ighting, backstabbing, espionage, personal vendettas, familial sacrifice and murder. A space for lies and hidden motives.

Kaleidoscope created quite a hype before its release and we were there for it, screens drawn out, pop-corn in hand.

But was the effort to watch the rainbow-coloured episodes in chronological order, following in the footsteps of the usual suspects or choosing an order entirely one’s own successful? Did it live up to the glamorously high, unreachable standards of a heist that would be like none other; the main selling factor or just what we’d expected?

In the end the series can be compressed into one word: revenge.

It may be good to know the characters before delving into the story. Giancarlo Esposoito and Rufus Sewell portray Leo Pap, later to be known as Ray Vernon, a thief and the murderer of his wife, and Roger Salas aka Graham Davies, an honourable, trustworthy white man with a clean slate, owning the largest security firm on the East Coast – ironic, considering his past interests.

Enter Argentinian immigrant Ava Mercer, played by Paz Vega, a lawyer by day, criminal by night, and Leo’s right hand through thick and thin. The rest of the team for the heist includes Leo’s former cellmate: Stan Loomis, safe cracker husband and explosives specialist wife Bob Goodwin and Judy Goodwin, and the naïve car customiser, engineer and driver in the heist, RJ Acosta Jr.

Ray’s daughter Hannah Kim and her younger sister Liz put on the performance of a lifetime in their patchy screen time and definitely make their mark before leaving. We also see the Iranian American actress Niousha Noor and Bubba Weiler who played FBI agents’ hardworking, intuitive and frantic mother Nazan and her colleague Samuel as they try to convince the authorities who the murderers are and follow leads despite being told not to bother.

“This job can swallow you whole.”

When you chalk out a heist, you put in the effort to minimise all sorts of mistakes and have a plan for damage control. But despite twenty-four years of planning, everything that can possibly go wrong goes wrong. That leaves the viewer wondering what pushed the heist off the mark. What was it that led the crew to change their identities? Why did they risk their lives to raid the most secure facility in the world?

Kaleidoscope has changed the way we watch movies, allowing us to choose our own path. This opens up endless possibilities for experimentation. While the story in Kaleidoscope was predictable there is no doubt that there will be interesting takes on this narrative style in the future.

Of course, human emotions flicker like fire on a windy day during high-pressure situations and the fear of getting caught only heightens the vehemences, constricting the brain away from logical analysis as the fight or flight response kicks in.

But it is rather surprising that the plan depended solely on the dishonesty of a contractor who left a backdoor open for the heist to occur years later - or that the staff of the most secure firm in the world failed to notice this in the first place.

October 29, 2012, became the inspiration for kaleidoscope; Manhattan being the epicentre, where $70 billion were lost in bonds due to the flooding of underground vaults during Hurricane Sandy. The credit for the idea of a heist during a ruthless hurricane is due. However, the execution falls short as the temporal approach and virtuoso acting are insufficient to cover for evident cracks in the script.

For comparison, look at Money Heist or Ocean Eight where the plans were not drafted overnight but meticulously orchestrated across years. The professor in Money Heist thought of every single loophole. In Kaleidoscope, the scheme seems like a last-minute idea where the aperture the heist was dependent on is fixed by Roger at the last minute. The new plan makes no sense. It’s a ploy that rebounded and backfired. The sole lingering question is; so, who won in the end?

Many prefer to watch the series in chronological order, but since it can be shuffled, there are 5,040 ways to watch the series with the ending episode being white – the heist. If all eight episodes are mixed, we have almost 40,320 ways to explore the series. This means that if someone says “you have to watch it from the start to understand it” you can causally play any episode without feeling like you don’t relate to the characters.

There is a significant lack of coherence and in-depth explanation, given the 35 to 56 minutes time bracket and the number of episodes that stretch from 24 years before to 6 months after, where the audience are left to fill in the gaps about the purpose of a certain step in the heist was or how the yeggs end up all over the place despite pulling off one of the greatest heists of all time with almost $7 billion stolen.

The reviews are a hodgepodge of polarised comments. “Genius”, “overrated”, “a renewable show amidst disposable content”, and “format was promising but the plot was poor.” These provide an insight into the colourful heist. Personally, the series was a bit tedious to watch; the storyline a bit trite.

Kaleidoscope has changed the way we watch movies, allowing us to choose our own path. This postulation opens up endless possibilities for experimentation. So how many genres can be filmed based on a similar structure? While the story in Kaleidoscope was predictable, there is no doubt that there will be interesting takes on this narrative style in the future.

The writer is an undergraduate student of psychology at FC College