Let’s hear it for Jack Gleeson. The Irish actor cemented his place in television history in his first major role: the smug, sadistic, sociopathic, cowardly, completely insufferable boy king Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones. He returned to his studies after that, acting only sporadically until very recently.
God, am I glad to see him back. His character here, the archetypal Irish trickster Byron Hedges, makes use of many of the same traits that made Gleeson’s portrayal of Joffrey so menacing — the twinkle of glee in his eye, the tight-lipped smile of someone harboring a secret — but harnesses them for good instead of evil. Well, if not good, then at least Guinness.
There’s something quite humbling about having your nation’s number well and truly gotten by a television show aired in Britain in 1976, based on novels published in 1934 and 1935. But humbling isn’t the right word at all. Humiliating is closer to the mark. Two thousand years after the events of I, Claudius, the United States of America — the richest and most powerful empire in the history of the world — is crumbling before our eyes due to the every combination of greed, ambition, sadism, and degeneracy that brought mighty Rome low centuries ago. We, as a species, have learned nothing.
But that’s not quite fair, is it? You’ve learned something. I’ve learned something. People who have kept their minds and souls intact amidst the fascist onslaught, people who have remained human as the entire warship of the state and technology and capital aims its cannons at anything remotely human and fires — people like that, people like us, we’ve learned our lesson. We know that gerontocratic perverts like Emperor Tiberius, gibbering young psychopaths like Caligula, and scumbag secret police chiefs like Sejanus have been put in charge of our country, our future, our world — our children’s country, our children’s future, our children’s world. I think what we’d like to happen to these people in return is clear enough.
I, Claudius isn’t about everyday people like us, though.True, everyday people come into the story every now and then — in this very episode there’s a lengthy, hilarious aside in which a scribe passive-aggressively instructs his employees to erase the beautiful elephants they’ve drawn on Claudius’ manuscript about Carthage, seething about his rich client’s bad taste all the while. Even Sejanus is, in his way, closer to the masses than the Julio-Claudians, into whose ranks he’s been scheming to climb for years. But like George R.R. Martin (more on him in a moment) writing A Song of Ice and Fire, author Robert Graves and adapter Jack Pulman made a conscious choice to center royalty and aristocracy in their narrative.
But it’s the powerful who move the plot here. And look where they’ve moved it to. Justly titled “Reign of Terror,” this episode of I, Claudius is a cavalcade of cruelty — and I defy you to find a single reason why it couldn’t happen here tomorrow.
I can’t say that House of Guinness is firing on all cylinders. Ellen, for example, feels altogether too broad a caricature of a fiery Fenian redhead, down to chugging a pint o’ Guinness with her flaming tresses curling hither thither and yon. I could do with Rafferty getting a little more seasoning than “sexy swaggering tough-guy company man, too; his scene with Ellen suffers as a result of neither quite feeling like people the way Arthur or Anne or even the type-A Edward do.
I think it’s Arthur’s show, frankly. It’s like the man’s callowness — “What the fuck do I care about the people for? I’m a Conservative!” he says at one point, indignant — is in a constant tug of war with actor Anthony Boyle’s soulfulness, with neither side emerging the victor in full. (Also, you see his penis.) That said, Jack Gleeson stole every scene he was in as Joffrey, and he’s already a blast as Byron, so there are other contenders for the crown. Or the harp.
This remains such a fun, inventive show. It’s capable of recognizing when it needs to course-correct, following up the complex zombie card game with a very basic round “dodge the flying killer frisbees.” The nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, meanwhile, is a still-provocative image that calls to mind the lethal terrorist attacks by a religious cult years ago. The canaries are a great visual, too.
And Ryuji emerges now as a compelling antagonist — the kind of explorer in the further regions of experience obsessed with going beyond the limits that drove the narrative of the first two Hellraiser films. This is an archetype I like a lot, and as with so much else in this show, I like it here plenty.
I dreaded watching this episode of Alice in Borderland. Not because I’m squeamish, or sensitive, or artistically or philosophically opposed to random acts of gratuitous violence. It’s just that I like my gratuitous violence to mean something, man. If I’m going to watch characters get senselessly mowed down in agonizing terror for an hour at a stretch, I want to know they did so in order for the filmmakers to make a statement about the wielding of power against the powerless, however personal or political you want to make it. I want to know those characters died for a purpose.
That’s never been Alice’s strong suit. This isn’t Squid Game, with its candy-colored Verhoevenesque anti-capitalism. This is just a bunch of cool violent shit happening to nice people who deserve better and try and help each other. I feel for the characters of course, but their plight seems very arbitrary and narrow. I don’t foresee circumstances in which getting sucked into a warp-zone afterlife where you get shot by lasers reveals much about the human experience, you know?
But here’s the thing: The moment you shoot a flaming arrow through some rando redshirt’s neck, all my objections go up in smoke. So to speak.
It’s the damnedest thing. I’m sitting here watching the second episode of House of Guinness and thinking “Huh, this seems much stronger to me than the first episode, somehow. Less showy and blunt, more thoughtful, better dialogue, better lighting, an altogether tighter thing.” Great news, right? But then I thought, “Wait, why does this seem familiar?” It’s because the exact same thing happened with writer-creator Steven Knight’s last period piece about 19th-century dirty deeds among people with pretty accents, A Thousand Blows.
Back then, I wrote that “Series premieres, even of very good shows, often suffer from what I call ‘pilot-itis.’ It’s a tendency to go a bit big and braod in hopes of catching and capturing the audience’s attention.” That’s especially true of the House of Guinness debut, which introduced the players and their personalities and motivations with all the subtlety of a kid plopping her favorite action figures down on the floor before playing with them.
It’s the playing that seems to interest Knight more than the setting-up. All of a sudden he’s having Aunt Agnes lament to her headstrong niece, who neither wants to play matchmaker for her brothers nor be married herself, “Oh, Anne, you’re a wave crashing against a rock, made up of gold bands and diamond engagement rings.” You’ve got Arthur, who earlier that day was dumped by his boyfriend Michael (Foundation‘s Cassian Bilton) in a botanical garden, cryptically telling his brother and their body man Rafferty “My peace was shattered today, beside a water lily.”
In the first episode, only Ben the junkie and Rafferty the rake were permitted this kind of lyricism, and coming from them it seemed more like a character defect than anything else. Once everyone gets in on the act, you start achieving some of that Deadwood magic, where characters of low character speak in high poetry.
Adapted by writer-director Shinsuke Sato from the manga of the same name by Haro Aso, Alice in Borderland is one of the most complex, complicated, convoluted TV shows I’ve ever covered. The obvious point of comparison is Squid Game, but with more players, way more games, and way more uncertainty as to what the hell is even going on.
This premiere clears a lot of that uncertainty right up. Obviously it’s possible the show is just straight-up lying to us, but it certainly appears as if Arisu’s adventure’s in Borderland took place during a near-death experience that plunged many people into a sort of shared consciousness where the games took place in classic “if you die in the dream, you die in real life” fashion.
Now, this obviously still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. If this is just some dream world, why do all the games involve guns, booby traps, and other relatively realistic means of killing people? Why are they themed around a deck of playing cards? Is it connected in a direct way to the meterorite, in the sense that its origin is extraterrestrial? How is Banda able to pass to and fro? Has this happened before, and if so where and when and how often?
But still, given the show’s adamant refusal to answer a damn thing for nigh on two seasons, this return felt like finding the answer key to a chemistry exam. What’s more, there’s no new normal to familiarize yourself with that takes more than two seconds to get accustomed to: “Oh wow, Arisu and Usagi are married now? Cool, good for them.” And other than Ryuji, there aren’t any new characters to familiarize yourself with, not yet anyway. This may be the easiest Season 3 premiere I’ve ever had to review, from a “recapping the action” perspective.
To me, however, the standout moment isn’t any of the explanations receive. It’s not even the disgusting electrocution sequence, as fun as that is if you’re a gorehound. It’s Arisu’s long twilit walk from the sanitarium to the game zone through the cobalt-blue streets of empty Tokyo. It’s then that it truly feels we’re on the border of some new and terrible thing. At least, so I hope.
According to the titles that spool out over a music video–style montage showing the making of the legendary brew, these are the ingredients that go into both a pint of Guinness and House of Guinnessitself. The approach to getting this information across is stylish, slick, bombastic, and direct. The text is a blend of cold hard facts and poetic embellishment. It’s a bit corny in places, but knowingly so: People who play with themes like “FAMILY. MONEY. REBELLION. POWER” know they’re walking well-trod territory, so they might as well dance their way across it instead.
That seems to be the approach of writer-creator Steven Knight, previously responsible for the well-regarded British gangster period piece Peaky Blinders, as well as the excellent 19th-century bareknuckle-boxing drama A Thousand Blows earlier this year. This seems an altogether less serious, more scandalous and sudsy effort than ATB, which was anchored in part by powerhouse performances from future Adolescence stars Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty. There’s only so silly you can get when those two are giving their all.
This is not to sell short any of the talents involved in House of Guinness, which is prefaced with the amusingly Wildean description “THIS FICTION IS INSPIRED BY TRUE STORIES.” This is is the historical-fiction TV-show equivalent of David Bowie slapping every copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars with the phrase TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME — a sign that above all, we’re here to jam out and have fun.
The bad guy’s a fun one, too. No one who isn’t named “Leslie Nielsen” has had more fun poking fun at their square-jawed persona than Kyle MacLachlan has over the course of his career (even on Twin Peaks: The Return!). In this episode alone we watch him hump Jeanne Tripplehorn only to collapse crying into her arms upon climax, then insist on a ludicrous hair dye job to “court the youth vote.” When he and Lee nearly come to blows at Dale’s memorial service, he assumes a ludicrous Fighting Irish put up yer dukes boxing stance. He seems to be having as good a time here as he had on Fallout, which bodes well for the future of this shaggy-dog story of a show.
The Big Lebowski’s influence, intentional or not, can’t be overstated. Lee is basically the Dude if he made a career of leaping off of couches and using that old pencil trick to see what Jackie Treehorn wrote on that note. A wise, mysterious older stranger sits down next to him at a bar. A car of unknown origin follows him around. He is beset by rich white assholes and beautiful, eccentric women. He gets mixed up in a sprawling case with a huge cast of colorful characters and humorously recreates classic crime narratives in pursuit of the truth. You get it.
Most importantly, like the Dude used to be back when he (and six other guys) wrote the Port Huron Statement and occupied ROTC buildings, Lee is, according to both Cyrus and Marty, that saddest of specimens: “a white man who cares.” Even though he dresses like a dirtbag and talks like he’s doing a bit and is perpetually broke, Lee still has tremendous power and privilege as a straight cis white guy. Because he cares, he’s using these powers for good. As a result, he nearly winds up murdered in a car trunk like Billy Batts.
Caring, in other words, isn’t easy, even if you live life on the easy setting thanks to your background. It’s hard and dangerous. The Lowdown simply suggests that caring also can make you one of the coolest, most interesting people anyone’s ever met — a living legend without really trying to be one — while still solving actual problems. Maybe it’s not really that easy in real life, but if it results in a show as much fun as this one? Let’s hear ’em out.
Noah Hawley has done what countless unfortunate employees of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation have been unable to do for nearly 50 years: He brought Aliens to Earth successfully.
If you know actor Tom Pelphrey at all, it’s likely because of a single scene: a monologue he delivers in the back of an Uber on Ozark, desperately explaining to a person who doesn’t care why he’s almost certainly crossed the wrong person and gotten himself and, possibly, his sister and her family killed. But of course there’s hope around the corner, a light at the end of the tunnel, if he can just…keep…going. Despite the scene’s almost unwatchably painful naturalism, Pelphrey has said he didn’t improvise a word.
But he’s such a good actor that it feels like he’s making it up as he goes along, even as he sticks to the script’s chapter and verse. His dialogue seems to come from within his body, not his head. So when Robbie repeated himself during this pivotal scene, over and over and over, my first instinct was to give Pelphrey the credit. But if his process remains the same as it once was, writer-creator Brad Ingelsby is responsible for this revealing detail. If you’ve ever wondered why I like Task so much better than Mare of Easttown, this kind of thing is why.
It goes ill for the Empire. Its ruler is a bitter old man who spends his time nursing ancient grudges and indulging in rape and pedophilia as pastimes. The whisperings of the ambitious head of his secret police drive him to ever greater acts of paranoia and violence. His inner circle includes even bigger, more sadistic perverts and murderers. The Senate goes along with it as innocent people are arrested without charge. The only ones who can put a stop to it all are either too old and enfeebled to act, or too complacent, or too cowardly.
Anyway, did you guys watch this episode of I, Claudius? Because things are pretty bad there, too.
Chief of War is an achievement in historical fiction on television, an earthbound spectacle to rival and surpass the faraway fantasy lands and science-fiction galaxies of other epics. It announces the arrival of Momoa as a filmmaker worth watching — worth studying, even. There are compositions in here that call to mind Kurosawa’s Ran, and I don’t say that lightly. This show delivered in every way I’d hoped it would, and in countless ways I never dreamed it could.
Though we’re only two episodes in, so far Task is an improvement over Ingelsby’s stylistically and thematically similar Mare of Easttown in almost every conceivable way. Naturally I miss the inimitable presence of Kate Winslet, but such is the power of Tom Pelphrey and his seemingly bottomless fuel tank of pathos that this show has it covered. It’s aided additionally by Jeremiah Zagar’s superb direction, which takes care to match the characters’ piercing emotions with equally striking shot compositions and lingering, well-framed closeups. Gliding over all is the gloriously goes-to-eleven score by Dan Deacon, who like so many others — Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Trent Reznor, Mica Levi, Daniel Lopatin — proves that the art-rock weirdo to superlative film composer pipeline is real and flowing freely. Task is not a happy show, but it’s one I’m happy to recommend.
I’m also not convinced this is going to go well for the (noticeably wide-eyed) Boy Kavalier. This is a man used to being the smartest guy in the room — or used to being told he is, anyway. It doesn’t occur to him that even as he’s figuring out how best to make use of the eyeball, the eyeball is determining the same thing about him. These monsters have already destroyed a robot so sophisticated it was presumed to be nearly indestructible. The hubris of the powerful is a much softer target.
Beautifully blocked even by I, Claudius standards, this episode makes the most of the Senate’s comparatively cavernous size, framing Piso pontificating in the foreground while Tiberius glowers beneath his imperial laurels in the back. Sejanus is constantly standing in the Emperor’s personal space, indicating who really wears the pants in the relationship. Caligula is a sinister presence throughout, a Lynchian entity in child form, lurking in the crowd or in the rear of the frame.
And that final scene with Piso and Plancina, ugh, my god! Stratford and Hamilton’s clinch, their desperate pressing of their heads and faces together as they resolve to die as one, is incandescently hot, the way doomed passion so often is. It makes Piso’s decision to back down feel like even more of a slap in the face. Did you not watch the scene you are currently in, dog? You’re caught in a bad romance, roll with it!
Photo: Acorn
But Piso’s uncertainty and terror are understandable. He now lives in a system where everything comes down to the decisions of a single man, a sovereign, a one-man maker of reality. Your safety as a Roman citizen, even a Roman Senator, ultimately depends not on laws or principles, but on remaining in the Emperor’s good graces.Humanity struggled for centuries to crawl out of this kind of moral morass, in which liberty and freedom enter freefall as the whims of dictators reward friends and punish enemies with impunity. It’s been recognized almost universally as evil for generation upon generation. I, Claudius was made for societies where, it was presumed, people agreed on this. But it’s just as good, if not better, in a society where they don’t.
This one’s bittersweet. The Mule is down, but seemingly not out. Empire stands, but it’s fallen into Darkness nonetheless. Foundation lives, but it’s a fraction of its former self. Gaal betrayed her mentor. Darkness betrayed his brothers and his most loyal servant. Atrocities have been committed across the galaxy by a black-hole bomb that remains operational and in the hands of a madman.
But Foundation has always been bittersweet, hasn’t it? From the start, this has never been a story about the triumph of good over evil, knowledge over ignorance, civilization over barbarity. All Hari Seldon ever aimed to do was shorten the inevitable reign of evil, ignorance, and barbarity from 30,000 years to a mere millennium.
This isn’t an easy message to hear, especially right now. Everyone’s looking for the quick fix or magic bullet that will restore the world we once knew, or better yet create a new and healthier one, from the hell it’s been made into by rich and powerful sociopaths — men exactly like the Mule and Brother Darkness, except in ugly suits.
But the message is necessary. The fight is on to preserve the light of freedom, science, and truth as rat-bastard tyrants attempt to stamp them all out. Everyone can play a part to make the future just a bit brighter than it would be without them. The moral arc of the Prime Radiant is long, and only we can bend it towards justice.
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The Season 3 finale of Foundation has no chill. None. Not a single particle of chill can be detected. Where this episode goes, you couldn’t see the light from chill with the Hubble telescope. Generations of psychohistorians working hand in glove with a secret team of powerful psychics to steer the course of this episode towards chill across a span of centuries would come up short. You’d need the Mule to brainwash you into feeling any chill in this thing whatsoever.
