I came to Chief of War almost a year late expecting a large, bloody historical epic. Three days and nine episodes later, I was reading about Kaʻiana, Kamehameha, Nuʻuanu, featherwork, muskets and a Hawaiʻi that popular culture had mostly taught me to treat as scenery.
Nine Episodes in Three Days
I was late to Chief of War, which is becoming an increasingly familiar way for me to discover television. The series arrived on Apple TV in August 2025, ran for nine episodes and finished in September, while I somehow managed to leave it sitting in that increasingly crowded mental folder marked “I really should watch that”. By the time I finally pressed play, most of the launch noise had passed, the interviews and promotional clips had drifted further down the timeline, and Apple had moved on to promoting whatever came next.
Once I started watching, however, the delay disappeared remarkably quickly. I finished all nine episodes in three days, which probably says more about my reaction than trying to manufacture a clever opening judgement. Streaming has made postponement ridiculously easy. There are series I have supposedly been meaning to watch for five years without experiencing the slightest urgency, yet Chief of War managed to turn itself from another item in the queue into the thing I wanted to put back on as soon as I had the time.
Part of that was the story itself, but much of it came from the uncomfortable discovery that I knew considerably less about this period of Hawaiian history than I had assumed. I knew King Kamehameha, or at least I knew the name and the broad outline: warrior king, unification of the islands, the beginning of a recognisable Hawaiian kingdom before the later history of missionaries, foreign commercial interests, American intervention and eventual annexation. What I did not know was the dense, unstable political landscape that existed before that unification, with separate kingdoms, rival chiefs, shifting alliances, family ties, prophecies and wars that were already reshaping the islands before European and American interests began applying their own pressure.
Most of all, I had never heard of Kaʻiana. That changed fairly quickly. By the time I reached the end of the series, I was reading about the real man behind Jason Momoa’s character, trying to separate documented history from television invention and discovering that his actual relationship with Kamehameha becomes considerably messier than anything the first season has yet shown. That, more than almost anything else, is what I want from historical drama. I do not necessarily need it to teach me history while I sit obediently on the sofa; I want it to make me curious enough to go looking afterwards.
Before Hawaiʻi Became Scenery
Popular culture has spent generations turning Hawaiʻi into an image for outsiders. It has been a holiday destination, a naval outpost, a surfing paradise, a backdrop for detectives and action films, a place of palm trees and sunsets that can be summoned visually before anyone bothers mentioning that human beings were living complicated political and cultural lives there long before resorts and military installations arrived.
None of those familiar images is necessarily false. The problem is that repetition has a way of replacing a place with its postcard, and one of the first things Chief of War does is put history, conflict and human ambition back into the landscape. The islands remain beautiful, obviously, but the beauty is never neutral. Mountains define territory. The sea separates kingdoms while connecting them. Canoes are transport, military technology and expressions of craft. Land carries genealogy and spiritual meaning rather than merely providing somewhere spectacular for a drone shot.
The series is set during the turbulent late eighteenth century, when the major islands were controlled by competing rulers and Kamehameha’s eventual dominance was by no means inevitable. The programme approaches this period from an Indigenous Hawaiian perspective and centres Kaʻiana during the struggle surrounding unification and increasing Western contact, a choice that immediately changes the familiar visual grammar of this kind of historical epic.
There is no European explorer conveniently standing at the centre of the frame so that we can discover Hawaiʻi through his astonishment. When foreigners appear, they are entering somebody else’s world. Their ships are strange, their clothing is strange, their commercial appetites are strange, and the guns they bring with them are both useful and terrifying. The Hawaiians do not require an outsider to explain themselves to the audience, and I found that simple shift in perspective increasingly important as the series went on.
It also gives the story of colonisation a more interesting shape. Colonialism does not initially arrive as an invading army with a flag and a speech about empire. It arrives in smaller, apparently practical forms: a ship, a trader, a musket, metal tools, information and the knowledge that another chief may gain access to the same things if you refuse them. By the time formal political domination becomes imaginable, the relationships of power are already changing.
Kaʻiana and the Man Behind Jason Momoa
The decision to build the series around Kaʻiana rather than simply making Kamehameha the central protagonist turns out to be one of its strongest choices. Kamehameha is the monumental historical figure, remembered in statues, names and national history, whereas Kaʻiana occupies a more unstable position, important enough to have been deeply involved in the events but complicated enough to offer the writers room for contradiction.
The historical Kaʻiana was a high-ranking chief who became one of the earliest Hawaiian aliʻi known to have travelled extensively outside the islands. His experiences aboard Western vessels exposed him to foreign technology and trade before he returned to Hawaiʻi, where he initially became an important ally of Kamehameha. He later broke with him, defected to Kalanikūpule on Oʻahu and died fighting against Kamehameha at the Battle of Nuʻuanu in 1795.
That is an extraordinary life even before television begins moving things around, and it gives Momoa far more interesting material than the straightforward image of a heroic chief fighting for unification might have provided. His Kaʻiana is caught between identities almost from the beginning: warrior and husband, political figure and reluctant participant, Hawaiian chief and traveller who has seen the scale of the world gathering beyond the horizon.
This is also where the series changed my view of Momoa as an actor. His physical presence has never been in doubt. From Khal Drogo to Aquaman, his career has understandably been built around a body and a charisma that are difficult to disguise, and Hollywood has generally responded by handing him something heavy to swing while making sure the lighting department catches the tattoos.
Chief of War does not pretend that physicality is irrelevant, because casting Momoa as a warrior and then avoiding violence would be slightly absurd. What it does is give him more dramatic space around it. Kaʻiana carries grief badly. He doubts himself. He makes decisions he knows are morally compromised and then has to keep living beside them. His certainty changes depending on whether he is speaking as a warrior, a husband, a brother or somebody who has seen what foreign weapons can do.
The more interesting performance is often visible after the violence rather than during it. Momoa has moments where Kaʻiana seems almost sickened by the role everyone expects him to occupy, yet he remains very good at performing that role when necessary. There is an uncomfortable tension between his ability to dominate a battlefield and his growing suspicion that battlefield dominance is not going to save his people from the much larger transformation approaching them.
That tension gives Momoa something his blockbuster roles rarely require: uncertainty that cannot be resolved by becoming stronger. Kaʻiana cannot punch colonisation. He cannot prevent other rulers from wanting guns simply because he understands what guns will eventually mean. He cannot protect his family without involving himself in the same political machinery that continually endangers them. By the end of the season, I felt I had seen considerably more of Momoa’s dramatic range than most of his previous work has allowed him to show.
Kamehameha Before History Finishes With Him
Kaina Makua’s Kamehameha works for almost the opposite reason. Where Momoa arrives carrying decades of screen familiarity, Makua appears without all that baggage, and the difference suits a character who has not yet hardened into the historical image we recognise.
His Kamehameha is physically strong but not theatrically imposing at every opportunity. He listens, waits and sometimes appears almost uncomfortable with the expectations gathering around him. The performance resists the temptation to play him as a monument in waiting, which means his authority grows more convincingly because we are allowed to see the man before the legend has finished being constructed.
That becomes especially important in his relationship with Kaʻiana. Kaʻiana has seen more of the world outside Hawaiʻi and understands the technological danger approaching from it, while Kamehameha understands the internal political landscape and the obligations of leadership in ways Kaʻiana would sometimes prefer to escape. Their alliance works because neither man is simply there to confirm the greatness of the other.
Knowing the historical future makes their scenes more interesting rather than less. The first season can allow their growing cooperation to feel hopeful because the eventual fracture remains beyond the frame. Once you know that Kaʻiana will ultimately leave Kamehameha and die fighting against him, however, every gesture of trust starts to acquire a slight shadow.
That is the story I hope the series eventually gets to tell. Historical friendship is easy enough to dramatise when both men are moving towards the same enemy; the richer material lies in explaining how people who once understood each other come to believe they can no longer remain on the same side.
Kahekili, Keōua and the Problem With Knowing Who Wins
Historical drama has an inherent problem whenever the audience already knows which ruler eventually ends up on the statues. Everyone opposing him risks becoming a temporary obstacle whose main purpose is to delay the inevitable.
Chief of War mostly avoids that, partly because Temuera Morrison and Cliff Curtis are too experienced to play their characters as historical furniture. Morrison’s Kahekili has an almost relaxed menace, the sort of ruler who has lived with power for long enough that he no longer needs to demonstrate it every second. Violence is not a failure of his political system; it is one of the tools that keeps the system working.
Morrison is especially effective when Kahekili is quiet. His face has always been good at suggesting that the calculation has already happened somewhere behind the eyes, and his scenes with those beneath him often carry the unpleasant feeling that everyone else is waiting to discover whether he has decided to reward, humiliate or kill them.
Cliff Curtis gives Keōua a different kind of conviction. He is dangerous, but the series also understands that resistance to Kamehameha cannot simply be reduced to villainy, particularly once Western weapons become part of the equation. If you believe guns and foreign influence threaten the cultural and spiritual integrity of the islands, then opposing the ruler increasingly willing to use those things is not an irrational position.
The trouble is that history does not usually provide the convenience of giving one person all the correct arguments. Keōua may be right to fear what Western technology represents while still being capable of brutality and political ambition himself. That tension is much more satisfying than simply dividing the battlefield into enlightened modernisers and backward traditionalists.
Kaʻahumanu, Kupuohi and the People Watching the Warriors
One of the pleasures of Chief of War is that its political intelligence does not belong entirely to the men carrying weapons. Luciane Buchanan’s Kaʻahumanu gradually becomes one of the characters I most want to see given more room, partly because Buchanan understands how much can be communicated through observation.
Kaʻahumanu watches men perform certainty and seems increasingly capable of noticing the fear and vanity underneath it. Her relationship with Kamehameha also makes his leadership feel less solitary. History tends to compress rulers into singular figures, but political power is usually built through families, advisers, marriages, rivalries and the people willing to tell a leader what he does not want to hear.
Kupuohi, played by Te Ao o Hinepehinga, gives Kaʻiana’s choices a similar domestic and political weight. It would have been very easy for the series to leave her waiting at home while Kaʻiana travelled around becoming historically significant, but she is allowed to have her own understanding of what his choices will mean for the people around him.
The debate over firearms is where that becomes particularly sharp. Kaʻiana recognises them as a threat, but Kupuohi understands the practical problem of refusing technology that your enemies may happily accept. Once the weapon exists within the political system, moral refusal does not return the system to its earlier state. It may simply leave you honourably unarmed.
That is one of the central ideas running through the season. Everyone can see pieces of the danger, but nobody has the power to make the danger disappear.
Hearing Hawaiian Rather Than Decorating With It
The extensive use of Hawaiian is one of the production decisions that gives Chief of War its identity. Apple lists Hawaiian and English as the programme’s original languages, and the production put actors through substantial language work rather than using a few ceremonial phrases before returning everybody to English for the audience’s convenience.
Momoa worked closely with language coach Kahoʻokahi Kanuha, who spent an extended period helping him with pronunciation, rhythm and everyday use. Reporting after the series aired was refreshingly nuanced about the result: language experts did not claim every performance was perfect, but they emphasised the cultural significance of hearing Hawaiian used so extensively in a major international production after generations in which the language endured suppression and decline.
What matters dramatically is that the language is allowed to do ordinary work. Characters argue in it, complain in it, flirt in it, threaten one another in it and speak to their families without the series treating every Hawaiian sentence as a solemn cultural demonstration.
That makes a significant difference to the perspective. I am the one who needs subtitles; the characters do not need to rearrange themselves around me. It is a small but important reminder of whose world the series is asking us to enter.
Feather, Fibre and the Weight of Things
The costume work was another element that kept catching my eye, partly because it feels designed from material culture outward rather than from the usual vague idea of what an “ancient warrior” should look like. Costume designer Caroline Eselin and her department researched collections at institutions including Honolulu’s Bishop Museum and Te Papa in New Zealand and worked with Hawaiian cultural practitioners while building the series’ clothing and regalia.
The spectacular pieces are naturally the feathered cloaks and helmets worn by the aliʻi, but even there the design is doing more than decorating the frame. Eselin’s team produced more than 150 capes and developed different visual identities for the major islands, with dominant colours helping distinguish groups during the larger battle sequences.
That is exactly the sort of design decision I appreciate because it works before the viewer consciously thinks about it. Costume becomes information. When armies fill the frame, colour and silhouette help us understand allegiance even amid movement, smoke and bodies.
I was just as interested in the quieter materials: woven fibres, kapa, shell, bindings, wood, tattoos and the way clothing sits on bodies without looking like it has been translated into a familiar European costume pattern. The department even had to create contemporary substitutes that could behave like traditional materials while surviving sweat, stunt work and repeated takes, the sort of practical compromise that good production design hides completely once the cameras start rolling.
The same material confidence extends into the canoes, weapons, village structures and tools. Things look used rather than displayed. The world never feels as if the characters have wandered into a museum exhibition five minutes before opening.
When the World Gets Bigger
Kaʻiana’s journey beyond Hawaiʻi initially made me wonder whether the series was losing some of the political momentum it had established among the islands. Those episodes pull him away from the characters and tensions I had already become invested in, and for a while the programme seems to be changing into a different historical adventure.
By the end, I understood why that diversion mattered. The real Kaʻiana’s travels were central to what made him unusual, exposing him to foreign ships, commerce and weapons before many of his contemporaries had anything like the same experience. His return therefore brings not just a man home but knowledge that cannot be taken back.
The gun becomes the clearest expression of that knowledge. Before firearms arrive, the warfare we see is intimate in an unpleasantly literal sense. Whatever ritual, strategy and skill surround the fighting, people generally have to get close enough to one another to feel the consequences. Wood, stone, shell and blades meet flesh at distances where everyone involved understands exactly what is happening.
A musket changes the geometry of killing, while cannon change it again. Courage and physical skill do not disappear, but suddenly they operate inside a battlefield governed by different rules.
The series understands that the real political danger begins once everyone knows those weapons exist. Kaʻiana can hate what firearms represent and still realise that Kamehameha may need them. His enemies can condemn foreign influence while searching for advantages of their own. Once technology enters a power struggle, nobody gets to return voluntarily to the previous version of history.
Why I Kept Thinking About The Convert
Watching the combat, I repeatedly thought about Lee Tamahori’s The Convert, the 2023 film set in nineteenth-century Aotearoa amid Māori intertribal warfare and growing European contact. The comparison is not simply that both works depict Polynesian cultures and traditional weapons; it is the way both insist that close-quarters warfare should look physically exhausting and deeply unpleasant.
There is very little elegant movie fighting in Chief of War. Weapons strike badly. Bodies react awkwardly. Men lose balance, panic and become trapped under other bodies. The violence is often graphic enough that I occasionally wondered whether the series had crossed the point where another crushed head was telling me anything I had not already understood.
Even so, I prefer that to the alternative. Historical action can become strangely hygienic when everyone moves like trained stunt performers and the camera treats death primarily as choreography. Chief of War rarely allows the viewer that comfort.
The important difference from The Convert is the perspective. Tamahori’s film uses an outsider as part of its entry into Māori society, whereas Chief of War has no need for that conventional audience surrogate. The foreign sailors are the strange ones here. Their ships and guns are the things entering an established world rather than the civilisation itself being presented as something newly discovered.
The War Changes Before Anyone Is Ready
By the later episodes, the growing foreign presence has stopped feeling like background foreshadowing and begun directly altering the internal struggle. That progression is more convincing than a simpler story in which colonisation arrives suddenly at the end, because it shows how external power can change local politics long before anyone formally takes control.
Weapons become commodities, traders become useful specialists and people who have travelled outside the islands acquire new kinds of political value. Kamehameha’s historical rise would indeed become connected to Western firearms and foreign advisers such as John Young, one of the many uncomfortable points where Hawaiian unification and Western contact overlap rather than sitting in separate chapters.
The programme never lets that contradiction become entirely neat. Guns can help protect Hawaiians from other Hawaiians while simultaneously accelerating dependence on foreign technology. Unification can strengthen the islands against outside powers while also requiring enormous violence against other Hawaiian kingdoms.
That is why I find the history much more interesting after watching the series than the simplified version I carried into it. There is no clean point where resistance ends and accommodation begins, because the same action can contain both.
The Sacred Niu Grove and the Cost of Making War Personal
The eighth episode turns much of the season’s political violence into something brutally intimate. Nāhi’s death and what happens to Heke are deliberately difficult to watch, removing any remaining possibility that Kaʻiana and his family might somehow retreat from the conflict and allow larger historical forces to continue without them.
I remain uneasy about historical dramas using sexual violence as a way of raising the emotional stakes, particularly when a woman’s suffering becomes primarily a motivational device for male characters. Chief of War does not entirely avoid that problem, although it does give Heke agency beyond the event rather than reducing her to evidence of somebody else’s wickedness.
That becomes important in the finale, where her confrontation with ʻŌpūnui belongs to her. The sequence is still vicious, but the series at least allows Heke to remain a character with anger and action rather than turning what happened to her into another reason for Kaʻiana to look grim before battle.
There is no way to make any of it comfortable, and I do not think the programme tries particularly hard to do so. By this stage, the accumulating damage has become the point. Winning the war is not going to restore anybody to the person they were when the first episode began.
The Black Desert
Then comes “The Black Desert”, directed by Jason Momoa himself, and whatever reservations I have about historical compression or the series occasionally leaning too heavily into prestige-epic grandeur, I thought the finale was awesome.
What I loved most initially was not even the fighting but the trash-talking before it. The armies face one another across that extraordinary black volcanic landscape and begin exchanging threats, insults and challenges, attempting to shame and destabilise their opponents before anyone charges. Thomas Paʻa Sibbett has discussed the sequence in terms of traditions of verbal and spiritual confrontation before physical battle, which makes something that could have played as contemporary swagger feel properly connected to the culture being represented.
It is also wonderfully human. Historical drama can sometimes become so respectful of its own grandeur that everyone starts speaking like a museum plaque. Here we have warriors preparing for a potentially fatal confrontation by telling the men opposite them, in essence, that they are cowards who are about to be humiliated.
The cultural context may be specific, but the impulse is recognisable. Men have apparently been talking rubbish before fights for a very long time, and Kaʻiana uses that provocation tactically, and then the guns fire. The effect is immediate because the entire season has spent enough time showing us the older physical grammar of warfare that we understand how radically the muskets change it.
The first volleys create an almost obscene imbalance. Warriors trained for close combat suddenly face organised fire from a distance, and for a brief period the battle ceases to resemble the sort of fighting everyone on Keōua’s side understands.
Then the distance disappears and the armies collide, firearms lose some of their immediate advantage, and the whole thing descends into spears, clubs, blades, smoke, bodies and panic. It is enormous without becoming completely unreadable, which is harder to accomplish than large-scale television sometimes makes it look.
Momoa the Director
Momoa fought to film the climactic battle on the Kalapana lava field on Hawaiʻi Island, and the location gives the episode a physical hostility that would have been difficult to manufacture on a comfortable stage. The production spent eight days shooting there, with performers training for the terrain and wearing protective footwear disguised for camera because the lava rock itself could be punishing. During production, Mauna Loa erupted, briefly forcing filming to pause while conditions and air quality were assessed.
Knowing that makes the sequence even more remarkable, but it works before you know any of it. The ground looks dangerous because it is dangerous. There is almost nothing soft in the image, and the bright featherwork, exposed skin, smoke and blood stand out brutally against the black.
Momoa also proves more disciplined as an action director than I expected. He certainly likes gore and apparently filmed material even more extreme than what eventually made the episode, but the larger battle maintains enough geography that I could follow the important movements rather than simply registering two armies colliding.
The individual character moments therefore remain attached to the battle rather than feeling like isolated inserts. Heke gets her confrontation. Kamehameha remains part of the larger strategic picture. Kaʻiana is physically dominant but increasingly trapped inside the consequences of the very tactics making victory possible.
That final point matters because Momoa himself has said he did not want the ending to feel purely victorious. These are Hawaiians killing Hawaiians during a civil war, and even a historically significant victory carries enormous loss.
The episode understands that well enough to keep the triumph uneasy. The muskets have helped win the battle, which also means everyone has just received another demonstration of why they will be impossible to ignore in the future.
When History and Television Part Company
The finale is also where the gap between historical drama and history becomes most obvious. Keōua’s volcanic death is spectacular television, and I can completely understand why the writers looked at the available historical material and decided that a rival chief disappearing into volcanic catastrophe during the season’s climactic battle was irresistible.
The problem is that the real Keōua Kūʻahuʻula did not die that way. Historical accounts place a devastating volcanic event affecting members of his forces in 1790, but Keōua survived and was killed the following year after travelling to Puʻukoholā, where Kamehameha had constructed the great heiau dedicated to Kū. The series effectively combines separate historical events into one piece of mythic television punctuation.
I do not regard that as some fatal betrayal of the audience, but it is a useful reminder of how carefully we should use words like “accurate” when discussing drama. Chief of War has clearly invested enormous effort in cultural consultation, language, costume and material detail, yet that care does not mean its narrative is a documentary transcript.
The same applies to Kaʻiana. The television character is built around reluctance, war-weariness and an early understanding of the danger represented by foreign weapons, while the historical figure appears to have been more comfortable with warfare and far more entangled with firearms and political manoeuvring than the series initially suggests.
For me, recognising those alterations makes the programme more interesting rather than less. There is a useful distinction between asking whether a scene literally happened and asking why the writers chose to shape history that way.
Chief of War clearly wants Kaʻiana to carry the moral contradiction of a society confronting foreign technology. That may simplify the man, but it gives the drama a perspective through which to examine what happens when refusing change does not stop change from arriving.
A Story That Becomes More Complicated After the Credits
The most tantalising historical fact waiting beyond Season 1 is Kaʻiana’s eventual rupture with Kamehameha. The season ends with the two men aligned, their partnership strengthened by battle and the immediate threat apparently overcome, but the historical record leads towards betrayal, defection and Nuʻuanu.
That makes the ending much more compelling to me than if the series were simply marching towards Kamehameha’s inevitable victory. Kaʻiana is not going to remain comfortably beside the future king. The man who has helped alter the balance of power will eventually decide that he can no longer stand with the ruler benefiting from it.
Exactly why the series’ version of Kaʻiana reaches that point could be fascinating, particularly because Momoa has spent the first nine episodes making him someone increasingly suspicious of what power demands. His break with Kamehameha could therefore become both political and personal rather than a sudden historical event that the script needs to tick off.
As of late September 2026, Apple still has not publicly announced either a renewal or a cancellation for Chief of War. The series was initially presented as a limited series, but Momoa and Thomas Paʻa Sibbett have repeatedly made clear that they built the story with more history available beyond the first nine episodes. Current renewal trackers still list it as pending, which leaves me looking forward to Season 2 in the slightly inconvenient sense that there is, for now, no confirmed Season 2.
Given where the actual history goes next, stopping here would feel particularly frustrating. The first season has done the work of introducing Kaʻiana, Kamehameha and the political landscape; the material ahead contains the fracture that could make all of that groundwork pay off.
What Stayed With Me After Three Days
Finishing nine episodes in three days is not something I do automatically anymore. There is simply too much television, too many platforms and too little reason to behave as though everything marked “prestige” deserves immediate attention. A lot of streaming television is perfectly competent while you are watching it and begins evaporating from memory before the credits have finished.
Chief of War stayed with me because it gave me several things to think about at once. There is the history itself, much of which was new to me. There is the cultural perspective and the pleasure of seeing Hawaiʻi presented as something other than scenery. There is the production craft in the language, featherwork, costumes, weapons, canoes and locations. There is also the much less tidy issue of watching a story about unification while understanding that unification looks very different depending on whether you are the person doing it or the person being unified.
The series has weaknesses. Its historical compression can be substantial, Kaʻiana occasionally develops the gravitational pull common to television protagonists where almost every major event seems somehow to pass through him, and the violence sometimes becomes so extreme that one more smashed body communicates less rather than more.
There are also moments when the show appears slightly too aware of itself as expensive historical television. A mountain fills the background, drums rise on the soundtrack, everyone looks burdened by destiny and you can almost see the trailer editor making notes.
Yet those reservations never stopped me wanting the next episode. Kaina Makua gives Kamehameha a calm authority without turning him into an icon before his time. Luciane Buchanan makes Kaʻahumanu feel increasingly important without demanding attention from every scene. Temuera Morrison and Cliff Curtis give the political opposition enough weight that history does not become a procession of people waiting to lose.
Momoa surprised me as well. I went in expecting the physical performance because that is the obvious part. What I came away appreciating was the dramatic one: Kaʻiana’s hesitation, anger, shame, grief and awareness that almost every available choice carries damage somewhere inside it.
The fact that Momoa then directed the season finale himself gives the whole thing a satisfying sense of personal investment. “The Black Desert” is big, brutal and occasionally excessive, but it never feels like the director is merely trying to create a more expensive action sequence. The trash-talking before battle, the first shock of the muskets, the violent collapse into hand-to-hand combat and the bleak volcanic ground underneath it all bring together most of what the season has been thinking about.
War has tradition and ritual, but technology is changing it. Hawaiian rulers are fighting for the future of the islands without fully understanding what the future is about to contain. Victory may create unity while simultaneously opening the door to other forms of dependence and loss.
I came to Chief of War nearly a year late knowing Kamehameha’s name and almost nothing about Kaʻiana. Three days later, I had watched the whole season and was reading about Nuʻuanu, Puʻukoholā, the politics behind unification and the considerably messier life of the man Momoa is playing.
That seems a better measure of the series than whether every piece of historical compression survives scrutiny. It made the world beyond the television programme more interesting.
Now I would simply like Apple to let them finish the story, because somewhere beyond that final image of victory is Kaʻiana standing on the other side of Kamehameha’s battlefield. After everything this first season has done to bring him into view, that is the part I most want to see.
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