I’m happy to report that Julia Gfrörer and I once again have copies of our horror/erotic/gothic comics and art anthology Mirror Mirror IIavailable for sale at her Etsy shop. It’s an absolute murderer’s row of artists; if you like our sensibilities at all, you’ll like this book.
Okay, so this episode leaves in a crime-does-not-pay suicide but edits out a love scene like it’s a Hays Code Hollywood movie. Other than that, though, it’s the second in a row I’d call the strongest of the season to date. Director Adam Bernstein and cinematographer Marshall Adams really outdo themselves here, with one crisp, gorgeous shot of the Los Angeles night after another. Colin Farrell and Laura Donnelly look radiant during their date, like Golden Age movie stars. There’s a view of the sky at dusk that John and Peg catch before her death that takes your breath away.
Meanwhile, the mystery now feels much more focused. We know what Vega is up to and why, though as Sugar notes he’s just the muscle and his real backer has yet to reveal themselves. Ji’s plight makes more sense, particularly now that Vega has gotten Danny dragged off to jail where he can be killed if John fails to cough up Ji’s location. Vega and Sugar have established some hero-villain understanding like Pacino and De Niro in Heat. And Peg works much better as a real, traumatic memory than a series of cryptic hallucinations. I’ll wait until a third strong episode in a row establishes a pattern for certain, but after its initial growing pains, it seems Apple TV‘s SugarSeason 2 may have righted the ship.
Suddenly I wonder if the tables will be turned in the finale. In previous iterations of the story, Max Cady assaults the Bowden family at Cape Fear. But Tom is in prison, Natalie is with Noa, and Zack is who knows where, possibly in Max’s trunk but most likely not given the timing. That leaves Anna alone with Max, Crystal, Robert, Luke, and mama Hester (Jill Larson). (Granted, she’s busy breastfeeding dolls she believes to be Crystal, but she’s still out there.) Will the finale, which I fully expect to be batshit insane, feature Anna as a one-woman army, an unstoppable force destroying the Cady family before it destroys hers?
It’s time to talk about the past. Or, rather, the present. It’s time to have a tough conversation about the pre-apocalyptic flashbacks, is what I’m saying.
On some levels, they have a lot going for it. This is the storyline that will ostensibly answer the big question, Why are they down there?, and as such it has undoubtedly held my interest. It’s charmingly acted by Jessica Henwick as investigative journalist Helen Drew and Ashley Zukerman as idealistic freshman congressman Daniel Keene. (They’re very good-looking people.) But man, the material is like styrofoam packing peanuts, designed to transport you safely from point A to point B, nothing more. I hate those things.
Rolin Jones’s Interview with the Vampire was always good, but during Season 2 something extraordinary happened. It just got better and better from episode to episode until the finale, which was the best episode the show had ever aired. And they say lightning doesn’t strike twice! Moving, disturbing, disgusting, hilarious, and harrowing, this final episode of The Vampire Lestat’s first season is the best episode in the whole show’s history.
This is true even though it succumbs to that otherwise woeful trend of shows building and building to an explosively violent climax that never arrives. Shōgun Season 1, House of the Dragon Season 2, and Fallout Season 2 were all good-to-great, yet they all dry-dicked us when it came to bloodshed, if you’ll pardon the Daniel Molloy–level vulgarity.
This episode overcomes that deficit through its sheer richness. “Silver threads,” Lestat says dreamily as he (apparently) looks directly into Heaven at one point. “Silver threads stretched out over other threads.” That’s how the writing on this show feels. Hannah Moscovitch’s script is a tapestry of different tones, styles, genres, emotions, sensations, all of it so wittily worded, so diamond sharp that Oscar Wilde could use it to file his nails. Director Alan Taylor, the major Sopranos and Game of Thrones director, returns to the chair for the first time since IWTV’s phenomenal series premiere, and lays out a real feast for the eyes as well as the ears.
I reviewed the season finale of The Vampire Lestat for Pop Heist. I just wanna be clear that as a horror person, a glam rock person, a musical theater person, a goth, and a TV critic, this show had a very high bar to clear with me, and it soared over that thing straight into the
I’ll say right here that Kyle MacLachlan is simply magnificent in this role, terrifying and wholly unique in his malevolence. The doppelganger looks as if all the light inside a normal human has been completely emptied out and replaced with tar. He sounds unbearable when he’s pretending to be happy and uncanny when he actually is. He’s pure darkness. I’m a big fan of Jamey Sheridan’s work in Mick Garris’s 1994 adaptation of The Stand, but if you said that MacLachlan’s Nega-Cooper is the best portrayal of Stephen King’s infernal archvillain Randall Flagg, I wouldn’t argue with you. He is the Dark Man, the Walkin Dude, the Hardcase, the Man with No Face.
“Nobody ever wins a fight.” Dalton, the philosophical bouncer played by Patrick Swayze in the 1989 cult classic “Road House,” offers these words of wisdom when he checks himself into the hospital with a knife wound. He knows whereof he speaks.
When it comes to the Dance of the Dragons, it seems Dalton is right. In this week’s episode of “House of the Dragon,” the war is not going well — not for the Blacks; not for the Greens; not for gold cloaks, white-armored kingsguard or blue-eyed princes; not for anyone. Knowing that the dragons are all long vanished by the events of “Game of Thrones” has given us a clue about the end result already, but right now, it truly does feel as if nobody were going to win this war.
If Sugar 2.0’s back-to-basics approach is going to work, it’s because of episodes like this. Relying more on the tricks of Sugar’s trade than police-procedural style portrayals of stereotypical gangbangers, this week’s installment is the most solid of the season so far.
I can picture it now. A mausoleum somewhere in Savannah, holding four corpses. HERE LIE THE BOWDENS, reads the legend above the entrance to their crypt, below which is printed a single explanatory sentence for their collective demise: “IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME.” Over and over, Anna, Tom, and Natalie — Zack is in a mental institution recovering from his brainwashing — do what feels right in the moment, only for it to come back to haunt them in the most horrifying way possible.
When portraying a functionary in a dystopian regime, it helps to have resting scowl face. Actor Denise Gough, for example, made the most of what she has called her “downturny mouth” as the sneering Imperial officer Dedra Meero in Andor. Richard Burton’s hard-bitten hangdog looks made his O’Brien in the film version of 1984 seem possessed of some terrible wisdom that burns from within.
To this list, we can add Alexandria Riley and her character, Camille Sims, on Silo. For a long time I struggled with Camille, wondering why she was so much less sympathetic even than archvillains like Bernard or her own husband, Robert Sims. Even when she was helping Juliette before the rebellion and her exile and return, something in her eyes just defies empathy. She has the face of someone who’s about to explain to you why they had to betray you, and will be irritated that you don’t understand.
This, of course, is all by design on the part of the writers, the filmmakers, and the actor. In fact, Camille’s fundamental dislikability is made canon in this episode, by no less an authority than the Algorithm itself. Why was she chosen by the AI that runs the Silo to become the new head of IT and guardian of the Silo’s terrible secrets? “Your ability to lie,” the program says placidly. Her manipulative nature, her willingness to play both sides of any given conflict, is ironically how the Algorithm knew she could be trusted.
But more importantly, we learn exactly how Claudia feels about “Daddy Lou”: She hates his goddamn guts. Sometimes inhabiting Merrick, sometimes appearing directly before them, Claudia says she hates Louis more than anyone she’s ever known.
Photo: AMC
She mocks his self-pity, saying she only chose him over Lestat because he’s a natural-born “slave” who’d be easier to manipulate and then discard. Even worse, she reveals she’s had no rest in the afterlife, searching the void for her beloved Madeleine, who is nowhere to be found. “STOP SAYING MY NAME!” she screams, and departs. At last, Claudia has been given a voice of her own, and actor Delainey Hayles uses it for all it’s worth.
Or is it Claudia’s voice? Again, everything we’re hearing and seeing this season is being mediated through Lestat, just as Interview with the Vampire was through Louis. It’s possible that the needier, more damaged Louis, the creepier Armand, the more vindictive Daniel, and the Claudia who hates Louis more than her maker and kinda sorta murderer Lestat are closer to reality than the ones we saw through Louis’s eyes. It’s possible we got Spirit Claudia as-is, with no editorializing by Lestat. It’s just as possible that we didn’t.
My main man Matthew Perpetua has posted one of his marvelous playlists, this one dedicated to glam rock, and I helped contribute! Bowie, Roxy, Iggy, T.Rex, Slade, Sweet, Suzi, Queen, Elton, Eno, Ferry, obscurities, one-hit wonders, and one-off experiments from established acts — TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME!
The differences are established right away. The opening title sequence, with its familiar sight of a chirping bird and whirring saws, is gone. After woozy shots of the black-and-white floor and the red curtains, there’s a cold-open flashback set in the Black Lodge, with Laura Palmer telling Dale Cooper she’d see him again in 25 years. We fade to mist over the pines, then to the walls of Twin Peak High School, where the screaming girl runs through the courtyard as she did in the pilot, in slow motion. The camera pushes in to the trophy case, zeroing in on Laura’s homecoming photo. When the title of the show appears and Angelo Badalamenti’s theme finally hits, it’s over Laura’s face.
This opening alone establishes three things. First, the Black Lodge is no longer a side dish, it’s the main attraction, with the Red Room’s zig-zag flooring and billowing crimson drapery the first things you see. Second, we will be diving deep into memory here, into what happened 25 years ago and what happened in between. Third, Laura Palmer is at the center of it all.
Daemon Targaryen is a hard man. He has left a trail of dead enemies across the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and done it with a smirk on his face. His preferred tactic of negotiation is “take it or leave it.” It is exceedingly rare for him to display any negative emotion at all that doesn’t end in violence or its implied threat.
It’s with this Daemon in mind that we watch him encounter his daughter Rhaena in the wilds of the Vale. Daemon’s dragon, Caraxes, leads him right to the cave where Rhaena’s own dragon, Sheepstealer, has made its lair. Sheepstealer’s disastrous rampage through the Battle of the Gullet helped drive Queen Rhaenyra’s son Jace to his death, and she wants its rider brought to justice. Now Daemon knows the horrible truth: To avenge Rhaenyra’s child, he would have to sacrifice his own.
“No,” he gasps, doubling over. The reaction staggered me nearly as much as the revelation staggers the Rogue Prince. He has displayed a devil-may-care attitude all season long, but it turns out the devil does care after all.
A couple years ago I wrote an essay about a TV style or subgenre I called “the New Lurid”: Dead Ringers, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Copenhagen Cowboy, and other hyper-lush depictions of the incestuous degeneracy of the ultra-rich — Saltburn-core, basically. Since then, recent seasons of shows such as The White Lotus, Industry, Euphoria, and Interview with the Vampire as retitled The Vampire Lestat have carried the New Lurid torch. Cape Fear, a raw psychosexual thriller about a one-percenter family in which everyone is related, as they fight and fuck under trees whose branches appear ready to snap from the weight of their greenness, does so too.
“Like a televisual vanitas,” I wrote, these shows are “sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.” If that doesn’t describe Cape Fear, I don’t know what does.
It’s a very strong ending, a razor-sharp idea that keeps the spotlight on Farrell and Dalton where it belongs. I don’t know if it’s the influence of showrunner and Breaking Bad veteran Sam Catlin, the presence of Better Call Saul star Dalton or what, but it reminds me of something Walter White might have done to Jesse Pinkman if push came to shove for them. If the Sugar 2.0 can generate more moments like these, then we’d be talking. I’m just not sure it makes up for all the ways the writing had to fudge things to get us there.
Ironically, given the nature of the titular structure, Silo’s lore does not run that deep. I’m fond of pointing out that rather than take the usual mystery-box approach, keeping the core question in the dark as you add more and more questions to maintain momentum, Silo keeps it simple. There’s really only one mystery here: Why are they down there? Everything else flows directly from or to that central gap in the narrative.
But it’s not just the mystery plot, Juliette’s often interrupted quest to get to the truth, that reflects this welcome simplicity. As a result of that storytelling decision, all the backstory, the fake history, the world-building, the lore must also point in the direction of that one big question. In a lore-heavy episode like this one, we see the benefits of that approach. The information still opens up new vistas of understanding, but the camera, so to speak, is always focused on the exact same landscape. We just see it more clearly now.
The Vampire Lestat is now at the point that Interview with the Vampire reached in its second season. It is escalating in quality at a rate that is frankly psychotic. Each episode is better than the last; in IWTV’s case, this culminated in the Season 2 finale, which was the best episode in the history of the show. There are two episodes left in this season. Pump them directly into my veins.
It’s happening again. It’s happening again. It’s happening again. — Sarah Palmer, Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces
The emergence of The Missing Pieces was our first real sign that it might, indeed, be happening again. It was the first new Twin Peaks material anyone had seen since 1992, when Fire Walk With Me came out. Though it comprises deleted and extended scenes, sometimes with alternate takes, from FWWM, The Missing Pieces is considered canonical. The things that are happening in those missing pieces are really happening.
That’s not to say you’d be able to understand a moment of it if you hadn’t watched Fire Walk With Me first. The Missing Pieces has been edited into a continuous feature-length film, but even in the opening titles themselves, which bill what you’re about to watch as an outtakes collection more or less, no one’s making any pretense that it’s intended to stand on its own.
That’s reflected in how its story is told. There are no character introductions, no settings established, and much of the plot has been excised, happening in between the scenes we’re watching. Moreover, the scenes are arranged in the order they might have appeared in the original movie, not chronologically — scenes of Leland Palmer’s relationship with Teresa Banks, for example, are shown around the point of the film where he himself thought about them, even though they take place prior to anything else. You’re just dumped into it, with FBI Special Agent Chester Desmond already investigating Teresa’s murder. It’s expected you’ve watched Fire Walk With Me if you want to know who either of those people are or why they matter.
The Missing Pieces is designed to expand on and enhance our understanding of Fire Walk With Me — clearing up certain elements that came out confusing in the finished movie, beefing up the roles of the eccentric FBI agents from its opening sections, reintroducing a number of characters and actors from the original series whose material was filmed but didn’t make the final cut.
Most importantly, it provides a much larger, clearer window into both the lives of the Palmer family and the workings of the Black Lodge, allowing us to know the people this happened to and the things that made it happen more accurately and intimately. As such, it contains some of the most frightening images and moving moments in the entire Twin Peaks oeuvre. They can’t stand alone, exactly, but they do stand apart.
