It’s preposterous how good Shea Whigham is at delivering dialogue. Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason, American Primeval — whatever the assignment, he makes every line sound like he’d never heard a word of it before thinking it up right then and there. When Whigham’s Jim Bridger verbally spars with Kim Coates’s appropriately bloviating Brigham Young, he makes the great evangelist sound like a high school freshman at his first debate club event. Sure, Bridger has likely just brought the murderous wrath of the Mormon nation down on his head with his backtalk and intransigence — not to mention his heavily armed squad of employees, mountain men, and Native Americans with nothing left to lose. But Young attacking Bridger now after failing to verbally fluster the grizzled frontiersman in the slightest is a bit like Drake suing after Kendrick Lamar beat the brakes off him in their beef. Even if he wins, he’s a sore loser. 

I reviewed episode five of American Primeval for Decider.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m thinking about this line from 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke a lot while watching Silo these days.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

One of my favorite film microgenres is the Ordeal. In Ordeal movies, characters embark on a perilous journey across some wild territory, and endure a grueling struggle for survival along the way, marked with repeated instances of terror and pain. Think Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Descent, Gravity, and most relevantly The Revenant, written by American Primeval creator Mark L. Smith. Go ahead and throw Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in there if you’re feeling generous, and Homer’s The Odyssey if you want to be complete about it. These narratives are compelling because of how they join the viewer and the protagonist at the hip: You’re not going anywhere until this guy or girl gets out alive, or dies trying. The only way out is through.

American Primeval is an attempt to create an Ordeal TV Show, which in this age of spiffy limited series is now a possibility. There are pros and cons to this approach. In the former column is the obvious point that on  television show, your Ordeal can last a whole lot longer. You can drag out that primal struggle, allowing for more moments of bloody horror and stark beauty. And to fill up that extra real estate, you can create multiple protagonists, each on a different path, each undergoing an Ordeal of their own, each with their own appeal.

[…]

But on the big screen, the Ordeal is a uniquely focused form of storytelling. The pleasure of the Ordeal is its ability to burrow deep into the mindset of its main character as they’re put through their paces over the course of an entire film. By the end, ideally, you feel what she feels in your gut. That’s just not going to be the case when you’re bouncing around between stories and characters on a regular basis, episode after episode. It can even start to feel a bit, well, episodic: This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and the next thing you know a grizzled mountain man is snapping a screaming child’s splintered bone back into place and it’s cut to black, roll credits.

I reviewed episode four of American Primeval for Decider.

American Primeval is taking an open-world video game approach to its brand of revisionist Western. As our characters wander around, they encounter all kinds: friendly Mormons and murderous ones, friendly indigenous people and murderous ones, friendly settlers and murderous ones. You just never quite know which one is which when you stumble into them, until the shooting starts. 

This approach can be a little, well, video-gamey. As a horror guy, I was certainly tickled when a blind cackling hillbilly witch showed up to lure our heroes into Consanguinity Corner, but you can only take a show that otherwise self-evidently prides itself on gritty realism when Leatherface and Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show up. 

Yet at the end of the episode, Captain Dellinger writes a lovely and heartfelt letter or journal entry in which he laments the way he feels he’s losing his essential character in the ceaselessly violent world he’s entered. “Hatred” and “brutality” are everywhere, driving out “compassion and basic tenderness.” 

“I am overcome at this time by a deep pain from a tremendous and always present lack of love,” he writes. “So few in these lands know of grace. There is only brutality here.” He’s painting things with an awfully broad brush, as the concurrent shots of Abish being treated with care and kindness by the Shoshone women demonstrate. But he’s not wrong overall. American Primeval may have a kind of shopworn way of showing it, but it really is exhausting to think about how many people in this land of ours like it better when they know others are suffering.  

I reviewed episode three of American Primeval for Decider.

Director Peter Berg has a knack for depicting the inherent sternness of all this. The determined faces of actors Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch and Saura Lightfoot Leon as Sara and Isaac and Abish. The leaders of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, gathered around a campfire, silhouetted agains the big sky. Our four heroes captured with a low angle that makes them look like the Fellowship of the Ring. Rolling vistas and billowing mists. Forests and scrubland. Hard people in a hard land. It’s solid stuff.

What it isn’t is unique, special, or even particularly provocative beyond the in-your-face violence. If that sounds harsh, I don’t mean it to be — it’s just the way it is. American Primeval is a bloody modern Western, and that’s about the extent of it. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. But unlike Brigham Young, this show isn’t making any converts just yet.

I reviewed episode two of American Primeval for Decider.

American Primeval isn’t going to be reinventing the Western genre anytime soon, if that wasn’t already apparent. Revisionist Westerns — in which there are no black and white hats, no noble cowboys against uniformly savage Indians, just a continent full of broken people trying to live another day — have been around for so long they’re now just, you know, Westerns. This is a project that will rise and fall on the strength of its action, adventure, thriller, suspense, and survival sequences, and on whether the actors can make you care enough about the characters to worry about what happens to them. Westward the wagons, folks, and let’s find out.

I’m covering Mark L. Smith and Peter Berg’s new survival-horror Western on Netflix American Primeval for Decider.

Jod Na Nawood is not a nice person. Considering his occupation, the outer-space equivalent of De Niro and Pesci hijacking trucks in GoodFellas, maybe that should have been obvious. But this is the Star Wars Galaxy, where you can personally slaughter younglings and blow up entire planets but still get a cozy fireside ghost appearance once you die. We’ve been taught to forgive much worse. We’ve also been taught, via Han Solo, that preposterously handsome and charming lawbreakers are heroes at heart more often than not. 

Well, Jod appears to fall firmly in the “not” category. Though his charisma and fast-talking power him through the beginning of the episode, as he repeatedly avoids being airlocked while Captain Brutus and his men try to penetrate At Attin’s Barrier, that’s not what actually gets him to his destination. To do that, he shoots the helpless Brutus to death at point blank range, beheads SM-33 with a lightsaber, bullies and mocks four frightened children, and threatens to kill their parents if they talk. That last bit is textbook child abuser stuff, and Skeleton Crew is having Jude Law say it to a little blue elephant boy. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Skeleton Crew is good clean fun. That may sound like faint praise, and in the context of, like, Mad Men and I, Claudius (and Andor, for that matter), it is. But in the context of The Acolyte and Ahsoka, the Disney Star Wars Universe’s last two TV outings? This show is an enjoyable, zesty enterprise, with big ugly creatures, cool little droids, frequently inventive action sequences, and Jude Law as a scoundrel who my even turn out to be a real scoundrel this time. It has a pulse and a purpose. It justifies its own existence by being entertaining. 

[…]

But even in Star Wars, you’re asking a lot of your audience’s suspension of disbelief in this sequence, when you probably could have just crafted an escape that didn’t depend on four little children all acting like a cross between R2-D2 repairing Luke’s hyperdrive while flying through space and Captain America keeping that helicopter from flying away with his bare hands. I enjoy space werewolves and space kaiju and space Urkel and space Kelly MacDonald as much as anyone, but they can’t compensate for underbaked writing, which is what keeps Skeleton Crew from making the jump from fun to special.

I reviewed last week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

a short story by Sean T. Collins, 1/4/25

How it started. Can’t say I remember much of what happened after, but how it started? Yeah, I can tell you that. It was me, Kyle, Bryan, Eustace, Jenny, Eleanor, Tom of course, and it was cold. We were in the Green Dog, which was our regular then, and we were a couple drinks in, all of us. Bryan was smoking his pipe, it was new, he was showing it off like. Eustace had such a thing for Eleanor and all of us knew it but her. Kyle and me, we were talking about that year’s Games. Kenny, he owned the place, he had the fire going strong as he could, but we were still all bundled up. Jenny tied her hair back so she could lean in toward the candle on the table, even. It was cold. 

I think it was Jenny who noticed first because I saw her turn white as a sheet while the rest of us were still having a laugh. There was a lull in the noise and then we heard the sound of footfalls, and they were heavy like, and you could hear the scrape against the wood floor.Then I realize it had gotten so cold because the door had opened — like I said, we’d been drinking, things weren’t coming to me quickly — and I turn to look.

He was man height — peasant, not aristo, I mean, but still taller than all of us. He had on a scratched grey chest plate and dark leather armor, which you could see was ripped and stained black in a bunch of places. Ears like a bat and skin the color of, you know, an old bruise, that purple-yellow flesh tone. Big red eyes the size of a human’s mouth. Teeth the size of human fingers that stuck out even with his mouth shut. He had these big bony feet with hard yellow toenails that scraped against the ground when he walked, just these big grippers slapping the floor. When there’s an orc in your regular, you notice these things. Makes an impression like. 

Tom, he didn’t say much on a night out usually. He stands up and he says, and I mean loud, “What do you want?” 

So that kills whatever conversation was left in the place. 

The orc doesn’t even look in Tom’s direction, just sits down at the bar. Then he goes, and I’m not gonna do the voice so you’re gonna have to imagine it, he goes: “I’m here to test the hospitality of the halflings, renowned in story and song.” 

Everyone starts Tom looks real angry. Jenny’s scared as hell, you can see. Eustace is just staring into his drink. 

The orc sighs like. “I am unarmed and I wear no sigil,” he says, real tired like. “Would you turn a poor traveler away?”

Kenny behind the bar, his bald head is gleaming with sweat now, and it’s cold like I said. He looks over to Tom who I can see give him this little head-nod back. 

It took him like three tries but finally Kenny gets out “What’ll it be.” 

“Ale,” the orc says. “Keep it coming. Cut me off after a few if it makes you feel safer, I don’t care.” And Kenny pours him an ale just like that. The orc takes this big long sip and lets out this ahhhh sound only it’s more of a hiss when he does it. Like I said, I can’t do the voice.

I’m watching this so close that I don’t even notice Tom get up. Next thing I know he’s sitting down next to the orc at the bar. Now normally if he does this people know what’s coming, but this orc, he’s new, what does he know.

“Hey friend,” he goes. Tom’s tall, four feet, and he’s all muscle. He’s not scared of this guy. “Hey friend. You a veteran?”

“Aye,” says the orc and takes another drink. 

“I’m a veteran too,” Tom says. Kenny starts to say something and Tom just shoots him a look and he shuts up again. “What campaign, brother?” 

“Azh Khabad was my last one,” the orc says. He’s just staring into his drink, like Jenny.

“Yeah, that was a lot of people’s last one,” Tom goes. “Especially on your side.” The orc just grunts and drinks again. “Where’s your sword and sigil at, brother?”

“Lost ’em,” he says. “In the last campaign.”

“Gotcha,” Tom goes. Then he kind of tilts his head and looks right at the orc and says in this weird loud voice, “Threw them down in the retreat, this one did.”

The orc lets out another one of those hiss-sigh sounds again, puts down his beer. “Yes, I threw them down,” he says. “They would avail me no more.” Finally he turns and looks at Tom, those red eyes, you know. And he says “Why do you stare? Have you never seen a soldier weary from war?”

“I’ve seen plenty, brother.”

We’re all exchanging nervous looks now, and Eustace is whispering something in Eleanor’s ear. Eleanor reaches out and grabs Jenny’s wrist and Jenny jumps and her beer falls over but Tom and the orc don’t notice.

“You’ve killed people,” Tom says. Eleanor squeezes Jenny’s wrist tighter and tilts her head towards the door. I look around and see a lot of folks looking in that direction.

“Probably I have,” the orc says. He’s turned back to his beer already. “But what soldier hasn’t?”

Tom’s drinking an ale of his own now, I didn’t even see him order it or Kenny give it to him. It’s like it materialized in his hand. “Totally fair,” he says, “totally fair. I know I have.” 

He pauses and takes a drink. Eleanor is dragging Jenny toward the door, fast, that’s the last I saw of them that night.

Tom puts his mug down. “But you served an evil cause, brother,” he says, staring right at the orc.

“Probably I did,” the guy says. He takes his own drink, then he moves his head real slow to look back at Tom. “But what soldier hasn’t?”

So Tom, man, he does not like that. He slams the mug down and yells “Those who follow the One True King!” After that you don’t hear a sound in that room except people heading for the exit.

The orc doesn’t miss a beat. “My Lord said he was the One True King. And where I come from, when he speaks, you don’t argue.”

Tom’s just getting madder now, you can see the flush creeping into his face. His fists are all balled up like. “So you were forced into war, is that it?” he asks the guy. “You were forced to fight? You were forced to kill?” All that kind of shit. 

The orc says “No. No, I wanted war. I wanted to fight. I wanted to kill. And when the time came I enjoyed it. But that time is over now. I’m tired.” He starts looking around the room as he talks now. “And I will harm no one so long as I am within these walls, as long as no one tries to harm me first.”

Now Tom, he only gets madder now for some reason. “Oh I’ve tried to harm you already, brother,” he says. “Your armor — you’re a Wolfrunner, yeah?”

And he goes, “Yeah.”

“So you were there,” Tom says. “You were there on the Plain of Sellema when the Paladins of Frodost brought the Early Dawn.” Me and Kyle and Bryan and Eustace had heard this one before and we all kind of looked at each other like. 

The orc goes “I remember the Plain of Sellema, yes.”

Tom’s, well, he’s not the smiling type the way he used to be but you can hear it in his tone of voice now and then and you could hear it now. “So, the vampire knights burning in their thousands, the trolls turned to stone that we used to build a monument to our glorious dead. You remember that, brother?”

The orc’s getting quiet. “Yes.”

“You remember the Werewolf Legion? One second they were rampaging through our front lines and the next they’re just a bunch of naked men on a battlefield. You remember how that ended? Remember them falling to the Silver Axes of Nar-Gurru?”

He doesn’t wait for a response this time. “You know who was in the Paladins of Frodost? Can you guess, brother? I’ll bet you can guess. Go ahead, take your time.”

Another hiss-sigh. He turns and looks Tom right in the eyes again. “You?”

“That’s right!” Tom is crowing now like. Me and the boys are up on our feet, real quiet. “I was one of the halfling paladins who slaughtered your Dark Armies, brother. It wasn’t personal, it was just that all those vampires and werewolves and trolls needed to go.” He gets up in the orc’s face. “Sometimes people just need to go, would you agree, brother?”

“Like the people of Sellema?” he says back. “That was not our doing.”

Tom’s says, “They made their choice. You don’t get to volunteer to be one of the Black Sword’s slaves. That’s just not an option for people to take, unfortunately.” 

Bryan whispers to me “He’s drunk” and I’m realizing suddenly he’s right. 

The orc finishes his drink and goes “What’s done is done, I suppose.”

“Almost,” says Tom.

He must have gone for his gem at that point, it was hard to see from my angle, but the next thing I know his arm is on the floor. His whole arm! The orc just bit it right off at the shoulder. Tom, he passes out, and his face lands right in the palm of his own hand, I swear on the Great Tomb of Atar.

There’s blood everywhere now, and I mean everywhere. A candle on the wall sputters and goes out from the spray, that level of blood. Kenny drops behind the bar and that’s the last I see of him. Most everyone in the bar is making a run for it. But me and Eustace and Kyle and Bryan, well, we just kind of collectively decide we’ve gotta do something about this. We’re pissed about Tom and we’re all drunk. 

And it’s the weirdest thing. The orc, he looks at us coming, Tom’s blood is all drooling and dripping from his mouth. And he goes “Hello, friends. Is any among you a veteran?”

We’re embarrassed like. Only the Wielders could serve in the High King’s army, and only Tom was a Wielder. On the other hand look where it had gotten him. 

So when no one says anything, the orc just says “That’s good. Very good indeed.” 

What were we supposed to do? 

I go first and I bring my mug down hard on his bruise-colored head. The black blood stings on your skin, I didn’t anticipate that even though I knew it was the case, you learn this stuff. Kyle goes in swinging, Bryan too. Eustace I think is backing out but then I see he’s reaching behind the bar for the club Kenny was afraid to use. He grabs it and swings hard, right into the orc’s face, which just explodes. Like I didn’t know you could do that to a living thing’s face and have it still be alive afterwards.  

It took a long time. Like I said, I don’t really remember much.

Anyway they erected a statue to Tom at the Old Bridge, and the orc they fed to Kenny’s pigs, on account of it was his place that got busted up and this was his getback. But all Kenny did was serve the orc a drink so I don’t feel bad his pigs got sick and died after that. Serves him right like. 

The deputies cleared us of course, since orcs aren’t people and you can only murder people, something like that. Bryan has been fine since except for his marriage. I haven’t talked to Kyle in a bit. Eustace did something that Eleanor isn’t speaking to him anymore, don’t know what that’s about. Jenny’s fine, and me and her have been going together since harvest, and we have a new regular. Anyway it’s funny you asked about this, because I just had the craziest dream where the orc says — well, that’s not important. I don’t think about it that much anymore is the main thing. That war ended a long time ago now.

The Pact is what has kept things in line all these decades. It may well stop a catastrophe even now. But it led to this catastrophe too, with its lies and deceptions and bias toward the Up-Toppers. Does such a document deserve to govern a people who have outgrown it? Do its handmaidens in power deserve to rule us? I mean, them? 

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Everyone’s off on a side quest in this episode of Silo. That’s not a bad thing! Ask any gamer worth their salt and they’ll tell you that the wooly, rambling parts of an open-world game are the best part. True video game happiness is when you could probably advance toward the final boss if you wanted but you’re having too much fun solving puzzles and braving dangers and helping farmers locate their lost chickens and what have you to stop playing anytime soon. 

I don’t know if that was the remit for this week’s script, by writer Katherine DiSavino, but as a metaphor it works pretty neatly. Virtually across the board, all of our main and secondary characters are engaged in side quests this week. It might feel like treading water — literally so, in Juliette’s case — but it’s where a show can stretch its legs a bit.

I reviewed last week’s Silo for Decider.

One last thing: Wim. Sure, it’s funny to see him mean-mug Jod with a lightsaber in hand as if this is his moment of destiny, then promptly switch it on upside-down and drive it into the ground, knocking himself ass over teakettle. But “I wanted to have an adventure, and now I regret it because adventures are scary” is a movie motivation, not a real-person motivation. Luke Skywalker was a bored teenager wanted to see the universe, not have adventures in it. Indiana Jones wanted fortune, glory, and presumably tenure. The Goonies wanted to save their parents’ homes from foreclosure, for crying out loud. None of them was like “Oh boy, I hope I get into all kinds of danger so I can show how kickass I am!” It’s both unrealistic as a motivator and unlikeable as a personality trait. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

In the end, it’s both beautiful and brutal. All-out mass murder in a blue-and-red darkness. Muzzle flashes erupting from dozens of crevices in a vast pastel cavern. Desperate men and women fighting to the last bullet. Lovable characters cracking under pressure. A final betrayal in the royal purple corridors of power. The season finale of Squid Game is everything you’d want from a season finale of Squid Game…except for the “finale” bit. There’s nothing final about this episode at all. 

I reviewed the season finale of Squid Game for Decider.

By the time you finish this season of Squid Game, you will have witnessed hundreds of murders. Hundreds! It’s baked right into the premise. Other than shows that involve actual war, this kind of body count is just unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in that in virtually every case the murder victims are unarmed and helpless, and are getting killed because they messed up while playing a children’s game. 

The question I ask myself when I watch things like this is simply, Why? Why am I watching something in which human lives are discarded like garbage, in graphic on-screen deaths so numerous you need the show to keep track of them for you? Is this some high-octane action-movie thing that’s using murder the way roller-coasters use downward slopes — to shock your system and give you a thrill? Does the violence have weight, does it cause emotional pain, does it speak to something broader than “look out for armed men in pink jumpsuits”? In short, what does the violence communicate, and is it a message worth hearing?

I’m wrestling with this question, I’ll admit. That’s because I think it’s very obvious Squid Game does, indeed, have something to say. The cartoonish bluntness with which its premise is stated — poor and indebted people are pitted against one another in sadistic games for a chance to win enough money to become solvent again, in a sham quasi-democracy overseen by the world’s richest men — tricks the mind into thinking it’s simplistic. 

But read that premise again, and tell me how it differs from conditions on the ground right here and now. Friends, the real world is simplistic at this point. Just as the lethal games are designed to evoke fun childhood pastimes, Squid Game just renders the real world’s cruel absurdity in caricature form. 

There is, however, such a thing as diminishing returns. With only one episode remaining in this short season, and a longer one behind us already, it’s fair to wonder what this heap of several hundred green-tracksuited corpses tells us that we didn’t learn from the previous pile. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Recapping this episode of Squid Game is a daunting prospect. Not because it’s complicated — on the contrary, it’s a simple as these things get. The players play a game, the survivors take a vote and then a break, they bond with each other, they start a new game, there are brief detours for the No-eul and Jun-ho side plots, the end. 

No, the problem stems from how much of the energy of Squid Game is lost if you summarize it. I mean, the show really is as simple as it sounds above. The characters sound equally sketched out when you break them down in text form: the kindly old woman, the genial jarhead, the arrogant celebrity, the gentle trans woman, the surprisingly human villain, and so on. I found all their interactions compelling, but if I were to sum up their conversations without the benefit of the performances conveying them, they’d seem gossamer thin.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Squid Game‘s second season for Decider.

The clock is ticking on Squid Game, and I don’t just mean for the contestants. In a short season of just seven episodes, we’ve just completed Episode 4 and haven’t even finished our second game out of six. Will the remaining games get rushed through via montage or some other means? Will the competition get cut short, perhaps by Gi-hun and Jun-ho’s mercenary team? Will the season finale end with a big TO BE CONTINUED? No matter the outcome, the result is going to be paced quite differently from the previous season. In other words, we’re guaranteed something novel.

I reviewed episode 4 of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

So much of what makes this episode good is also what makes it familiar: the giant doll, the X and O voting, the “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remixed by M.C. Escher” staircase set by production designer by Chae Kyoung-sun, But what sells the drama of it all, what makes it feel like more than just a rehash, is what has changed: Gi-hun. When we see flashes of the initial season, he looks like a different person, floppy-haired and fresh-faced. Actor Lee Jung-jae’s transformation is subtle, but it’s like an optical illusion or a Magic Eye poster: Once you train yourself to see it, it’s kind of mind-blowing.

I reviewed Squid Game Season 2’s third episode for Decider.

For a director whose signature achievement is capturing claustrophobically cheery sets, Squid Games‘ Hwang Dong-hyuk has a hell of an eye for exterior shots. An amusement park, a hospital, a bridge underpass, even Gi-hun’s run-down Pink Motel: They’re all given a real sense of scale, color, drama by Hwang’s camera. Even given how gorgeously creepy all the interiors are once we get to the island and its game complex, I’ll still miss the view.

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Maybe it goes without saying, but like most episodes of Squid Game, this is a nasty bit of work. The episode stays fairly light until the end, characterized by joking banter between the loan sharks on one hand and Jun-ho and the fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who plucked him out of the sea after the Season 1 finale and now helps him search for the island. Then, all of a sudden, you have a protracted scene of queasy brutality and emotional torture straight out of The Deer Hunter, set to opera. This is followed almost immediately by a very similar scene in which the sociopathic Recruiter positively beams with joy over being a sociopath before shooting himself to death on camera. It’s a lot, but it’s supposed to be. If individual viewers find it’s too much to justify what is at root not all that different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man in conceptual terms, I get it.

But it sure looks good. We haven’t yet immersed ourselves in the pink pastel hellscape of the Game’s HQ yet, but the red and green lighting that falls on Gi-hun and the Recruiter during their face off, along with a sudden cut that jumps the 180-degree line so we suddenly see the bright red window against which they’re seated, had me thinking favorably of Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own beautifully colored foreign-language Netflix thriller, Copenhagen Cowboy. (Go watch it, it rules.)

The most important contrast in this scene isn’t one of color, however, but of character, or more accurately of performance. Gong Yoo is positively demonic as the Recruiter here — eyes gleaming with the joy of cruelty, voice not skipping a beat when he reveals he killed his own father, mouth agape and grinning as he almost lewdly inserts the barrel of his gun into it before pulling the trigger. Lee Jung-jae, meanwhile, retains the sad-sack lovability that endeared him to audiences in the original, but it’s now tempered by trauma, grief, guilt, and the horror of knowledge. You still want this dear man to win, or at least to survive. Under the rules they make us play by, that’s usually the closest to winning you can get.

I’m covering the second season of Squid Game for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

Many of these missteps could be forgiven if the character work were particularly compelling. Unfortunately its core cast — Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmel and, until this episode at least, Mark Strong — swamp the rest of the show with their relative intensity. It is simply very hard to care about, say, Sister Lila walking around with glowing blue eyes and issuing commands in Dortea’s voice when we’ve seen how much more interesting this sort of behavior is when the twitchy, shuffling, humorous, kind of cracked Desmond Hart does it. Same with Empress Natalya, who lacks the in-over-his-head melancholy granted to Javicco by Strong, or the mettle brought to Valya and Tula by Watson and Williams. Simply put, the show is lopsided.

But there’s every possibility it will right the ship. Sophomore surprises, in which flawed but promising first seasons are succeeded by second runs that exceed them in every way are fairly common in Sci-fi-fantasy TV. “Foundation,” “The Wheel of Time” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” all took off during Season 2 in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible having watched their first seasons. “Dune: Prophecy” is most notable right now for where it goes wrong. But you have to believe that when things fall apart, they can be put back together.

I reviewed the season finale of Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. (gift link!)