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.
Meat, sex, murder. As of this episode, John Sugar has partaken in all three. What kind of man — or “man” — does that make him?
For answers, maybe we should look to Breaking Bad, showrunner Sam Catlin’s old stomping grounds and an obvious influence on this season of Sugar, even beyond the presence of Better Call Saul villain Tony Dalton as the evil Lieutenant Vega. This episode starts with a BB/BCS-style cold open, showing us the detritus from a car crash before flashing back two days earlier to show us how that car came to be upside-down in the middle of a desert road.
Breaking Bad’s storyline is so famous by now it hardly constitutes a spoiler warning to discuss it, but the basic idea was that once a mild-mannered but frustrated science teacher started killing people, he’d never stop. The definition of “self-defense” is slowly expanded outward until he’s ordering a dozen simultaneous hits to keep people from snitching. When you break bad, or when you “assimilate” in Sugar’s parlance, there’s no going back.
Just ask Sugar’s assimilated friends Peg and Henry, both dead by their own hands. Is that where Sugar is headed? A life of crime, be it white-collar like Peg or red-handed like Henry, culminating in suicide? Or will he skip the middleman and cut straight to the killing-himself bit? Sugar connects with a cheery scene on his television right at the end of the episode, or else I’d figure self-harm was an immediate possibility.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself: In this episode, John Sugar wins.
Before I start an episode of Apple TV‘s Cape Fear, I crank up the volume on my soundbar. I want that Bernard Herrmann/Elmer Bernstein/Jeff Russo score to hit like the fist of an angry god. I turn off every light, because I want the ruddy flesh tones and blue-green eyes of these sweat-soaked lunatics to pop off the screen. I turn off the air conditioning, partially because I don’t want to the show to compete with the white noise but partially because if it gets hot while I watch it, well, that feels appropriate. To properly enjoy Cape Fear, you have to give yourself over to it completely.
Boy, does that approach pay dividends here. Titled “The Executioners” after the John D. MacDonald novel that started it all, this season finale plays more like the finale of a fireworks show, with one spectacular scene and set piece after another until the ominously understated conclusion. It’s a sensory experience, a parade of lurid sights and bombastic sounds best represented by a single shot: Max Cady, standing on the roof of the Bowdens’ house in the middle of a hurricane, as the theme song blares. I was grinning from ear to ear. A moment like that is why you make this show — a masterpiece of modern TV horror.
Hot damn, this is the kind of episode you build mystery boxes for. This obviously pivotal episode of the third season of Silo is titled “Memory,” for multiple reasons. In part, it’s because we are afforded glimpses of the past we skipped over in the transition between seasons. In part, it’s because with the help of her friends, Juliette begins, at last, to remember.
This journey beyond the infinite deserves, frankly, a round of applause. Coop’s journey is not without precedent: Without straying far from mainstream nerd culture, it’s reminiscent of David Bowman’s travels past Jupiter in 2001, the concept of the Source Wall from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, or the ritual of Chüd in Stephen King’s novel It. Even so, it looks and feels wholly unique. Mark Frost and David Lynch are combining horror, fantasy, science fiction, surrealism, and experimental filmmaking with gobsmacking results — the kind of episode that leaves you either knocked back on your couch or excitedly pacing around the room, recalling favorite moments and spinning elaborate theories. My notes read “THERE’S SIMPLY NEVER BEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS ON TELEVISION.”
The last we see of Daeron in this episode, he’s asking about his mother. Is he making decisions based on what will reunite him with his family? He’s imagined what they might be like now, but he hasn’t seen his brothers in years. When he hears that Aegon is dead, he’s not able to process it in that moment. It’s just a passing piece of news in Ormund’s strategy. But he has this connection with his mother. There’s hope for his mother, because he hopes that there is a love, and a way out.
If they were reunited tomorrow, what would he say to her? He’d have a lot of questions, but more than any question … just to see her. Just to hear her talk, to get a sense of her as a real human, a real person. That would be it, I think. Just to see her, and be in her presence, because she’s been an idea for most of his life.
Just before he embarks on his final, fatal campaign, Criston daydreams of Alicent singing songs of his death. He wraps her favor around his sword hilt as he makes his last stand. I was surprised she was still so close to his mind.
I don’t know, man. I’ve been in love a small handful of times, and it’s very hard to think about anything else. The people you think about when the end is near are the people you love. He doesn’t have a father, a mother, siblings, a wife, children. What has this man loved? Alicent is the only true thing he’s loved. It doesn’t feel surprising to me that she’s so prevalent in his final moments.
Rhaenyra Targaryen has the better claim to the Iron Throne of Westeros than her rival half brother Aegon. She is the better human being, not that this is a high bar to clear. But is she any better at the job?
This is the trick “House of the Dragon” has pulled, on both the realm and the audience. Everyone’s focus, including Rhaenyra’s own, has been on the fact that she is a good person (relatively speaking) with a good claim. Neither, however, guarantees she will be a good queen. As it turns out, she’s kind of terrible at it.
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.
