“The Affair” takes the work of adulthood seriously. That is different than saying that adults on “The Affair” always behave in a serious manner, or what passes for it in narrative fiction. Alison, Noah, Cole, Helen and all their various relatives, friends and lovers rarely make the linear progress we’d like to see from ourselves, or rise and fall in the more predictable arcs we enjoy from television characters.

They circle back on the same issues and reprocess the same traumas, yet they hide others for years. They repeatedly fall hard when Mr. or Ms. Right appears to come along, not letting past transformations into Mr. or Ms. Wrong stand in the way. And they hash it all out in arguments and heart-to-hearts, in therapeutic settings and in impetuous getaways, in sexual encounters that are as much about figuring things out as they are about feeling good. No one here is “adulting like a boss,” as the ultimately infantile pop culture phrase goes. On “The Affair,” people do adulthood like nine-to-fivers, like tipped workers, like freelancers with unstable incomes. It’s work, and it’s more refreshing than a dip in the ocean.

I continue to make the case for The Affair at the New York Times with my review of this week’s episode.

If there’s one thing Secret City has gotten right, it’s showing how hard we can cling to our preferred versions of the people we love. That’s an unusual statement to make regarding a cloak-and-dagger thriller about the menace of China Rising, but it’s true nonetheless. Episode 3 of Secret City finds its emotional center in the mourning for Kim Gordon, the slain spy who was once married to main character Harriet Dunkley, and it provides ample opportunity for writer Belinda Chayko and director Emma Freeman to demonstrate this maxim.

I reviewed the third episode of Secret City — featuring some really beautiful shot compositions, a magnetic performance by Anna Torv, and misgendering as a sign of villainy — for Decider.

I do have one concern, though, and upon thinking about it it’s a pretty major one: What is this for? Don’t get me wrong: Anna Torv and Damon Herriman (a cis male actor cast as a trans woman, he steers clear from the showy pitfalls such performers often leap into, even when the material all but frogmarches him in) are both magnificent in this segment, and if anything it’s a shame they won’t be given a chance to repeat this performance together. Yet I’m sitting here watching these characters in terror and pain because, what, there’s some opaque shenanigans and skullduggery going on in a pissing contest between Australia and China, involving a bunch of unlikable bureaucrats we’re treating like fun antiheroes and flat-affect spies who can best be described as “sinister Asians”?

The stories of spycraft that have really mattered to me — The Americans, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Joseph Conrad’s relatively obscure but beautifully bleak novel Under Western Eyes — wedded their characters’ zealous, often murderous and amoral patriotism to a sense of colossal waste. It’s impossible to walk away from those stories feeling like you’ve watched an edge-of-your-seat thriller and nothing else, not when they’re based on the idea that espionage is a soul-destroying, life-destroying business. Unless and until Secret City gets serious not just about the deaths of people like Kim, but the whole fraudulent and poisonous enterprise for which such people died, it’s not a city I really want to live in.

I reviewed the second episode of Secret City, which is maybe a bit too good for its own good in terms of wedding well-made characters to a potboiler, for Decider.

Stream This Absurdist but Empathetic Documentary About Live-Action Gamers

A scene from “Darkon.” Ovie Entertainment

‘Darkon’ Where to Watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime; rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, or YouTube. Save it to your Watchlist.

This 2006 documentary from Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel takes its title from the Darkon Wargaming Club, a society of live-action role players in suburban Baltimore. Strapping on homemade armor and whacking each other with foam-padded weapons, these weekend warriors (and wizards and elves) gather to enact elaborate story lines of conquest and intrigue. But peel away the helms and tunics, and you’ll find a diverse group of people, driven by personal or economic dislocation to find fulfillment in an imaginary world: a stay-at-home father, a single mother, a young businessman, a teenage misfit.

“Darkon” is bracingly honest — and, in the context of today’s cultural conversations, prophetically relevant — about the limits of escapism. And the determination its subjects display in using their own imaginations to find agency and joy is deeply moving. At a time when wide swathes of nerd culture have gone toxic, the downtrodden but upbeat adventurers of “Darkon” are downright inspiring. — Sean T. Collins Stream an Overlooked, Terrifying Slice of Satanic Panic From John Carpenter Alice Cooper, center, in “Prince of Darkness.” Universal Pictures   ‘Prince of Darkness’ Where to Watch: Rent it on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Vudu. Save it to your Watchlist. The writer and director John Carpenter birthed the slasher film with “Halloween,” reinvented the creature feature with “The Thing” and created the sci-fi dystopia of our age with “They Live.” The guy is good. But he has never been better than in one of his most overlooked efforts, “Prince of Darkness” (1987). This bone-deep-disturbing supernatural horror film pits an outmatched team of professors and students against Satan himself, who appears in the form of a swirling green ooze that the Catholic Church has kept sealed away for centuries. As that evil essence permeates the claustrophobic and abandoned urban church where they’re trapped, the academics’ mission switches from study to survival. Simply put, this movie just feels wrong. Both the story’s structure and the entity’s powers shift constantly, preserving the power to shock. The theology underpinning the horror, meanwhile, is perverse enough to make even my extremely lapsed Catholic jaw drop. If you liked the madness of “Hereditary,” bow to the “Prince.” — Sean T. Collins

I’ve begun contributing movie recommendations to Watching, the New York Times’ fun and useful email newsletter that offers tips on good movies and TV shows available to stream on pretty much any and every service and network. It’s free to subscribe, and the newsletters don’t appear anywhere else online (unless I copy and paste my segments, like so, which I shan’t be doing again), so go sign up!

“All right, so, let me get this straight. She was married to you, and then she cheated with you, and then she left you for you, and then she cheated on you with you, and then she had your baby, but then said it was your baby. Did I get that right?”

Sure, I could identify the men referred to by each use of the word “you” in the above monologue, delivered by the high-school student Anton Gatewood to his teacher Noah Solloway and Noah’s former romantic rival Cole Lockhart. But would it really even matter? Watching the actor Christopher Meyer say all this stuff from the back seat of a car to the two men in the front, his head swiveling back and forth as if he were watching some kind of bizarre, psychosexual Wimbledon, says it all. As an encapsulation of the chaos into which the titular relationship on “The Affair” plunged its various participants, Anton nails it. And judging from the cryptic flash-forwards that have opened each episode of Season 4 so far — in which Noah, Cole and Anton embark upon what appears to be a search for Alison Bailey — there’s more chaos to come.

But this particular brand of interpersonal mayhem takes a back seat to more immediate professional and physical concerns in this week’s episode, which returns us to the Los Angeles half of this season’s story. While Noah navigates the rocky waters of class, race and faculty politics at the charter school where he works, his ex-wife Helen and her boyfriend, Vic, receive a devastating medical diagnosis that throws their already strained relationship into greater turmoil. Connecting the two story lines is the sense that life is turmoil and chaos, and that the times we’re able to control it are happy accidents at best.

Savior complex: I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

I was thrilled to return to the terrific left-wing podcast Delete Your Account for another wide-ranging chat about pop culture in a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode! I joined co-hosts Roqayah Chamseddine and Kumars Salehi to talk about Janelle Monae, Westworld, Kanye West, Game of Thrones, Beyoncé & Jay Z, Solo & Star Wars, Roseanne, Drake vs. Pusha T, and much more. Go and subscribe and listen!

Looking back, do you have a favorite moment from shooting?

Harris: Pag Island.

Menzies: The time on Pag Island? Really? That’s interesting.

Harris: Yeah, that was a fantastic place for us to shoot. It was totally different when we were in Budapest, because people were in and out from London for their bits. Once we were on Pag Island, everyone was there for six weeks, so we all got to hang out properly. And it was just gorgeous. So bleak and beautiful. The [tourist] season hadn’t started yet, so we had the run of the town to ourselves, and there was a really lovely feeling to it.

Menzies: In terms of filming, I think [my favorite moment was] finally doing our long walk-and-talk with you, up there on the high ground of that island.

Harris: Yeah, that was good. We rehearsed that a lot just the two of us. We would go for walks around the little town.

[Your favorite part] wasn’t playing against Pag F.C., Tobias? Taking on the locals?

Menzies: You know what? That was a bit of a letdown, because the day before I pulled a muscle in my leg so I couldn’t really play. I remember being disgusted about that. That might have been a high point, but not for me.

It might have been watching you order pink drinks around various continents. [Laughs.] Jared is very partial to a pink cocktail, so I saw more pink cocktails than I think I’d ever seen.

Harris: Yes, yes. I do love pink cocktails. My theory is that pink cocktails are very potent.

Menzies: You mean they’re more potent the pinker they are?

Harris: Yes. The only thing more potent than a pink cocktail is a blue cocktail, but …

Menzies: What? I’m going to accuse you of false science. What the hell is that? Blue is better than pink?

Harris: No, blue cocktails are very potent as well, but you’re properly forewarned when you look at a blue cocktail. Pink cocktails look quite friendly. They have an umbrella in them, some sort of fruit … they look innocent, and boy do they pack a punch.

Here’s a very silly excerpt from what is otherwise a very serious interview I conducted with Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies about their work on The Terror, the best show of the year so far, for Vulture.

“Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad” is a genre of prestige — or at least prestige-adjacent — television I’ve avoided until now. So too is its auxiliary wing, “American Version of Grim-Faced Murder Detectives Abroad.” Secret City, the new crime drama from Netflix, is a little bit of both. Set in Canberra, Australia, the country where it originally aired in 2016, it’s one of the many many foreign shows branded with the American streaming-media behemoth’s familiar red N. Its star, Fringe‘s Anna Torv, also co-headlines the David Fincher serial-killer series Mindhunter, a hit for the network (as far as anyone knows; Netflix is infamously opaque about such things). Despite predating Mindhunter, this gives Secret City the feel of a side project, a place Torv can use her native accent and look less like Carrie Coon while still dealing with the same basic matters of investigation, intrigue, and murder most foul. If Mindhunter is her Parliament-Funkadelic, Secret City is Bootsy’s Rubber Band.

I reviewed the first episode of Secret City on Netflix for Decider. Based on one episode out of a total of six, it’s a so-so show with a strong lead and at least one interesting supporting character.

Coincidence, synchronicity, luck of the draw: If any show on television is aware that these mysterious forces are often less than benign, it’s “The Affair.” The series’s titular relationship began with what seemed like kismet between a frustrated father and a grieving mother, and it ended in a slow-motion crack-up of the families involved. In the process, Noah landed in prison for a death he didn’t cause, covering for both his current wife and his former one. And those are just the two most prominent instances among many.

Which brings us to tonight’s episode, in which the often traumatic experiences of undocumented immigrants plays a central role in the story — airing, it just so happens, on a week when it has played a central role in American life and politics.

True, the back story behind Cole’s second wife, Luisa, was planted when she first appeared on the show; Sarah Treem, the series’s co-creator and its sole showrunner, has long had an eye for the undercurrents in this country that can drag otherwise fully functional adults down. Indeed, another such riptide, the small-town drug epidemic made manifest by the Lockhart family’s coke-dealing side hustle, popped up again this week after many, many hours of screentime had elapsed since it last played a part.

Still, this week’s installment, written by Treem and directed with Atlantic Ocean coolness by Rodrigo García, brings home the difficulties faced by America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants by tying it to quotidian and universal events. Let’s say you aren’t an undocumented immigrant, or don’t know any personally: You’ve almost certainly experienced the stomach-dropping dread that comes with seeing the lights of a cop car in your rearview mirror. You’ve probably also at some point felt like the odd person out, prevented by circumstances beyond your control from truly fitting into the life of a person you love. And you’ve most likely wondered why people who are supposed to care about you are too tied up in their own petty concerns to treat your plight with the seriousness it deserves.

That’s Luisa’s story, told from Cole’s perspective over the course of a bad couple of days in their life. For those of us in the real world, the timing could not be better. (Or worse.)

I reviewed last week’s typically on-the-money episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Does the series still work? Did it ever? Appropriately, that may depend on your perspective. There’s an old saw taken from therapists and their countless dramatized depictions that sums up the experience of watching “The Affair” quite neatly: “How does that make you feel?” And from its very first hour, when its multi-perspective template was established, this series has emphasized feeling, serving more as a vehicle for impressionism rather than for realism. The differences among its characters’ competing histories speak to a basic truth about the unreliability of memory, but some of them are probably too major to explain away as tricks of the mind. (I mean, two totally different people saved the same kid from choking to death all the way back in the pilot.) As such, I have long believed that the best way to process “The Affair” is as a portrait of those mindsets, not as an effort to reconstruct the truth.

Viewed from that perspective, all the sex, lies, self-destruction, screaming matches and occasional violent outbursts and murder mysteries are merely the screen on which the series projects its kaleidoscopic picture — a picture of the ways in which grief, guilt, lust, love, parenthood, couplehood, marriage, divorce, age, class and (especially) the limits of traditional gender roles replace reality, deep down inside us. And if you can accept that, then “The Affair” winds up looking like one of the smartest, most observant, most empathetic things on television — the most truly adult show since “Mad Men.” You just have to let yourself feel it.

So how does it feel? Not always great, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Helen and (especially) Noah aren’t merely unreliable narrators in this episode, they’re also unpleasant ones. The series — and the actors Maura Tierney and Dominic West — isn’t afraid to make these people ugly, and to look ugly doing it. They pay the price every time a viewer or critic says, “Get your act together, Helen,” or, “Ugh, Noah is the worst.” But expecting otherwise treats that ugliness (to echo Helen) as if it were the show’s “fault” rather than its strength. That misses the point.

Because if you’ve reached adulthood without ever failing to get your act together or being the worst … well, bless your heart, because that sure doesn’t look like life from where I’m sitting. “The Affair” — angry, guilty, horny, and as restless as the ocean Fiona Apple sings about in the opening credits — does.

I’m excited to be covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, beginning with this review of the season premiere. Co-creator and showrunner Sarah Treem saw this review and said “I’ve never seen anyone articulate what I’m trying to do on this show as clearly,” so there’s that.

The funny thing is that despite the length of the finale and the glacial pace of most of the preceding episodes, Westworld Season Two still feels like it just barely got started. Take away the shifting time frames and the occasional detour into Flashback Country, and what have you got? A road movie in which characters who either perpetrated or survived Season One’s climactic massacre all head to the Valley Beyond. A bunch of robotic redshirts and a few supporting players get killed. A few other supporting players make it through to a virtual-reality paradise while Bernard, Dolores and the Man in Black live on (in one form or another) in the real world to fight another day.

It’s not a bad narrative, necessarily. From The Warriors to the freaking Odyssey, plenty of good work concerns its characters’ quest to get from Point A to Point B without losing their lives or souls in the process. But the show’s parameters for the park are too vague to give their journey a sense of direction. All we know is that it’s really, reallybig. That, and there are strategically located bunkers and hideouts just a few minutes of screentime away from wherever the characters are at any given moment so they’re never in real danger of getting lost.

Meanwhile, the constant cross-cutting between storylines dilutes our investment in the physical journey of any one character or group, since we know we’ll be whisked away to some other place and time at any moment. There’s a reason the Akecheta episode hit as hard as it did, even aside from Zahn McClarnon’s performance: It rooted us in the experiences and perils of a single character for an entire episode, in a way that made us feel what was at stake – and that no amount of Dolores monologues could equal.

And we don’t even have a recognizable endpoint in mind to serve as an anchor, the equivalent of The Lord of the Rings‘ Mount Doom. “The Valley Beyond” is amorphous even by the show’s standards (at least Season One’s “Maze” implies a central location). It’s just a bunch of rocks in the middle of a Western landscape like countless others the characters have crossed, and even as a metaphysical concept it’s just a bog-standard promised land. To paraphrase Bernard’s imaginary Ford, you might as well have spent the season chasing the horizon.

Which is a bit like the experience of watching Westworld itself. There are enough individual elements at play – concepts, creature effects, a handful of strong performances – to make you believe it could all come together at some point. There’s a consistent leap of faith needed, a fingers-crossed hope that the show will Get Good the way many other dramas that suffered shaky starts eventually did. Yet all our pathways keep leading us to the same place: clichéd dialogue, meaningless twists, plodding pacing. And the good Westworld remains, as ever, its own Valley Beyond, maddeningly out of reach.

I reviewed the blah season finale of the blah show Westworld’s blah second season for Rolling Stone. I wanted to post this long an excerpt for a couple of reasons. First, it’s me riffing on one of my favorite topics: the way film can use the motion of bodies and objects across physical space to communicate. Second, and more on this soon, it illustrates a point I frequently try to make, which is that rather than start with thematic or sociopolitical critiques and work downward, you can often start with seemingly small formal considerations of cinematography, writing, performance, etc. and discover how they work upward toward larger flaws.

I’d also recommend reading my new Rolling Stone colleague Alan Sepinwall’s thoughts on the season; we realized early on that our takes were very complementary.

Evan Rachel Wood’s performance since her transformation into the Deathbringer has been impressive in its steeliness, but her hard-ass attitude and mechanical lack of emotion have left her little to do than act like a grumpy robot unless there’s something especially traumatic for her to process. We saw how well she could play that kind of emotion when she encountered the ruin of her father, his computerized mind torn to pieces by having too much data pumped into it.

Here, over the body of the man with whom she’s shared so much, we see it again. There’s something weird and alien in how her face registers the pain of Teddy’s death, as if her internal processors have to learn what grief feels like from scratch and figure out an appropriate physical response. Her face goes weirdly flat, then asymmetrical, then contorts in an animalistic silent howl of anguish and rage. It’s acting as creation, using the face and body to build a new way of expressing a familiar emotion. You want a metaphor for how good sci-fi operates? You got it. If only Westworld gave it to us more often.

Three weeks ago I reviewed the penultimate episode of Westworld Season 2 for Rolling Stone. It’s a return to mediocre form after the beautiful Zahn McClarnon/Akecheta episode from the previous week. One thing that emerged really strongly to me this season is how badly the material hamstrings even the best actors on the show, and there are some really good ones, and how in the hands of less-good actors (it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Tessa Thompson is at it again) it just goes nowhere at all.

Solo: A Star Wars Podcast

A long time ago, in a theater near you, a movie named Solo: A Star Wars Story came out. It feels like an eternity has passed since then and now, but what better time to listen to Sean & Stefan discuss the movie that seemed to shatter the Star Wars franchise into a million weird pieces? In this episode recorded a week after the film’s release, we talk about director Ron Howard’s Han Solo origin story — the action, the acting, what worked and didn’t, how it stacks up against the other post-Lucas SW movies and the larger series in general, its place in the bizarre post-Last Jedi debate among fans and critics, how Disney-Lucasfilm screwed up its release and the future of the franchise, and more. If you’re sick to death of the state of the Star Wars discourse, we think you’ll dig what we do in this one. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 76

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All of Sean’s recent-ish Star Wars writing.

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What a way to cap a season in which this ruthlessly entertaining and intelligent show, so gimlet-eyed about the corrupting influence of power and so deft at depicting its argot and appeal, finally brought in the buzz it has long deserved. To paraphrase the Hulkster, “Billions”-mania is running wild, brother. Long may it flex.

I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times. What a pleasure to write about this show this season!

If you want something done right, give it to actor Zahn McClarnon to do. That’s the logical conclusion to draw coming out of this week’s episode of Westworld, titled “Kiksuya” – and the series’ best hour by a considerable margin. For once, the show’s annoyances (easy escapes, constant pointless bickering, those damn orchestral alt-rock cover versions) aren’t enough to overwhelm the material of real value. It took one of its most underutilized cast members, placed him at the center of a storyline that directly addressed the series’ sci-fi conceit but combined it with real mythmaking power and then let him run. The warrior Akecheta may not save Ghost Nation and its many human captives, but he just might have saved this show.

Until now, McClarnon had only been required to do is act mysterious and menacing – which is easy to do when you’re covered head to toe in death-cult warpaint – and spend a little time in a real-world flashback scene looking smart and suave. (The dude is all cheekbones.) But if you watched Fargo Season Two, you know that this actor is capable of so much more. As Hanzee Dent, the Native American enforcer for a Midwestern crime family, he was a nearly mute murder machine whose every move and murmur carried the weight of the whole rotten world. His reading of a weary, whispered line like “Tired of this life” – so tired that even identifying himself as said life’s owner was too much to bear – was all he needed to make himself the season’s greatest monster and its wounded moral heart.

This is the McClarnon we get tonight.

Last night’s Westworld was, by a considerable margin, the best episode of the series. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone.

26. ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ (2001)

Meet the only film on this (or any other) list in which a deranged Vietnam veteran played by Law & Order: SVU’s Christopher Meloni learns valuable life lessons from a talking can of vegetables that can suck its own dick. (“And I do it a lot.”) With a gaggle of alums from the influential sketch comedy group the State both in front of and behind the camera – and a cast of soon-to-be superstars including Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd – this send-up of raunchy Reagan-era teen comedies has an anything-for-a-laugh approach that actually gets laughs every time. This one-time cult curiosity has since spawned two Netflix spinoff series … as well as a legendary DVD audio commentary track that just adds extra fart sounds.

I contributed a pair of write-ups to Rolling Stone’s list of the best comedies of the century so far, featuring the usual murderers’ row of writers. Enjoy!

Bill Mantlo’s versatile writing and Ed Hannigan’s expressive art helped these au courant characters make a strong first impression. The two collaborated on the pair’s design in particular, and the results speak for themselves, from the swirling void of Ty’s dark cloak to the daring dagger-shaped décolletage of Tandy’s bodysuit. Not to mention that the color contrast between the characters’ costumes are a bit like if the black-and-white outfits that artist John Romita Sr. designed for fearsome figures like the Punisher or Bullseye had been split into two people. The look also anticipated artist Mike Zeck’s design for Spider-Man’s black costume and its eventual incarnation as Venom a few years later.

C&D earned their own mini-series in 1983 and an ongoing comic two years later, both illustrated by Rick Leonardi. But despite, or perhaps because of, their combination of two of the era’s biggest trends – teen teams and “good guys” who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty – they never wound up hitting the heights of other anti-heroes. Still, the strength of the design, and the mixed-up-kids-bound-by-fate concept, kept them from fading from the spotlight completely.

Sadly, both Mantlo and Hannigan have suffered debilitating health crises: Mantlo was permanently incapacitated after being struck by a hit-and-run driver in 1992, while Hannigan suffers from multiple sclerosis. Despite the strength of their creation, the financial struggles endemic in the dog-eat-dog comics industry have made them causes célèbres for fans and charities alike.

I wrote a primer on Cloak and Dagger in anticipation of their new Freeform tv series for Rolling Stone.

Moment 21 | Westerosworld

From HBO’s dreams to BLAM’s reality! It’s a crossover between the concepts of two of TV’s biggest shows on this edition of our Patreon-exclusive mini-podcast, courtesy of subscriber Chris Schera, who asks what storylines we’d want to take part in if a Westeros-themed Westworld-style android theme park existed. This was a fun one — click here to subscribe and listen for just $2 a month!

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

This week, on “Billions”: Salt Bae.

The viral-video sensation and steakhouse hearthrob Nusret Gokce makes an unexpected appearance to open the episode. Of all the real-life restaurateurs, athletes and hedge-fund aristocracy who’ve appeared on this show, none made me laugh harder at their sheer delightful audacity. Come to think of it, I don’t know if anything on TV has made me laugh harder than this.

The look of lust in the eyes of Condola Rashad’s normally unflappable attorney Kate Sacker, accompanied by the sensual strains of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” on the sound system, simply add additional seasoning to the scenario. Silly as it sounds, the scene is a textbook example of the attention to detail “Billions” pays to its Manhattan machinations. The show never settles for satisfying when spectacular will do.

Billions is so good. I reviewed this week’s episode for the New York Times.

It was the best of worlds, it was the worst of worlds. Like no episode before it, this week’s voyage to Westworld (“Les Écorchés”) was the proverbial non-stop action thrill ride – a carnival midway of cool sci-fi/horror imagery and visceral combat. It had James Marden’s Teddy going full Terminator, dressed in body armor and beating short-lived security badass Coughlin to death with his bare hands. It has both Clementine and Angela going out in blazes of glory, the latter by blowing up the hosts’ backup files in the Cradle and setting them free from the park’s endless loop. It has a beautifully shot face-off between Maeve and the Man in Black, the camera resting on Thandie Newton’s foregrounded face as she uses her psychic powers to turn the MiB’s own android allies against him. It has a creepy Bluebeard closet full of Bernard replicas and the real version getting possessed by the electronic spirit of his own creator so he can murder Delos thugs guilt-free. In short, it’s full of rad-ass robot shit.

[…]

The same cannot be said of the new narrative’s antagonist. Frankly, it’s time to come to terms with Charlotte Hale. Obviously, Tessa Thompson’s on a career hot streak – but the character of Hale is ice cold, and not in the unflappable-villain way she’s supposed to be either. There’s just nothing interesting about this one-note one-percenter, or the smirking way in which Thompson delivers every line. She has the mocking affect of a condescending reply from a Trump supporter on Twitter. She’s obnoxious when she has the upper hand over Peter Abernathy and Bernard in their respective torture chambers, and she’s just as irritating when her picked-on minion Stubbs, or rogue hosts Dolores and Teddy, have the upper hand on her in turn.

I reviewed tonight’s Westworld, which was both good pulpy fun and incredibly stupid, for Rolling Stone.