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.
In addition to the ominous soundscapes of Dean Hurley and the familiar synth-score of Angelo Badalamenti, even David Lynch’s beloved mid-century pop music gets in on the act. Booker T. & the M.G.’s immortally cool rock instrumental “Green Onions” plays almost in its entirety over an unbroken shot of a worker sweeping up the floor at the Roadhouse; it’s slow cinema at its most entertainingly dull, until Jean-Michel Renault reveals that his family, which has been running the place for nearly 60 years, is still trafficking teenage girls there.
Santo & Johnny’s equally iconic instrumental “Sleep Walk” plays over a scene at the Double R, where Shelly and Heidi serve customers as Norma does the bills. Suddenly the door bursts open, and a man (Riley Lynch) yells “Has anybody seen Billy?” No one has. The frantic man leaves, and the song plays on. Ghostbusters did this as a gag at Tavern on the Green; Stephen King did it as a primary characteristic of the town of Derry and its people in It. As Laura put it, “They’ve never listened to my cries.” We sleepwalk past others’ unhappiness to preserve our own, for however much longer we can.
As someone who’s read a fair number of Green Lantern comics, it’s difficult for me to say whether a great big introduction for SINESTRO!!! means anything to anyone not familiar with the character and mythos already. But his presentation as “Hannibal Lecktor” to Hal Jordan’s Will Graham in (appropriately) Michael Mann’s Manhunter— the imprisoned killer whose capture both made this lawman’s reputation and broke his spirit — creates an instantly recognizable and compelling dynamic regardless. It’s not terribly original (neither is the Spider-Man 2 powers-on-the-fritz flying attempt by John) but it gets the job done.
Meanwhile, the core cast continues to exude charisma from every pore. Does it help that Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, and Poorna Jagannathan are all really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking? Yes, but they also all have an easy, convincing chemistry. This is true even of Chandler and Pierre as Jordan and Stewart, whose relationship feels like the former finding out just how far he can push things before the latter finally snaps. As always, I’m hoping a giant green fist is involved.
Silo continues to be some of the most pound-for-pound satisfying storytelling on television. In this episode, the flashbacks serve up a heaping helping of Answers — though pointedly they have little to say about why the hell Stensen felt the need to turn his Silos into giant gas chambers with the flip of a switch, a haunting mystery in itself. The future returns us to our home for half of Season 2 and a much-beloved supporting character, wraps up the Orla Kent case, and keeps up the confrontations between Camille, Robert, and Juliette, which have been dramatic gold for all three actors involved. To me, this is the baseline of what TV should be. If you’re not at least this competent and compelling, give the job to someone who’ll do it right.
I love a good dance scene. I mean I love a good dance scene. I adore watching interesting characters played by beautiful people move their bodies in time with good music playing within their fictional world. I find interpreting their body language, feeling what the music and the movements are meant to communicate, absolutely thrilling. Dance scenes are a rhythmic audiovisual spectacle of sex and glamour. That’s the stuff movies and TV were made for. So of course I’m gonna go gaga for an entire dance episode.
Other things happen in the sixth episode of Twin Peaks’s return — funny things, fascinating things, frightening things, things we’ve waited to see for 25 years. Most of them fade in the glare of white-hot agony generated by that one scene. It is one of the most viscerally upsetting moments in both David Lynch’s oeuvre and, frankly, the history of television drama.
To put it into the context of superhero comics, Lanterns is very much a ’00s-style “superheroes-plus” story, the idea back then being that superheroes were unpopular, but other genres were not, so you just mash them together and enjoy the results. The plus in this “superheroes-plus” story is “a True Detective–style unlikely buddy cops in rural America murder mystery.” It’s the kind of slow, down-to-earth thing superhero fans reared on Bendis and Brubaker are likely to enjoy.
Robert talks Camille down by saying their son should be spared having two murderers for parents. Clearly he’s feeling guilty for using the boy’s school jacket to help smuggle IDs needed for the aborted bombing; Camille caught him so easily you’d almost think he wanted to be caught. Once again, actor Common makes Robert’s moral and emotional dilemmas seem truly painful for him to endure. This is not a man used to honoring his own conscience.
The episode ends with Debbie refusing to look up at the beautiful sky. “I’ve seen it already,” she sighs. This cynicism is the embodiment of the world of adulthood and death into which Bret now feels he’s been thrust permanently. His days as a kid are permanently over. This, of course, is what the whole party was a rehearsal for, but now it seems ugly and empty. As a wise woman once said, when they get what they want, they never want it again.
FX‘s The Shards loves lingering on beautiful things that won’t last. Director Michael Uppdendahl’s lens luxuriates in the sight of a beaming, utterly fearless girl roller-disco dancing on her own in slow motion…on a circle of young, beautiful friends eating lunch, the camera whirling around and around them…on an incredible dancer commanding the camera…on a fast drive down a twisting, secret road…on a fallen model practicing her grand Oscar kiss-off…on a boy smelling his lost boyfriend’s jacket and crying. When this episode finds something nice to look at, it lets you know it, and does not let go, until it has to.
Back in Twin Peaks, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Shelly and Norma (a re-debuting Peggy Lipton) watch concerned as Shelly’s daughter Becky (a radiant Amanda Seyfried) “borrows” money to compensate for the shiftlessness of her husband, Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones). This guy is such a no-account that Mike freaking Nelson (Gary Hershberger, also making his return) boots him from a job interview because he couldn’t even fill out the application properly. Norma and Shelly, who have no shortage of experience with winding up with the wrong guy too young, can only watch and cling to each other.
But even the dumbest young love is still young love. Becky is clearly enamored with Steven’s flattery of her and promises of a brighter future…and with his cocaine, which he hoovers up like a vacuum apparently. He still has enough left over for her to take an absolutely blissed-out, coked-up ride in his convertible, staring up into the sky with luminous eyes while the Paris Sisters’ oldie “I Love How You Love Me” plays on the car radio.
Honestly, someone probably should show the fun parts of dating a dirtbag and doing a lot of blow. These can be fun activities! They just come with some side effects, usually. But Lynch and Frost convert this moment into a kind of ecstatic tribute to the joy of being young, being beautiful, being in love, being alive, the sun, fast cars, fun drugs, good music, grinning from ear to ear just because you feel good. It’s incredible how many moments like this, in how many different moods and tones and genres, the TP braintrust has created already this season. They can shoot threes from the logo or shatter the backboard with a dunk seemingly at will.
Tragedy ends the episode, and the season. Depressed, alone, confined to her quarters and cruelly force-fed after refusing to eat, the pregnant Queen Helaena throws herself from the palace window onto the spikes below. Her suicide is crosscut with footage of Tumbleton’s casualties as meanwhile her mother, Alicent, somewhere far away, watches as a flight of moths takes off around her — one last visit, perhaps, from a daughter who loved the beauty of insects and hated the ugliness of people. An achingly mournful piece by the composer Ramin Djawadi accompanies all these images. The sadness of it all, the sights and sounds of pain and waste, made me cry.
The episode is aided by some of the cast’s strongest work to date, with Matt Smith exploring the outer limits of Daemon’s tolerance for violence, Freddie Fox’s Gwayne emerging as a desperate voice of reason and Phia Saban embodying Helaena’s anger and misery. But this is Emma D’Arcy’s episode. Resplendent and imposing in Rhaenyra’s evil-queen get-up — a visual makeover that echoes her psychological transformation into a much more frightening kind of ruler — D’Arcy all but physically vibrates with the Black Queen’s barely contained fury and self-regard.
What an odd thing Apple TV‘s Sugar has become. Whatever the behind-the-scenes turmoil during Season 1 that led to a showrunner handoff was, it’s worth bringing up only because its effects are still being felt on screen. Despite being built to for a full season, there’s a rushed, slapdash quality to the resolution of old storylines and the establishment of new ones here that’s really unfortunate to see on a show that only just began steering itself out of its second-season skid.
What a pleasure it is, watching Apple TV’s Silo’s investment in Camille Sims — and in Alexandria Riley, the actor who plays her — pay off.
Making someone who’s not part of the cast’s core the chief antagonist for the show’s third season is a risky move. Camille’s been around since early on, but she’s hasn’t had the importance of a Knox or a Shirley or a Sheriff Paul. Nor does Alexandria Riley have the star cachet of series leads Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Common, Harriet Walter, Steve Zahn when he’s around, or Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo for a hot minute way back when.
Yet here Camille is, generating the story’s main conflict, acting like a true conflicted but hubristic arch-villain. She’s having arguments with the AI that runs the Silo, with its messianic hero Juliette Nichols, with her increasingly estranged husband Robert Sims, even with her troubled son Anthony. She’s helping the Voice in the Vault deceive Juliete, while also staying a step ahead of the Voice by taking the initiative and dosing the whole damn Silo with the forgetting drug “Vitamin D+” hours before the Algorithm orders her to.
As a politician, she’s an all too familiar type. She’s always turning the ratchet to the right, to more extreme extralegal sanction, to duplicity as policy, to ceding decisions to an AI program that tells her what a great job she’s doing to calm her down. Her apparently sincere belief that she’s going to turn the minds of everyone in the SIlo to Swiss cheese For The Good Of The Silo somehow makes her conduct more infuriating than if she were merely a cynic or a sociopath. She’s a portrait of a person mistaking doing their worst for doing the best they can.
Directed by frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Michael Uppendahl, this episode lacks its predecessor’s copious film references and dreamy vibe. But it’s excellent at capturing the outrageous lives of hedonism, luxury, and unsupervised independence enjoyed by Bret and “the gang.” Drinking red wine in the hot tubs of houses blissfully unoccupied by parents might be a memorable evening for normal kids; for them, it was Tuesday.
The show’s deadpan cheesiness, meanwhile, is a hoot. The central-casting Satanic cult and its evil leader named (dun dun dunnnnnn!) Bruce (Gus Halper). Bret keeping a knife on his manuscript for self-defense. Susan narrating every detail of the Kellner family’s lives (Matt’s dad is played by an uncredited James Wolk) like she’s somehow the prosecuting attorney in his murder trial. Bret’s pretentious pronouncements about the perils of life in the Serial Killer Age…It’s funny! On purpose!
It’s also sexy and sleazy and now and then creepy and occasionally, as in a striking composition that puts Bret’s face in the extreme foreground as Debbie does her makeup behind him, lovely. As is typically the case with Murphy ensembles, everyone in the cast appears to be having a ball with the material. I know I am.
“It became clear to me after our second introduction that Robert Mallory was like a virus, a new kind of insidious, invading agent who was here to destroy the very cellular structure of my friends, my school, and me. He was up to something, and it was up to me to find out exactly what it was.” Herein, I believe, lies the secret of exactly how seriously you’re meant to take FX‘s The Shards. Feel how you will about Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, the provocateurs who adapted the series from Ellis’s novel of the same name — itself a work of autofiction, juxtaposing details from Ellis’s real childhood with pure invention — but they understand how this sounds.
These are the words of a teenager, Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional avatar in fact, declaring that another teenager is a virus out to destroy everything, And Only I Can Stop Him. It’s superhero dialogue, coming from the mouth of a kid who looks like Peter Parker, but enjoys luxury living like Jordan Belfort…or Patrick Bateman. And why has he decided that this newcomer to his clique is pure evil? Because the guy fibbed about, or just plain forgot, seeing Bret for five seconds at an opening-day screening of The Shining half a year earlier. The monster!
It’s funny on purpose, is what I’m saying. If you want to appreciate The Shards, you’ll have to get on that level.
Airing back to back with “Part 3,” this episode rounds out the Vegas storyline somewhat, showing us exactly who Dougie is and what the hell Cooper is going to do in his shoes. What it really does is establish that apparently nobody is going to much notice that the Dougie Jones they know has been replaced with a doddering simpleton who can only repeat snippets of things people say to him and has forgotten how to do all basic tasks, from getting out of a car to urinating.
Maybe that will change, and more people like Bill Shaker’s wife will come along. Maybe Lynch and Frost are making a point about how for certain guys, things kind of just always align in their favor. Maybe it’s just funnier that way.
Regardless, it’s one of the most audacious things this show has ever done — as big a departure from the original in its way as purple oceans and cannibalistic entities mutilating nude people. If you don’t want Twin Peaks at its Dougie Jones, you don’t deserve it at its Dale Cooper or its doppelganger. To paraphrase another great TV show, they’re building something here, and all the pieces matter.
