What if witches had ended their own persecution by signing a contract with the state? Motherland: Fort Salem, an American series from 2020, builds its entire world on that premise and fills the country's armed forces with women trained to fight with magic.
What is Motherland: Fort Salem about?
More than three centuries before the story opens, the witches of this alternate America struck a bargain with the government: an end to the hunts in exchange for military service. The agreement still stands when the series begins. Three young women report for basic training, where the curriculum is combat magic rather than rifles and drill alone. The episodes stay with them from their first days as recruits, through the pressure of learning to work as a unit, and on into early deployment, when the lessons stop being exercises and start carrying real consequences.
About the cast
Taylor Hickson, Amalia Holm Bjelke and Ashley Nicole Williams head the cast list, joined by Lyne Renee, Jessica Sutton and Demetria McKinney. Eliot Laurence is the name credited at the helm of the series in the catalogue. It is an ensemble piece by construction: a story about a military unit needs several faces sharing the weight, and the cast is assembled accordingly.
Context & significance
Three genre labels sit on Motherland: Fort Salem, namely drama, science fiction and thriller, and the series draws on each of them. The alternate-history setup supplies the speculative side: a familiar country reshaped by one different decision taken more than three hundred years ago. The boot-camp structure supplies the drama, because recruits thrown together in training have to learn to depend on one another. The move toward deployment supplies the tension expected of a thriller. Episodes run about 42 minutes each, a length that suits watching one at a time or several in a row. On K-Time the series is offered with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can choose between hearing the dialogue in Farsi and reading along with the original audio.
Watching Motherland: Fort Salem on Ktime
Reading this page needs no account. To play the episodes, sign in with a K-Time account. K-Time is a Persian-focused streaming service for the Iranian diaspora, and its Farsi interface makes it simple to find the series, pick the dubbed or subtitled version and continue from the episode where you stopped.