Spartacus: House of Ashur

Ashur? The fellow who was brutally decapitated in the second season of Steven S DeKnight’s historical drama series Spartacus (2012)? Oh, well, he’s alive again. With thanks to an unacknowledged yet deeply absurd plot device enabling his simply astounding and highly convenient resurrection (cheers, Gods of the Underworld), Nick E Tarabay’s chiselled character returns with every intention of releasing his own company of honed enslaved fighters onto the sand of the gladiatorial arena. His secret weapon? An unknown gladiatrix, Achillea (Tanika Davis), who has nothing to lose and everything to prove to earn her freedom (that being said, peril is hard to conjure in a world where anyone can be brought back into being by Pluto and his mates).

Empowered significant female character or not – something alien to the Spartacus universe to date – this show retains its precedent for utter coarseness. Sure, vulgarity need not be shied away from, yet every angle of crudeness – language, nudity, violence, gore and more – is categorically over-explored, striving to invoke awe through the grotesque and superficially intriguing, rather than attempt to do so through such novel approaches as well-developed characters or an arresting narrative. The characters may actually say something if they’re not throwing in quite so many f-bombs.

The script is a particularly interesting case. These characters may favour deeds to words, but the profanity-strewn faux-Shakespeare dialect in which they talk is actually not that ineffective, and matches the surreality of the very evidently computer-assisted creation of the visual world. Additionally, the fight scenes, of which there are a fair few, are cinematically engaging and amusingly choreographed.

All matters considered, Spartacus: House of Ashur is as ridiculous as it is searingly earnest in its intent to portray the epic over all else. Whether the show’s creators intended for it to emerge as a greatly protracted 300 with all the bodies and brooding and battling, and of course the eternal dusk, that’s how this one has panned out, and it doesn’t lend itself to a miniseries.

Will Snell

Spartacus: House of Ashur is released on 6^th December 2025.

Watch the trailer for Spartacus: House of Ashur here: