The Worst Episodes of Manuel on the Island of Wonders

Episode Rankings

1. #1 Worst Episode
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   7.4/10(30 votes)

   #1 - La Petite Championne d'échecs

   S1:E31/1/1984

   Part Three (beginning in Episode Two), entitled ‘The Little Chess-Champion’, hands the (until now) off-screen voice-over narration to Manoel himself. He promises to tell his own story, but adds that it’s ‘a story that I made up in my distant childhood and that happens in the future’. The tone is less Baroque, more Gothic, as Ruiz explores the ‘wonders of the night’. The filmmaker’s obsession in this section concerns perception and the deciphering of secret signs and codes.

   Director:Raúl Ruiz

   Writer:Unknown

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   Director:Raúl Ruiz

   Writer:Unknown
2. 

   7.7/10(31 votes)

   #2 - Le Pique-nique des rêves

   S1:E21/1/1984

   Part Two (the status of which is at first confusing since it begins after the three mini-narratives of the first Part and before the end of Episode One) is entitled ‘The Picnic of Dreams’. Whilst vaguely ‘keeping to the storyline’, it veers off in many different directions, where the thematic coupling ordinary/special replaces the familiar/unknown dualism of Part One. (Each Part is guided by a thematic ‘dominant’, a pair of notions that tend to exchange their meanings as it progresses.)

   Director:Raúl Ruiz

   Writer:Unknown

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   Director:Raúl Ruiz

   Writer:Unknown
3. 

   8.2/10(33 votes)

   #3 - Le Jardin interdit

   S1:E11/1/1984

   Part One presents us with three possible worlds. In each world, seven year-old Manoel has a different response to an entreaty from the outside world. Fittingly, in this film in which nothing coincides, the three parts of the story do not coincide with the three-episode structure (the trinity-form recurs frequently in Ruiz). In this case, past, present and future – the unholy trinity or Time en soi – is the film’s very protagonist, variously called ‘long ago’ (Part One), ‘now’ (Part Two), and ‘future’ (Part Three). At the outset, this gives the story an apparent order before digressions take it over.

   Director:Raúl Ruiz

   Writer:Unknown

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   Director:Raúl Ruiz

   Writer:Unknown