Let's start with miniseries' main surrogate into its refugee experience, an Australian flight attendant named Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski). By the end of episode one, she's shows up dazed and dirty at Barton, answering to a different name, Eva Hoffmann. Unlike other people at the camp, Sofie wants to be deported back to Germany, where (she thinks) she’s from, which is nearly sadistic compared to how others deeply fear their home country, and chose to live in such dire conditions at the camp with hopes of becoming Australian. "Stateless" nearly loses focus entirely by showing Sofie's fraying psyche while she's at the camp, even though Strahovski is game for numerous explosions of crying, screaming, and sometimes dancing, all of it evidence of a mind that itself is lost.
It's revealed in select flashbacks as to why this Australian is a refugee—an experience related to escaping a cult that we meet in episode one, whose engrained philosophy about being whoever she wants to be has broken her. Leader Pat Masters (Cate Blanchett) welcomed her into the cult's world of elaborated dance sequences (Blanchett singing "Let's Get Away From It All" takes on a ghostly significance), but her husband Gordon (Dominic West) preyed upon her, a horror revealed in abrupt cuts when Sofie experiences triggering moments at Barton. Spread throughout the miniseries, there's a tedious manner to how the story reveals its truths, accompanied by Sofie remembering details of how her escape lead to a new identity.
Inside Barton, walking among its residents and sometimes talking with them, is Jai Courtney’s hulking Cam Sandford. He’s one of the many guards working for a private security group called KORVO, and he’s not just one of the newest but also the softest—the latter detail shown in his small chat with a detainee about “Top Gun,” or how he seems to be the only one who repairs the yard’s rickety swing set. Cam is referred to as “an honorable bloke,” and even has to be trained in defensive combat. And so the story sets him on the path of letting his aggressive peers influence what he should simply go along with, all while the heat and claustrophobia starts to eat at his empathy. Courtney gives one of his most interesting performances here, finding more depth in quieter moments than larger scenes that make plain how Cam's arc is like a tidy experiment about becoming a bad cop.
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