The Widow

The Widow - Official Trailer | Prime Video
'Crazy people running around with blood in their eyes' pretty much sums it up. The story jumps back and forth in time and between Africa and England. Some of the jumps make sense, but most of them are just there to leave a little cliff hanger, which I must admit, I kind of enjoy. Oh, it irritates me, but it gets me stirred up which is a good thing. My emotions need their exercise, you know.

Africa seems to have no end of horror stories to tell, but from this movie, it appears that most of the people are just going about their everyday business. I mean we have big cities with skyscrapers and international airports. Yes, there are men with guns running around in the bush just outside of town, but it's a big country and there aren't all that many men with guns, so you can avoid them, and as long as the militia are not right there in your neighborhood, life goes on as normal as in any peaceful country.

The lead characters are all varying degrees of wacko. It's understandable as they have all been through some pretty horrendous events, most of which they instigated themselves. Most of them end up dead, which is kind of telling.

A miner shows a bag containing coltan in Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Aug. 2008. ALFREDO FALVO/CONTRASTO/REDUX

There is a thin line running through this whole story, and that is smuggling coltan out of the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). There are some scenes of a coltan mine scattered throughout the series, but it's a pretty feeble operation, a few dozen people working in muddy pools on the surface, much like the picture above. But in the beginning of the last episode they take you on a tour of how it it mined, bagged, transported, combined with the output from dozens of other mines (must be dozens or even hundreds if they are all as small as the one we were shown) and smelted. They skip the part about how the metal is made into capacitors, but then they take you to a modern smart phone assembly line and deliver that phone to one of the characters in the show who is ranting about something to do with coltan production. Clever.

Only about a thousand tons of tantalum are produced each year, so it's not like coal where a thousand tons are mined every second.

8 episodes on Amazon Prime Video