Specials

Prequel series that give a deeper understanding to the "Spartacus" universe by giving more background to several characters. It is still a lot of detailed blood and sex-scenes for all us sinners out there and some stuff shown here is so extreme that they would never have passed the ordinary cinema censors either. The series also toned down the use of CGI for this mini which was a good thing.

I am fully aware of the sad events that led to this part of the show but I still have issues with it.

My main problem was that I was not interested in seeing origins of characters who I know to be killed. Batiatus wasn't a great character to beginn with. He was an upstart, a wannabe, basically an a**e all the time and why do I care about the reasons ? Most of the story we already knew, we just hadn't seen it. Gannicus and his story could have been done like intended - in a one episode flashback.

Plus this all suffers from the usual prequel problems. If you know a character doesn't die there is no exitement by putting him in dangerous situations.

Maybe it would be better, now that the option is there, to watch this before the first season. There are sure pros and cons about that. But I guess you could as easily just skip it.