Taylor Swift: End of an Era review – As she crumbles due to a terrorist plot, it’s impossible not to feel her pain | Taylor Swift

SWifties have long guessed that there would be a behind-the-scenes documentary on Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras tour. The concert film for the 2023 Eras Tour didn’t show any of the inner workings of the three-and-a-half-hour behemoth, which ran for 149 dates from 2023 to 2024. Fans pieced together some pieces, like how Swift gets to the stage as she’s pushed inside a cleaning cart. Plus, given the two albums she wrote while on and around the Eras tour — 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and this year’s The Life of a Showgirl — it wouldn’t be Swiftian to overlook another lucrative IP extension.

What fans could never have imagined was that Disney was about to begin filming as the Eras tour was scheduled to arrive in Vienna on August 8, 2023 — the first of three shows in the Austrian capital that were canceled due to an ISIS terrorist plot. We learn this in the first episode of the six-part documentary series The End of an Era, when Swift and her old friend Ed Sheeran are backstage at Wembley, hours before he attends her first concert after the frustrating attack. “I couldn’t even go,” Swift told him about Vienna. “I was on the plane heading there. I just need to do this show and remember the joy of it because I kind of like…” She couldn’t find the right words.

These are the biggest revelations of the first two episodes. The series begins by repeating all-too-familiar storylines around the tour: it was motivated by the sale of Swift’s master recordings without her having the option to buy them live — and the pandemic. There was the Ticketmaster craze, Swiftonomics, friendship bracelets, and Swifties that caused seismic oscillations from jumping. “I thought this was going to be a tour I was very proud of,” Swift says. “It’s more than just a tour, it’s a force to be reckoned with in global culture. So I never thought we would have a terrorist plot.”

We see Swift in her London hotel room in mid-August – not just after Vienna, but also a few weeks after the Southport attack in which three girls were murdered while attending a Swift-themed summer holiday dance class. She looks visibly upset, trying to explain the situation. “We evaded, like, a massacre situation? And so I was everywhere. There was this horrific attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, and it was little kids who…” She couldn’t stop crying. “I can’t even explain it,” she whispered.

Before the Wembley show that night, she said, wiping her eyes, that she would meet the victims’ families backstage. “It’ll be okay because when I meet them I won’t do this” – cry – “I swear to God. I’ll be smiling.”

This is what it means to be an artist, she says. You can get all your emotions out before you take to the stage, so that, like a pilot, you can calmly guide the audience throughout the night. “Keep your seatbelts fastened and welcome to the Eras tour,” she said in a deadpan voice. Of course, you don’t see her meeting the families, but then, you see her crying, being comforted by her mother, Andrea, while Swift simultaneously wipes away the professionally applied mascara under her eyes. It’s impossible not to feel the pain of it, the horror of these atrocities, especially when, as this documentary reiterates, Eras was supposed to be about doing your best to deliver joy to 10 million ecstatic fans. When she ran off stage that night at Wembley, she immediately asked her father Scott: “Has anything bad happened that I don’t know about?”

Since Swift released The Life of a Showgirl in October, the critical tide has turned against her (although not commercially — it’s the biggest album of the year). Critics found her twelfth album vindictive, insubstantial and thinly written. Her public appearances seemed stage-managed and empty. The End of the Age doesn’t offer much to discover outside of Vienna. She discovers that she saved her fiancé, Travis Kelsey, in her phone that has a red heart emoji after his name – Cute – and learns how secret the training is. The dancers had to learn the choreography for the new Tortured Poets section, which debuted in Paris in the spring of 2024, on a click track, because she couldn’t risk leaking unreleased music. (A new version of the concert film featuring this section, The Final Show, will also debut Friday on Disney+.) We hear a lot about how impossible it is to accomplish Eras’ feat. At this point, it would be foolish to expect too much from her. But seeing Swift at work without her public face is a timely reminder of why her fans connect with her so deeply.

She’s completely obsessed with her craft: she gushes out ideas for the show in a way that reveals how she envisions an entire world when she writes, and she seems genuinely worried that fans might complain about the new Tortured Poets sequel. While this level of leadership could easily create an overbearing one, she seems like a pretty boss: personally involved with the dancers, musicians, and her crew, nurturing them in heartfelt pre-show gatherings, in awe of their commitment, and respecting them as the highest talents in their fields.

“This is a team of experts and that’s what keeps me in my element,” Swift says as they rehearse last-minute new moves for a guest spot from Florence + The Machine on their final night in London. “This kind of pressure is a privilege because they don’t make mistakes, so it better not be me!” She might be cynical about the footage of her giving them all huge bonuses, but this money is life-changing and a good example for her peers. “Setting a precedent for the Eras Tour is really important to me,” Swift says backstage as she seals each personally written note with wax.

As for the final four episodes, we’ll likely get insight into her developing romance with Kelsey, perhaps even skip over the end of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn just weeks after the tour’s first run — and we’ll almost certainly ignore the subsequent fling with Matty Healy in 1975 that inspired the Tormented Poets. It would be great to know more about the mindset you need to run a show like this: “From a mindset standpoint, I live in a reality that is very unrealistic sometimes,” she says. Given that the tour was ongoing during the 2024 US election, when she endorsed Kamala Harris, you wonder if she will get into politics, a topic she largely avoids these days. But, call me sentimental, the footage of the girls, especially those the age of the Southport victims, throwing themselves around without a shred of self-awareness says as much about the point of it all as the masterminds of the era can tell.