Five Interesting Facts About Kaleidoscope – Netflix’s Mind-Bending Heist
With vivid colors and hidden secrets everywhere you look, Netflix’s limited series is a hypnotic guessing game. With an unusual narrative, this slick and stylish heist series is making waves across the entertainment world.
When you think of heists, your mind often darts to the famous Point Break, where Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves battle it out in both the surf and in bank robberies. Or perhaps you drift to the legendary Ocean’s Eleven, where George Clooney and Brad Pitt are mixing playing casino games with robbing the establishments. These films are ones you need to follow from start to finish in order to understand the heists and the general plot of the shows.
However, Kaleidoscope is a new kind of heist show, with a completely different kind of twist. With no chronology, the order the episodes are watched in will differ from viewer to viewer, and therefore each person will have a completely different perspective of the show.
This non-linear viewing is just one of the unique aspects of this new series, and there are plenty more unusual elements to this mind-bending show. Read on to find out some more interesting facts and maybe you’ll want to test the disorganized nature of this new series for yourself.
The show’s eight episodes don’t have to be watched in a certain order
Having no right way to watch the series is a purposeful exercise to have the audience squirming a little, being forced to let go of latching onto the chronology of the show. The randomized order should add an element of satisfaction for viewers, knowing you may be a bit behind the twists and the turns, but also knowing the information is going to catch up to them eventually. Each episode takes place some time before or after the heist, filling in different details, before the final episode reveals the answers.
The episode titles are colors, not numbers
Since there is no chronological order to the episodes, numbers are irrelevant. Instead, the episodes are identified by color – Yellow, Pink, Orange, Blue, Green, Violet, Red and White. The episode titled “White” is the series finale, and it is the only episode that viewers have been asked to watch at the end. Even the scripts were color-coded to continue the unusual theme.
The show was loosely based on the story about $70 billion in bonds being lost during hurricane Sandy
Hurricane Sandy was one of the biggest natural disasters of the 21st century, wreaking havoc along the Atlantic Coast in late 2012. In the fallout, stories began to emerge about some of the damage that was caused. According to the New York Post, an underground facility used by several big banks was flooded, leaving around $70 billion in bearer bonds to potentially go missing. This story apparently led Eric Garcia, the creator of the series, to come up with the idea behind Kaleidoscope.
Ridley Scott is one of the show’s executive producers
Ridley Scott and Eric Garcia are no strangers, having first worked together on the movie Matchstick Man back in 2003. They now have been seen working together again, with Scott acting as one of Kaleidoscope’s numerous executive producers. Scott has a decent history of crime films, including American Gangster and Thelma & Louise, as well as visually astounding films like Alien and Blade Runner. Bringing his talents to this new series can surely only mean good things.
Jai Courtney learned to crack safes for the show
Bob, played by Courtney, is the safe cracker on the team, and now, thanks to his training for Kaleidoscope, he can crack a safe in real life. He claims that although he has no intention to actually rob banks, he could if he wanted to. According to Courtney, there’s almost a sixth sense to the task, where you have to listen to certain mechanisms land in place within the safe.