops are investigating like it is a conventional case, but Mentor knows it requires Scott’s “out-of-the-box” thinking. It will be Guttierez’s job to drive her, run interference, and generally keep her alive, all of which get trickier when the sinister “Ezequiel” realizes they are on his trail.

Based on the first three (out of seven) episodes provided for review, Red Queen is a great deal like a great many other series and films, but the execution is strong. Co-leads Vicky Luengo and Hovik Keuchkerian’s odd couple chemistry is especially odd, but it works. Keuchkerian’s rumpled (despite the Tom Ford suits) world-weariness wears especially well (after three hours). Luengo certainly has a knack for twitchiness, but Scott’s character has yet to be fully developed.

Nacho Fresneda’s villainy as Ezequiel is also still a work in process. However, Koldo Serra serves up some pretty creepy scenes. At one point, someone reasonably likens Ezequiel’s dungeon to the movie Hostel, which says a lot. The scenes that graphically represent Scott’s uncanny powers of observation and intuition are not unlike those in the Cumberbatch Sherlock, but they are still stylishly rendered. Recommended (so far) for serial killer/abduction thriller fans, Red Queen starts streaming today (2/29) on Prime Video.