Yana (jaded (realistic)) journalist: Any decent Ukrainian, once elected, becomes a shrewd, weasel-like, thievish...yokel."
Vasya: You think he became a shrewd, weasel-like thieving yokel? Or was he a yokel to begin with?
Yana: Are people born yokels?
Vasya: I don't think Ukrainians are born yokels. I think we are all born Ukrainians. ...The question is how a...small, pink-cheeked, 3 kilogram Ukrainian [baby]...turns into a 100 kilogram yokel?...I'll explain. People like you, Yana, like me. All of us. We are to blame. It starts at birth. With a bribe at the maternity ward. ...Then we bring the baby home...He first sees his dad.
--cut to dad and family watching on TV--
"these bastards, these damn politicians!" If dad doesn't [take the bribe] someone else will in his place. Why should someone else take the stolen money? "Why not me?", dad reasons. The baby takes mental note. So our Ukrainian gradually [grain by grain] becomes like his dad.
The camera has panned to several different groups of people watching Vasya at the presser: to his foreign minister and the wife of the Indian ambassador who has just seduced; to the oligarchs; to the oligarchs heavy;
to everyday Ukrainians watching in a department store;
to his defense minister and his wife, ironing in their run-down flat; to his infrastructure minister with his mistress, back to Yana, whose jaded smirk has become something else,
back to his dad and family,
All watch and listen closely. Very carefully. The plump, pink-cheeked baby becomes a full-grown Ukrainian.
Therein lies our enigmatic, yokel soul.
And there S-1 E-15 ends.
Servant of the People begins in the sunny laughter of a plump pink-cheeked baby but half-way through just S-1 it has turned gray. The purity of the new-born administration of President Vasyl Petrovich Goloborodko, only a teenager still, is eroding grain by grain.
Servant presents Ukrainians warts and all. It doesn't elide over even the "enigma" of Ukraine's "soul," the can-do sunniness and the corruption. It is the enigma of the soul of all humankind.
I have to recall myself as I watch. All of those common Ukrainians really watched Servant, saw and heard Vasya Goloborodko's diagnosis of their soul, and really elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy as their president.
It is all real.
