Hannibal captures the strange, very adult phenomenon inherent in relationships between you and your coworkers or you and your therapist: Within these fixed confines you become truly important to one another, yet you only ever see each other’s forward-facing parts. Hannibal’s psychosis, Will’s unclassifiable disorder, Dr. DuMaurier’s years-long manipulation by Dr. Lecter — these factors make them unknowable, but stand in for the mysteries we all choose to leave unexplored in the people we work with, because separation is safer than immersion.

This is the one-two punch that makes Hannibal haunting. At the same time its story pokes and prods at our most intimate and complex connections with one another — often through the work of its protagonists, profilers and psychiatrists for whom this is literally their vocation — its grand guignol imagery loosens your moorings and sets you adrift in the realm of pure nightmare. The human element forces you to lower your guard; when the wall is down, the horror is poured into your brain like a black liquid, pooling in the creases of your cerebellum till it’s impossible to get clean again. Once you let this devil in, he’s there to stay.

I’m covering Hannibal for Decider this season! Here’s my review of the season premiere.

This is a show that leaves you thinking that maybe the world is a little bit worse for its presence — a mark of all great horror. And whether you’re a fan of the genre or a practitioner, you’ve got to be like Will Graham voluntarily connecting with the worst humanity has to offer. You must be willing to turn to the work and say “just fuck me up.” In this series, that thrillingly self-destructive impulse is invited — and then rewarded a hundredfold with some of the most gorgeous visuals of murder and cooking you’ve ever seen. When you binge on Hannibal, Hannibal binges back. Bon appétit.

I wrote about the visual and narrative brilliance of Hannibal, the most soul-deep sinister show on TV, for Rolling Stone.

I interviewed the great editor and publisher Tom Devlin in this beautiful book about Drawn and Quarterly, one of the best and most important comics publishers of all time. It’s out today, and it’s filled with comics by wonderful cartoonists. Check it out!

At its best, fantasy — like horror, science fiction, and the whole spectrum of genre storytelling — uses unreality as a key to unlock aspects of reality that the reason and logic of the workaday world keep hidden. Simply put, the White Walkers are the series’ vision of war itself: death breeding death breeding death until nothing living is left. Sansa and Theon, Daenerys and Tyrion, newly minted pit-fighter Jorah Mormont and fledgling hitwoman Arya Stark have each caught their own glimpses of this truth. Tonight we saw that vision with crystal blue clarity, in the metaphorical form of a literal avalanche of bodies, and the creature responsible. Jon Snow saw it too. Now he carries its message, and the game — the real game — begins.

I reviewed tonight’s fucking magnificent Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. The ending gave me the chills and made me cry.

Across the board, Halt’s great leap forward makes for a breezier, better show. Though the painstaking process of chronicling the group’s personal-computer empire-building last season gave the show a sturdy core, it was also exhausting for the audience as well as the characters. Jumping ahead means skipping past the back-and-forths that bogged the series down just as surely as calling a ceasefire on the constant hostility does.

And it clears some space in the hard drive for much cooler stuff. There’s some just-this-side-of-showy stylistics, like the opening sequence in which a hand-held camera follows Donna around the chaotic Mutiny office for minutes on end. There’s a nifty metaphor for Cameron’s “where you see a wall, I see a door” thinking in her customer-service call, where she coaches a gamer trapped in a room full of holograms to escape by simply walking right through them. There’s a more playful sense of humor, from the goofy mid-Eighties commercial for the “Giant” to the sight of a coked-up Gordon reading William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer and muttering “What the hell??” with a bloody tissue up his nose. There may even be a new structure, since for all we know each season will focus on a brand-new aspect of the tech biz — like how The Wire handled Baltimore, but with joysticks.

I reviewed tonight’s season premiere of Halt and Catch Fire v2.0, a superior model in every respect, for Rolling Stone.

This is the problem with Outlander, really: It always feels like just a TV show. Rooting Randall’s torture of Jamie in the undeniable facts of physical — their nude bodies streaked with blood and spit and tears and sweat and lube — may have alleviated this fact, or obscured it if you want to be less charitable about it, by creating a sense of terrible intimacy. But who are they, really? Randall’s a one-dimensional sadist and Jamie’s a heroic hunk with more scars than facial expressions. The take-no-prisoners treatment of rape in all its horror, the sociopolitical ramifications of its emphasis on masculinity or recovery — neither factor matters all that much if the characters are ciphers, their story stays so predictably linear, and music and voiceovers tell you exactly how to feel about all of it at all times. Grading it all on a curve because the sex scenes are strong, or this sexual assault sequence was strong in an entirely different way, does no one any favors.

I reviewed last night’s Outlander finale, an ambitious failure, for the New York Observer.