دستور نيوز
The series “Ashkun Kan Say” is among the television works in which acceptable conditions are met in formulating the story. This is because the series did not start in a vacuum, nor did it build its world on a mere arbitrary gathering of characters that intersect by chance. Rather, it started from a crime from which secrets branched out, interests intertwined around it, and through which layers of familial, social, and financial violence were revealed. Therefore, the reading here will not focus on the directing and technical aspects, even if they in turn need an independent pause, but rather will focus mainly on dramatic writing, and on what the thirty episodes have accomplished in terms of construction, and what they have also corrupted from within this same construction.
From the first episodes, the series seemed to have a strong dramatic core: Amer’s death is not a passing event, but rather an introduction to a whole network of toxic relationships. The father here is not just a victim; It is also an ancient ruin. The children, wives, and those around him do not move within a pure world, but rather within gray spaces in which fear intersects with greed, the desire for revenge, love with self-interest, and silence with the desire to survive. This is a real strength of the series, because many works fall into moral simplification that divides the characters between good and evil, while this work succeeded, in a small part, in making the characters ambiguous and rereadable.
The series has benefited greatly from this confusion. Marwa is neither entirely innocent nor entirely evil. She is a wounded, impulsive woman, wanting both possessions and survival. Asmaa is not just a targeted artist, but rather a complex presence who knows how to move within the artistic field, and at the same time is exposed to blackmail, defamation, and exploitation. Sanaa is one of the characters with the most clear emotional intensity, because she combined fragility, talent, disappointment, and illness. Haitham, in turn, did not write unilaterally, but remained suspended between the image of the suspected son and the image of the young man ousted from an extremely cruel world. Even Amer himself, despite his early death, remained present as the center of poison from which most of the cracks emerged.
Hence, one of the most prominent advantages of the series is that it did not make crime alone its subject, but rather made it a gateway to other worlds: usury, black money, extortion, the fragility of women, the impact of the family on fate, symbolic violence within the home, and power relations within the social space. He also made good use of the idea of postponement at various moments: every episode adds information, every character opens an opening, and every secret is not revealed all at once. This is what gave the first episodes, and also the middle episodes in some stages, a reasonable amount of suspense.
However, this same strength began to weaken as the series progressed. Its first major flaw is that writing has become more subject to the compulsion of the Thirty Episodes than to the logic of dramatic development. Instead of the story expanding because there is something within it that deserves expansion, expansion became imposed on it from the outside. Therefore, there are many scenes that do not actually advance the event, but rather postpone it. There were many dialogues that repeated the same meaning in multiple forms. Confrontations in which one scene was sufficient increased, but now they are divided into two or three scenes. In this particular place, stretching appeared not as a slow, calculated rhythm, but as a dramatic filler.
This extension was not only temporal, but also moral. Some lines in the later episodes began to work on raising scandals, defamation, and tense relations within the artistic and family sphere more than they worked on the dramatic tension itself. Some issues began to be brought up because they contain material for scandal, shouting, or preaching, not because the logic of the story dictates them. Here the work was harmed, because the gray areas that were initially a space for human complexity sometimes began to turn into a space for exaggeration and repetitive emotion.
One of the weakest threads of the series, in my estimation, is the thread of the officer and the criminal investigation. This is the biggest loophole in the whole work. Not because the officer’s presence is unimportant, but because the story placed in his hands a file that assumed a greater degree of rigor, research, connection, and investigation, and then made him actually move mostly from the characters, not from the research. Most of what the officer knows comes from confessions, snitches, coincidences, or evidence given to him by others. The investigation itself hardly opened the lines of Amer’s life as it should have: his financial past, his credit circles, his victims, his rivalries, his movements, his network of interests, his relationship with women, and the details of his conflicts. All of this was necessary to solve the mystery of the crime, but it often remained in the context of what was said rather than what was investigated.
Hence, in many episodes, the officer seemed closer to a social control system than an actual criminal researcher. He speaks as a representative of the law, sometimes practices a moral and paternal language, is shown a space at home and with his son, and is presented as having a mission and a conscience. This in itself is not wrong, but it can be meaningful. However, the problem is that this symbolic dimension came at the expense of professional credibility. Instead of the officer being embodied in the investigation, in building hypotheses, in reviewing paths, in examining contradictions, in respecting procedures, and in transforming doubt into coherent evidence, he became very present in speech, but little presence in convincing investigative action.
Some turns even made the investigation seem based more on illusion than evidence. Othman’s accusation, for example, was based for a long time on psychological pressure and quasi-evidence, and then it appeared that the officer himself relied more on suspicion than on conclusive evidence. The same thing, in another way, happened with Idris in the case of blood on the shirt, where suspicion was escalated and then the man was easily removed from the charge when it turned out that the blood was that of an animal. The fault is not in the drop of suspicion, which is possible, but in the way in which the suspicion was built in the first place, as if the writing wanted to maintain tension at all costs, even at the expense of the logic of the procedures.
This problem increases when we notice that many crucial things in the plot appeared by coincidence. Finding Amer’s phone and key inside a ceramic vessel was not, to the extent of its appearance, sufficiently dramatic. The emergence of some evidence occurred suddenly, or at a very appropriate time, or at the hands of a character who was not searching with a clear method, but rather encountered something that changed the course. This type of solution may be useful once or twice, but when repeated it weakens the story, because it moves it from the logic of discovery to the logic of facilitation.
In terms of characters, the series remains uneven. He gave some of them a clear and influential path, but weakened others either by repetition, jumping, or exaggeration. Marwa, for example, is a strong character in terms of dramatic energy, but her transformation in the final stages into a more violent and impulsive woman sometimes occurred too quickly, as if the writing wanted to push her into the explosive zone. This may be psychologically justified, but gradualism was not always enough. Asma, in turn, experienced important transformations, including her transition from a position of damaged and used to a more effective position, especially when she intervened in the line of defense of Othman or when she returned to Sanaa in the end. However, this transformation itself needed, at some points, stronger consolidation so that it would not appear to be merely a functional shift.
As for Sanaa, she is one of the characters who bore the greatest emotional burden in the series, but her illness line suffered from some structural disturbances. Illness was present, influential, and established a state of real vulnerability, but the way it was presented was not always precise. At moments it seemed extremely dangerous, at others it reverted to overtaken territory, and then it came back again as an ultimate threat. This oscillation sometimes made the line closer to a tool for intensifying pathos than to a carefully constructed medical and psychological path.
One of the basic observations that should not be overlooked in this reading is that the series did not deal well with the background of Marwa, Asmaa, and Sanaa as daughters of charity. This given has been mentioned repeatedly, but more often it is used as a sign of understatement rather than a complex social given. It is as if the series, or at least some of its characters, without placing sufficient critical distance between them and the discourse, views this background as a stigma that continues with the girls even after they leave the institution. This is shameful, because the story did not give us a clear history of their exit from charity, nor the nature of the years they lived after that, nor how their selves were reshaped socially, culturally, and linguistically.
Here another precise observation appears: the series is silent about the period of time that separated the two sisters’ departure from charity and the beginning of the events. This absence was not a minor detail, because it confuses the social plausibility of the two characters. If Sanaa and Asmaa had lived for a significant amount of time in Casablanca, within a different linguistic space, and after years of mixing and working, how did they continue to speak a pure northern language in this way? If they entered charity at a late age where their native language had become established, the series should have made that clear. As for the matter remaining pending, this is a gap in the social and linguistic foundation of the two characters.
Related to this observation is the issue of geographical references that passed through the work, such as Zagora, Rashidiya, and others. These signs were present, but they were often not transformed into real dramatic elements. It did not build a space, it did not produce an effect, it did not change the course of the event. At times they seemed like they were just names thrown into the dialogue to expand the world, but they weren’t invested. This is also one of the signs of writing that invokes what is given and then does nothing with it.
Regarding the ending, the series chose to make Noura the actual killer. In principle, this solution is not weak, but rather carries an appropriate tragic dimension, because the killer here is not evil in the simple sense, but rather a psychologically and physically destroyed woman, with a past of violence, and her crime comes from a region of brokenness, revenge, fear, and imbalance. From this angle, the ending can be understood as a closure of a thick past of oppression, not just a police revelation. However, the problem is that this end did not benefit properly from a strong investigation leading to it, but rather came after a long path of hesitations, shifting accusations, and detours. Therefore, its impact was closer to emotional resolution than to intelligent exposure that rereads everything that came before.
However, these glitches shouldn’t overshadow what the series actually accomplished. Despite everything, he was able to create a real follow-up relationship, distribute the centers of interest over more than one thread, give some characters features that are not easily forgotten, and maintain the viewer’s curiosity in many stages. The conclusion of some tracks, such as the restoration of Sanaa’s reputation as the author of the words, or her re-recognition within the emotional group, had a clear symbolic significance. In this thread in particular, the series seemed to want to triumph, even if late, for the talent that was kept silent about, and for those who gave to others what they did not acknowledge until the end.
This is why it can be said that “Ashkun Kan Says” is a series that has a story stronger than the engineering of its long execution. Its main strength is that it has built a world with real social secrets, classes, and wounds. Its main weakness is that as the episodes progress, it becomes more subject to stretching, more dependent on coincidences, illusions, preaching, and emotion, and the logic of investigation declines in favor of what the characters say about themselves and others. It’s a series that manages to be interesting, but it doesn’t always manage to be solid. He succeeded in opening thorny issues, but he did not always succeed in giving them the most solid dramatic treatment.
The bottom line is that the work, if taken as a whole, remains one of the works worth reading, not because it is without flaws, but because its flaws themselves are revealing. It provides a clear example of the difference between having a good story and having a disciplined dramatic structure. It also represents how the series can gain a lot from the idea of gray areas, and then lose some of that profit when it extends the plot lines more than they should bear, or when it leaves the criminal investigation behind the characters instead of making it a force that reveals them. It is a work that has many merits, but it could have been much stronger if it had been freed from the pressure of numbers, the logic of investigation had been reset, and the social world of the characters, especially the women emerging from charity, had been placed on a more accurate and just basis.
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“Ashkun used to say: “Interesting gray spaces and stretching consume the spirit of the story.”
– الدستور نيوز
اخبار منوعه – “Ashkun used to say: “Interesting gray spaces and stretching consume the spirit of the story.”
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