Succession is a very funny television program. That’s a relief, since it was created by Peep Show and The Thick of It‘s Jesse Armstrong and directed by Anchorman‘s Adam McKay (working in his Big Short vein); it weren’t funny, that would be kind of troubling. But I’d like to start this Succession Episode 1 review of its premiere by discussing a scene that isn’t funny at all.

Which I do, at length, as I start my coverage of Succession for Decider. I know, I know, we’re getting a late start. But so are a lot of viewers, it seems. Climb aboard!

The sex scene between Helen and Sierra isn’t particularly explicit. But what Sierra says leading up to their liaison certainly makes a lasting impression. She enjoys sleeping with women, she tells Helen, because their shared struggles make the connection more intimate. She feels “primal admiration” for seeing a fellow woman in bed, “naked and confident and hungry for orgasm.” And she feels a greater degree of control — “control is really hot,” she concludes, before they finally kiss. By the time she’s finished talking, the temperature in that yurt has surely risen several degrees.

[…]

While we’re on the subject of Janelle, it has to be said that the chemistry between Sanaa Lathan and Dominic West is considerable. Granted, that’s par for the course on this show, which has yet to serve up a lukewarm sex scene (except on purpose) in three and a half seasons. But when Noah and Janelle finally get into bed together, there’s an easy, joyous intimacy to it — my favorite bit is when she jokingly moans “Does it turn you on that I’m your boss?” and then immediately starts laughing — that’s so convincing I almost felt bad watching. Almost.

In that regard, it’s a lot like the intense buildup to Helen and Sierra’s hookup earlier in the episode, which made their encounter, for all its problems, seem like the proverbial “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Seems to me that if sex were less fun, people wouldn’t risk all these complications to their lives in order to have it with each other. This is yet another aspect of adult life that “The Affair” shows it understands, week in and week out.

I reviewed last weekend’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

25 The Crow

Actor Brandon Lee, a.k.a. Bruce’s son, seemed born to play writer-artist James O’Barr’s undead vigilante, who returns from the grave to murder his way through the gang responsible for his girlfriend’s death. But despite the on-set tragedy that claimed the actor’s life, Lee helped create a no-holds-barred hero with an unforgettable look and vibe. The Crow doesn’t need the bulky armor and high-tech gadgets of his peers: His body is his weapon, and his spectral presence alone is enough to strike terror into criminals’ hearts. Batman beware. STC

24 Judge Dredd (Karl Urban)

Sorry, Mr. Stallone, but there’s only room for one “I am the law”-man on this list – and that’s the version from the punishing 2012 film Dredd. Played with unsmiling fury by Karl Urban, that judge is an instrument of capital punishment so pure and implacable that you never see his full face – an unknowable and untouchable avenger behind his helmet. This deliberate dehumanization does the original ultraviolent comics by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra proud, and when this Dredd shows up at the ground floor of a skyscraper apartment complex, one look at him is all it takes to know he’ll kill his way through every floor to get to the gang boss at the top. Which he does, with honors. STC

I wrote about the Crow, Judge Dredd, the Toxic Avenger, Raphael, Barbarella, Neo, Speed Racer, and Superman for Rolling Stone’s list of the top 50 movie superheroes of all time.

SPOILER WARNING

This leads directly to the show’s most disturbing sequence to date. Trapped in his hellish prison job for the foreseeable future, helpless as his fellow guards beat and dehumanize the prisoners — and quite possibly tainted by the touch of the Kid — Dennis Zalewski snaps. Grabbing his gun, he methodically marches through Shawshank, murdering every officer and official he finds. When he finally reaches the warden’s office, he finds Deaver there. “I wanna testify,” he says … before a flashbang grenade drops them both to the ground and a shotgun-wielding bull blows him away.

It’s a gorgeously fucked-up sequence, in large part because it’s just so very Stephen King-ish — and not in a way we’ve really seen before on screen. This kind of killing spree is a staple of the Master’s work: Seemingly ordinary men just lose it one day. They pick up a rifle or an ax, slaughtering their way through as many people as possible, offering one final deadpan non sequitur before someone puts them down like a rabid dog. (The town history of Derry, where It takes place, is full of rampages like this.)

And there’s nothing about Zalewski’s affect here to suggest that if he’d gotten away clean, he wouldn’t have just gone down to the bar for a drink, complaining about a rough day at work. It’s not quite the banality of evil, but there’s a workmanlike quality to it that gets right under your skin. Murder is so routine it barely registers.

Isn’t that what Zalewski himself tells Deaver? “Bad things happen here because bad people know they’re safe here,” the guard warned the lawyer when he tried to downplay the potential to open a prison-wide investigation. “How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” In his desperation to expose Shawshank’s horrors, the man turned himself into one of those horrors. He had to become the prison in order to destroy it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. The ending was impressive.

During another flashback, we see Molly invite young Henry up to her room to hang out. Her neighbor leads a sheltered life, most likely an abusive one. So he’s baffled by her meticulously curated posters for period-appropriate college-rock bands. (“What are ‘Violent Femmes’?”)

He’s even more flustered when Molly drops this bomb on him: “I know what you do in your room. Touching your thing. It feels like fireworks.” The moment is cut short when Daddy Dearest starts hollering for Henry to come home, but this sudden and relatively explicit swerve into adolescent sexuality is a welcome sign that Castle Rock will take that element of Stephen King’s work seriously. (The recent It adaptation excised the book’s infamous orgy scene entirely, but replaced it with a weird scene of a bunch of guys leering at a girl in her underwear instead … as if that’s somehow an improvement.) Carnal knowledge is a huge driver of the author’s character development and horror craftsmanship alike. Kudos to the show for having the courage to even try to tackle what can be a danger zone onscreen.

I reviewed the third and final episode of Castle Rock that Hulu launched all at once last week for Rolling Stone. This was the weirdest and best.

The bigger question facing Castle Rock is how much it wants to tap dance between the Master’s raindrops. Strong performances by the cast in general, and by the remarkable, dead-serious Andre Holland in particular, make the show watchable if you don’t know your Randall Flagg from your Kurt Barlow. But if you’re a fan, hearing Lacey talk about “the dog” and “the strangler” most likely gave you a bigger thrill than anything else narrative-wise. And when you think back through the King mythos, it’s not hard to come up with another character who had the ability to inflict disease and cause death with a just glance of his own dark, intense eyes. Is the show content to be a superhero-comic-style nostalgia act, where the main dramatic drive is figuring out when your favorite villains are about to return? Or does its portrayal of an economically devastated small town where the biggest source of jobs is a privatized prison provide fertile enough ground to grow evils all its own?

I reviewed episode two of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s still a show finding its sea legs.

Ser Garlan Tyrell

We’re making up for lost time with our second subscriber-exclusive BLAM mini-podcast in 24 hours! This installment’s question comes from $5/month subscriber Matthew Miller, who wants to know what role Sean & Stefan think Ser Garlan Tyrell will play in the remaining two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. Though we’ve barely seen him at all, his reputation precedes him — including IRL, where GRRM himself has said Ser Garlan will play a major part in the story’s endgame. What part do we think that will be, exactly? Click here to subscribe for the low low price of $2/month and find out!

(Click here to buy this episode’s theme music.)

A Different Verse of A Song of Ice and Fire

A Patreon snafu kept us from posting our latest BLAM, but we’re back with a new subscriber-exclusive mini-podcast, based on questions from readers like you! (No, not you, the other one — yeah, you.) This episode, $5/month subscriber Andrew Dill asks Your Illustrious Cohosts which parts of the world of Ice and Fire that aren’t covered thoroughly by the main narrative we’d like to see explored more in-depth. It’s an interesting question, and our answers range all over the world. Click here to subscribe and find out!

(There’s no way to legally download this episode’s theme music, but it’s “Horror Head” by Curve if you were wondering.)

Before the Game of Thrones

What was life like before A Game of Thrones? No, not for your illustrious cohosts (we can hardly remember; was there life before A Game of Thrones?) — for your favorite POV characters! On this installment of BLAH, Sean & Stefan discuss the attitudes and events they feel must have shaped the day-to-day lives of George R.R. Martin’s main characters prior to the start of A Song of Ice and Fire. How did Ned Stark balance his professional obligations against the ghosts of the past? What did Jaime Lannister have in common with a pro wrestling heel? What was the impact of domesticity on Catelyn Stark, and of domestic violence on Cersei Lannister? Why was Tyrion Lannister less interesting before the books began — and why was Davos Seaworth more interesting? It’s a deep dive into character and theme (and of course pure speculation), and we hope you enjoy it!

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 77

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Make aristocrats short again: GUILLOTINE t-shirt by Julia Gfrörer (buy it here)

If the premiere is any indication, it’s not the diverse strands of the Stephen King Extended Universe that’s holding this thing together: It’s Moonlight veteran André Holland. His character Henry Deaver is a just a black American from a lily-white small town, raised with a heaping helping of old-time religion and unexamined trauma. He’s not dreading an encounter with a demonic clown – the lawyer just wants to make sure that his client gets the legal representation the Constitution guarantees. He’s a careworn man trying his best, not a hero undertaking a quest. This is Mr. Holland’s opus: He acts like doesn’t know he’s in a highly anticipated television event from the creators of Lost and The Shining. He makes Castle Rock feel like a drama, not the haunted-house ride at the county fair.

And while Holland gets the meatiest material this time around, he’s surrounded by actors capable of moral and emotional seriousness. His mom is played by Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek. Pangborn is played by Scott Glenn, who’s brought grizzled gravitas to everything from The Silence of the Lambs to The Leftovers. Molly Strand, the suburbanite pill-popper who briefly shows up? That’s Melanie Lynskey, who hasn’t met a role she couldn’t crush since Heavenly Creatures. Frances Conroy, a solid player in both prestige dramas (Six Feet Under) and guilty genre pleasures (American Horror Story), cameos as Warden Lacy’s blind wife. And the Kid? It’s Bill Skarsgard, dialing his performance as Pennywise from It down several notches but still weird and wall-eyed as ever.

Finally, there’s the not-so-good Warden Lacy, played by Terry O’Quinn. All the emphasis on Lost‘s unanswered questions makes it easy to forget all these years later, but the actor was an absolute godsend for that show — an MVP who could play a wily survivalist, a Wolverinesque badass, a failed hero, a bitter old man and an embodiment of pure evil with equal nuance and skill. Yes, the Warden commits suicide by driving off a cliff with a noose around his neck (“guillotining himself with a Lincoln,” as Henry puts it). But we’re in King Country now, and even if you discount supernatural shenanigans, the flashback toward the episode’s end indicates we haven’t seen the last of him.

I’m covering Castle Rock, the new “songs in the key of King” series on Hulu, for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s not sit-up-and-take-notice stuff like The Terror was, but it’s promising.

And now, a brief aside about an outer-space action movie that I provides a useful interpretive framework.

Alison’s father’s latest wife is played by Dina Meyer, one of the stars of Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent sci-fi satire “Starship Troopers.” That film, which chronicles a militaristic future Earth’s intergalactic battle against a sentient species of giant insect, has long disgusted some critics and delighted others in equal measure. On the surface, its story of young, beautiful soldier-citizens waging a war of extermination against literal vermin reads as gleefully fascist.

But Verhoeven and his collaborators’ conceit was to make the kind of war movie such a society would make about itself, celebrating the virtues espoused by the fictional society it depicts. The film is positioned as the product of the mind-set of the characters within the film — not a bad way to understand how what we see on “The Affair” is filtered through the perspectives of its main characters.

I reviewed yesterday’s episode of The Affair, which dug right into the heart of Alison Bailey and the show itself, for the New York Times.

The Dream Machine: ‘Superman: The Movie’ (1978)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

The machinery of the modern-day blockbuster — kick-started by Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and thrown into high gear by George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — never operated in a more chaotic, or mercenary, fashion than it did in this big-budget work of art-by-committee. There was its small army of screenwriters, credited and uncredited (including the author of “Godfather,” Mario Puzo); the decision to shoot the film and its sequel simultaneously in order to increase the return on investment; the fortune thrown at Marlon Brando for just a few minutes of screen time as Superman’s Kryptonian father; the conflicts between director Richard Donner and his producers that led to his ouster before the sequel was completed (Richard Lester stepped in): All in all, the process was as industrial as building a car.

But all that fades away the moment the movie begins. The visual effects, most notably the Zoptic front-projection system that made Superman’s flight convincing, won an Oscar. The star-studded supporting cast, with Margot Kidder as a vivacious Lois Lane, Brando as Jor-El and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, gave the thing gravitas. Finally, there’s Superman himself: Christopher Reeve, in a performance so effortlessly charming yet rooted in thoughtful physicality, it forever associated him with the role. His instantaneous change in posture and expression when he switches between Superman and Clark Kent remains a wonder to behold.

The Reaganomicon: ‘RoboCop’ (1987)

Where to watch: Stream it on DirecTV Now or IFC; rent it from iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Despite the success of “Superman” and its even better sequel, “Superman II,” the standard superhero seemed a little superfluous in the 1980s. With President Ronald Reagan telling tales of good versus evil straight out of a comic book, and action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sculpting their physiques to cartoon-worthy levels, who needed spandex?

Enter “RoboCop,” the sci-fi satirist Paul Verhoeven’s biting black comedy in ultraviolent action-hero drag. In a dystopian future where hospitals are driven by profit and police departments use military-grade weaponry — imagine all that! — a badly-wounded rookie cop (played by the unlikely action star Peter Weller) is fitted by a creepy corporation with cybernetic enhancements that increase his lethality but wipe out his memory. The story of a super-cop literally fighting against his own programming in order to reclaim his humanity — in a city being stripped for parts by the superrich — is as poignant now as it was in Reagan’s America.

Blockbuster Begins: ‘Batman’ (1989)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Almost as soon as the TV show “Batman” went off the air, darker material began to ferment in the comic-book depictions of the Caped Crusader and his peers. “Batman” was the blockbuster that brought this grimmer vision roaring into multiplexes and the mainstream consciousness. Directed with confident neo-noir style by Tim Burton, the movie pivoted off works like the cartoonist Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and employed an array of talent — the composer Danny Elfman; the production designer Anton Furst; and Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson as Batman and his psychopathic nemesis, the Joker — working at or near their career peaks.

While “Batman” remains one of the genre’s best films (the best, if you want my opinion), its industry innovations sometimes overshadow its aesthetic excellence. The movie’s PG-13 rating became standard for tent-pole movies, while its record-breaking box office enshrined opening-weekend revenue as a key measurement of a film’s success. “Batman” was an inescapable last gasp of Big ’80s monoculture; that summer, the bat symbol was nearly as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

I’m really glad my editors at the New York Times talked me into writing a cultural history of superheroes on film and television, touching on changing mores, aesthetics, technology, showbiz, and American society in general. I’m very proud of how this piece turned out, especially of the effort we made to give proper credit to the characters’ original creators. And there’s links to where you can watch every single movie and show on the list online!

Batman isn’t the star of The Dark Knight. That’s plain old conventional wisdom at this point. But Christian Bale’s foil, Heath Ledger’s iconic Joker, isn’t the star either. Not really. Nor is it Harvey Dent, Gotham’s white knight, or Jim Gordon, the archetypal honest cop, or Rachel Dawes, the doomed idealist, or Lucius Fox, the steady hand, or Alfred, the faithful servant.

The real star of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s cinematic superhero landmark, is the concept of ethical behavior — and the performance stinks.

Written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who’s currently taking an equally high-minded and heavy-handed approach to ethical issues in Westworld, The Dark Knight is fixated on the opposition between right and wrong, order and chaos, and hope and despair, all to a degree no other superhero movie as come close to touching. While most costumed-and-caped adventures are content to let such issues stay subtextual, with the superpowered slugfests between heroes and villains serving as a metaphor for these underlying conflicts, The Dark Knight spins them into the whole plot.

Who’s a better example for Gotham City to follow out of its long-standing hell of crime and corruption: Dent, an elected official who obeys the will of the people and observes the rule of law, or Batman, a self-appointed vigilante who follows no rules but his own? Who’s right about the nature of humanity, Batman, who wants to serve as a symbol to inspire the stifled good he believes exists within everyone, or the Joker, who wants to prove that all systems — from organized crime to democracy — are just pancake makeup applied to a scarred mass of nihilism and brutality? To stave off chaos, is it permissible to inflict order on the whims of one man?

The answers the film wants us to take away are obvious. Dent, not Batman, is the hero Gotham needs; Batman, not the Joker, sees the hearts of his fellow citizens clearly; even in the face of overwhelming danger, the power to stop it must be checked before it becomes just as dangerous.

These aren’t the answers that the film actually provides. By emerging just before the dawn of Barack Obama’s presidency, when the general consensus in America seemed sick and tired of the unending and overreaching War on Terror as it was of the terrorists said war was ostensibly designed to fight, The Dark Knight tapped into a national mood — the film repeatedly describes the Joker’s actions as “terrorism” — and sent the audience home with a positive message. But the film itself is a hopeless political muddle, constantly trying to have its liberty vs. security, order vs. anarchy, vigilantism vs. legitimacy cake and eat it, too.

I made my debut at Polygon as part of their enormous suite of stories on the 10th anniversary of The Dark Knight, with a look at the film’s much-ballyhooed, totally incoherent political and ethical stances.

Gather ’round, friends, and I’ll tell you a scary story. It’s a tale of political intrigue, in which right-wing politicians in a Western nation (culturally, if not geographically) conspire with the intelligence apparatus of authoritarians abroad to undermine democratic institutions and maneuver themselves into power. This story has it all: International hackers, compromising video of illicit liaisons between politicians and secret foreign spies, deep-state chicanery, romantic relationships between reporters and intelligence agents, false-flag terrorist attacks, a trans woman risking her life to expose abuses by the military-intelligence apparatus of which she’s a part, honeytraps, rampant xenophobia and racism, indefinite detention, allegations of fake news, attacks on the press, oppression of dissent…

Wait, you say you’ve heard this one before? And you haven’t watched Secret City, the Australian political thriller from Summer 2016 now playing in Summer 2018 in an American Netflix account near you?

In one of the most remarkable cases of art not imitating life but anticipating it, Secret City‘s short, sweet six-episode first season plays like a prophecy about the next two years of life in these United States, issued by a Canberra Cassandra who won’t be heard until it’s too late. And after the events that unfolded between America and Russia this week, it feels more relevant than ever — just swap a few proper nouns and serve hot.

I wrote a few pieces I’m proud of last week. First up, a few words on Secret City, the new-to-Netflix Australian political thriller from 2016…that just so happens to be basically America in 2018.

Vik spills his guts to Sierra, perhaps for the first time to anyone at all. All his life, he says, he has struggled to be the good immigrants’ son, “parenting” his own parents by studiously living up to all their dreams instead of his own. The one exception he carved out for himself was to build a family on his own terms, but that, too, is now tainted: He got together with a single mother partly as an act of rebellion, and now he is demanding she have a baby for their sake rather than for his or hers. “I’m going to die, and I haven’t really made a single choice for myself,” he says, before collapsing into sobs.

The actor Omar Metwally is frighteningly committed to this scene, digging up and spilling out a profound sense of failure and loss. In turn, his partner in the scene, Emily Browning, makes Sierra feel like a lived-in, serious presence, despite her narrative function as a vehicle for Vik’s moments of self-realization and infidelity.

The confession (and, admittedly, the very hot sex scene) is “The Affair” in a nutshell. This is a show about the gender-based shapes society allows our self-image and suffering to take. Noah is the guy who played by the rules but never got the chance to break them. Helen is the perfect partner and mother who has had a hard time making it look easy. Cole is the Good Guy who just cares too much. Alison is a Magdelene-like martyr-siren. I was all prepared to type out something about how Vik is the Good Son and the Model Minority who has never really lived for himself. But then he went ahead and said it for me.

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of The Affair for the New York Times. I realized afterwards that there’s a trick to watching this show similar to the one you have to pull off with Starship Troopers: Everything you’re seeing is the product of an in-world mindset.

Also, if you’re into watching beautiful actors fuck, and if you aren’t what the hell are you watching movies and TV for, this episode has you covered. Joshua Jackson, Phoebe Tonkin, Omar Metwally, Emily Browning, goodness gracious me.

It’s an enormously tantalizing note to end on. Yet I can’t help but wish it really was the end. I know that political thrillers tend to be endlessly iterative, and detectives and spies are as franchiseable as superheroes. But Secret City already started stumbling over itself here in the end, and now we know it’s done so without the satisfaction of a self-contained story to compensate for it.

No one’s going to complain about seeing more Anna Torv, a natural-born leading actor for this sort of story, that’s for sure. There’s a throwaway moment in this episode, when she has a tension-breaking laugh about her cop pal Bremmer’s target-shooting prowess in which she jokes she’ll safe as long as all their attackers are made of paper, that’s as human and incisive as anything you’re likely to see in a genre work this year. But Torv, and Harry, deserved a conclusion as well-drawn and decisive as Harry herself. I wish they’d gotten it.

I reviewed the season finale of Secret City for Decider. It tripped up in the end, which is a shame.

Filmed in 2016, Secret City is a dystopian vision of a future for Australia that has already come to pass in America. That’s what I can’t get over, watching the fifth and penultimate episode of the show’s first season (“Ghosts in the Machine”). I mean, it’s uncanny. Right-wing influence peddlers collude with authoritarian foreign governments to consolidate power. They use fear of non-white foreign hordes to drum up xenophobic fever. They take advantage of the previously existing, already unaccountable security and surveillance apparatus — left intact by a left-wing government in order to look tough — to consolidate power even further. Like I said in my previous review, all you need to do is change a few nationalities around, and this thing isn’t a drama, it’s a documentary.

[…]

In the end, I think the point Secret City is trying to make as it closes in on its final hour is that politics as warped as those being practiced here is pulp. If politics is the art of the possible, as the saying goes, and it’s possible to detain a journalist without a warrant and disappear her into a Kafkaesque nightmare only the lawyers of the country’s top newspaper can get her out of — and only just in time, since legislation has been passed to prevent this — well then, there’s really no limit to what politics can be, right? Compromised cabinet members, clandestine meetings, rampant corruption, flagrant human rights abuses, crackdowns on dissidents: Anything goes. Are a few bodice-ripping hookups and pitched gun battles really that outlandish in a political landscape that seems torn from a fever dream?

I reviewed episode five of Secret City for Decider. There’s some sex stuff in this one, too!

In the contemporary internet sense, the Dune discourse is wild and wide open, without the warring-camp, protect it at all costs mentality that plagues so many other geek-culture staples. If you say “The spice must flow,” you aren’t risking hours of replies from angry pedants the way you might if, oh I don’t know, you point out that in Justice League, Aquaman’s trident (from the Latin for “three teeth”) has five points instead of three. Unless you try very hard, you’re also unlikely to encounter anyone complaining that Dune has been ruined by SJWs and soyboys, or that critics who like it have been bought off by that sweet De Laurentiis money. Yet it’s still a sprawling invented world that provides you with all the esoterica and trivia and map-reading and jargon-slinging joy of any other. You can get stoned and stay up until the wee hours making dank Duncan Idaho memes with your friends, or with no one at all, completely unmolested.

And perhaps I’m going out on a limb here, but based on the source material and the filmmakers historically associated with adapting it — including Villeneuve, whose Blade Runner movie gives us a solid recent point of comparison — Dune-iverse phrases like “Tleilaxu ghola” or “prana-bindu training” or “He is the Kwisatz-Haderach” are never gonna reach “Infinity Stones” or “Ten points for Gryffindor” or “A Lannister always pays his debts” levels. Anyone who’s seen the very real Dune coloring and activity books, which look like an elaborate prank, can attest to how tough it is to boil this stuff down to four-quadrant consumability. It’s true that the books are bestsellers, but so is the comparable work of Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, which became a well-regarded science-fiction film that nevertheless won’t be getting Happy Meal tie-ins anytime soon.

No matter how much Lynch’s version trends upward in critical estimation, no matter how (or if) Villeneuve’s new version pans out, this is just not a franchise that’s scalable in the Transformers or Harry Potter way. It’s too dense, too weird. It smells like sun-bleached library paperbacks. Which, by the way, are the only form in which Dune has been successfully franchised, in the form of sequels co-authored by workmanlike SFF writer Kevin J. Anderson and Herbert’s son Brian. Dune references signal shared knowledge to those in the know, and that’s about it. Dune fandom is an un-fandom.

More than anything else, this is what makes immersion in Dune such an attractive prospect. Paul Atreides found anonymity, friendship, and freedom in the secret ways of the unconquerable Fremen desert tribes (Fremen, “free men,” get it?); his life after that point was a prolonged struggle to export that sense of freedom to others. Consciously or not, Herbert himself summed up the promise of Paul’s life in his introduction to New World or No World, repackaging it as a plan for the survival of the species and the planet we live on.

“The thing we must do intensely is be human together,” he wrote. “People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans a head of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. Together.” Dune is one small, goofy, vital way of sharing something wonderful with each other, and with nothing and no one else.

For my debut at The Outline I wrote about Dune, the nerdiest popular thing you can enjoy without feeling like a corporate shill or a footsoldier in some weird fandom war. I went real long and real deep, so please take a look!

The contrast between actors Dan Wyllie as Mal and Sam Fraser as his son Dylan works well, too. Dylan’s as estranged from his dad as you’d expect the quasi-failson of a wealthy government official who sent him to boarding school hundreds of miles away to be. That this gets reflected in their physicality — Dylan is tall, lean, pale, thin-lipped, with bass in his voice; Mal feels napoleonic in dimensions and demeanor, with a big mouth, convex eyes, and a raspy tenor — is very smart casting indeed. So when they do bridge the gap, as when Dylan quietly insists on coming to work with his dad and Mal acquiesces, or when Mal gently ribs Dylan about his conspiracy-theorist, Walter White wannabe friends, or when Mal employs Dylan for a little surreptitious surveillance of one of the right-wing generals calling the shots in the government now that Mal himself has been marginalized, you feel it in a way you wouldn’t if they looked like two peas in a pod.

[…]

The thing I keep thinking about while watching this show now is this: Secret City would be great for an American remake, with the governments of Russia or Israel or Saudi Arabia or any of the other foreign powers aiming firehoses of dirty money at the current regime standing in for China. But reality has clearly outpaced television. Secret City, a drama when it aired in 2016, feels more like a documentary from a slightly alternate reality in 2018.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Netflix’s Secret City for Decider. This is why I love doing episodic reviews: You can zoom in on details, which is where the stuff of art really is, and then you can cut back to the big picture.

Please click through to see a whole lot of lovely shot compositions that the Decider team captured and gif’d for me, too.