E-Ring (TV Series) Weekend Pass (2005) User Reviews

Love the show but absolutely hated this episode

[chrichtonsworld · 1/10 · 5 February 2010]

After having seen the first five episodes I can say without doubt that I love this show. I do however hated this particular episode. My parents are from Suriname and I know more than enough to tell you that 95% of the so called facts concerning this country presented in this episode are false. While Suriname is a relative small country in South America and there is questionable regime at power. It is nowhere near as explosive shown in the episode. Sure people would be outraged by the rape of the 14 year old girl. But to riot as depicted is over the top. While there are black people in Suriname the population is a mix of multiple ethnic groups (30% Hindu's,20% Creols,15% Marrons,15% Javanese and 7% other groups like native Indians,Chinese and Brasilians). In this episode they only showed the black people. Tom Wright supposed to be a Suriname representative but he spoke with an West Indies accent. People do speak several languages in Suriname and English is learned in schools,but Dutch is the main language (since it has been a Dutch colony until 1975 and still has a strong relationship with the Netherlands). So how come the Surinamese people spoke English. The accent therefore is completely wrong. Of course these elements can be ignored and overlooked when we talk about the big picture. But then the big picture has to be at least truthful to the real situation in Suriname. Which it clearly wasn't. *SPOILER* A regime change as presented in this episode is beyond ridiculous since in the history of Suriname there only has been one coup (by Bouterse in 1980 till 1989). To suggest that an incident as this could throw the ruling government as easy as this is preposterous. *END SPOILER* I really wanted to enjoy this episode as much as I had with earlier episodes,but this was clearly very hard to do. I agree that the regime in Suriname is far from ideal and that it is a mayor player in the drug trade. It still isn't an excuse to misinform an audience even if it's only for entertainment.