Until now, this show has been focused on plot, layering mystery upon mystery and expertly building a world. But it has done so at the expense of building characters, who have mostly been along for the ride. By keeping the focus on character, and on the truths they uncover, this episode reversed the show’s polarity in a welcome way. With any luck, the change will stick.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is back! For our 200th episode (!!!), Stefan and I tackle the big one: The Red Wedding. The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on the internet, baby! Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The smile on my face when I saw this week’s episode of Silo was called “Descent” could have powered every level above 125. After all, Silo excels when it digs deep into some simple, specific challenge — get from Point A to Point B despite Obstacle C; use Thing 1 to acquire Thing 2 by powering up Thing 3 — and it’s set in, y’know, a pair of massive underground Silos. I figured, well, someone’s gotta get from the top to the bottom of one of these suckers, and when it comes to that kind of action, this is a show you can trust.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

This climactic act of self-harm is one of Before’s gnarliest moments yet, which is saying something. I’ve yet to find the show genuinely scary — the rapid editing of many of the frightening visions and the breakneck pace of these short episodes overall largely preclude building any sense of real dread — but it’s admirably disgusting, that’s for sure. Billy Crystal just did the Joker’s disappearing pen trick on his own hand, for crying out loud. Not something you see every day!

[…]

All of this happens in the timespan of a network sitcom, which is wild to me. The show’s speed and staccato rhythm are unique, that’s for sure, though I’m not convinced they’re good for tension, fear, or atmosphere. What they do provide is an effective simulacrum of what Eli Adler’s battered brain must be going through. By the end of any given episode, you’ve seen so many insects and torn pages and bodily injuries and drowned ghosts and shots of Eli screaming in the snow, and (this is especially true of this episode) heard increasingly maddening noises like the drip-drop of a bathtub, the tick-tock of a clock, or the click-clack of a retractable pen, that shish-kebab’ing your hand almost feels like a reasonable response. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Before for Decider.

Without Law’s star power and talent, carefully honed over decades, the kid characters just don’t hold up by comparison. Wim remains simultaneously defiant and credulous, two annoying traits that make him hard to take under almost any conditions. Fern, whose ability to take charge of the situation made her the hero of episode 2, comes across as boringly one-note in her opposition to Jod’s very clearly necessary involvement in their escape. Neel is cute, obviously, but cloying, and the lack of nuance in his voice acting can’t be made up for by physical performance since it’s just someone in big blue elephant mask or whatever.

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew

When you step on set on a huge production like this, with the giant sets and elaborate costumes, does that make your job easier?

A lot of actors definitely say all that makes it easier for them. I don’t know if it affects me, really. I appreciate the work that goes into creating those costumes and sets, but I always make it about the other person I’m acting with.

The worst thing for me is walking on a set, and there are so many people in the room, and I know at one point in the day I’m going to be the only person talking. I don’t do speeches. I didn’t read in front of the class. So that’s the most daunting stuff, when I get on set and think: Oh God, there’s a lot of extras and actors here, and I’m going to have to talk in front of everybody — shoot me.

How do you overcome that? It’s your job.

I know! I much prefer when there’s only one person in the scene with me. But I try to make the work high-stakes and meaningful enough to where I can ignore what I’m doing. That scene in [Episode 4] where I’ve got to speak in front of a lot of people, that stuff is extremely difficult for me.

I interviewed Travis Fimmel about his work as Desmond Hart on Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. Raised by Wolves forever.

Two blue lights shine in the darkness, like the eyes of an insectoid machine. Guttural sounds, like speech in a language not yet invented, accompany them, but only for a second.

Throughout “Dune: Prophecy,” this menacing pairing of sight and sound has recurred in dreams and visions. Are they the eyes of God, judging the Sisterhood, as Sister Emeline argues? Are they the eyes of the tyrannical force that Raquella, the Sisterhood’s first Mother Superior, warned about with her dying breaths? Are they the eyes of whatever entity gives Desmond Hart his “beautiful, terrible” power to burn people alive with his mind? Are all these things one and the same?

I suspect we’ll get the answer eventually, but part of me thinks that’s a shame. Right now, the blue lights and the garbled grunts are the most Lynchian thing this franchise has served up since the director David Lynch himself was in charge of it 40 years ago. And as Lynch has demonstrated time and again, sometimes the mystery is its own reward.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Juliette Nichols is an engineer by trade, helping to power the Silo. But what her job really does is power Silo, the show. Thanks to her background of mechanical know-how and pragmatic problem-solving, the show can serve up one seemingly insurmountable problem with a so-crazy-it-just-might-work solution after another. Then all it has to do is sit back and point its camera at a sweaty Rebecca Ferguson and a bedraggled coworker or two, and the result is some of the tightest, tensest action setpieces on television.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Silo for Decider.

It may have taken eight episodes, a shocking confession, an imaginative method of storytelling, a surfeit of eerie old photos (featuring a vanishing young Eli, notably), and a scary dream-farmhouse to get it there, but Before has some real dark energy to it now. Let’s hope that energy keeps building.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Aliens, droids, starships, a dangerous spaceport, a Jedi in hiding, and not a lawn in sight. Now that’s more like it! Directed with an eye for both creatures and color by David Lowery, this week’s episode of Skeleton Crew is good harmless Star Wars fun. That’s all I ask! Oh, and it also brings Michael Jackson’s Captain EO firmly into Star Wars continuity, for some reason?

I reviewed the second episode of Skeleton Crew, which is perfectly fine, for Decider.

There’s something disgusting about seeing lawns in Star Wars. Once, outside the living memory of many people who will watch Skeleton Crew, this franchise became a franchise because it showed people things they’d never seen before — or at the very least, remixed its disparate sources into something exciting and novel. Skeleton Crew opts for neatly rectangular patches of freshly mown grass, in front of tasteful two-story family homes with attached garages, lining a sunlit street down which cars drive as their occupants return from their commute to the city…in Star Wars. An entire galaxy to explore, and co-creators/co-writers Christopher Ford and Jon Watts (who also directs this episode) decided to recreate the environmentally ruinous, politically alienating post-war American suburb? My reaction was instant and instinctive: This is sick.

I reviewed the premiere of the new Star Wars show Skeleton Crew for Decider. (The next two episodes are much better, but good lord.)

Personally, I’m still waiting for these characters to reach out and grab me the way the heroes and villains of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” have done. The show is still cramming such huge globs of plot and exposition into every episode that it’s tough to get a real handle on anyone who isn’t Valya or Tula at the moment. This is a time in the series’s progression when character building should probably take precedence over world building.

Frank Herbert relied on an incredibly verbose and complex style of inner monologue as a means of building out his characters amid the incredibly dense worlds he was creating. That works well on the page, but as fans and detractors alike of David Lynch’s “Dune” can tell you, translating Herbert’s approach — whether with voice-over narration or some other means of revealing characters’ interior lives — is a tricky proposition. So far, the series is struggling to pull it off. But the answer for impatient viewers may be simply to do what so many of the schemers and planners of the Duniverse do: sit, wait and see what happens.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times.

My favorite scene, one of the best non-thriller scenes in the entire series in fact, has little do do with any of this. It’s just Bernard, stuttering and stammering and awkwardly telling Judge Meadows that he has to measure her for her surface suit. He does this with obvious sensuality, implying a whole universe of emotions between the two characters who were once so close, and giving actors Tanya Moodie and Tim Robbins a moment of serious displaced sexiness. In a way, it’s an echo of the later sit-down between Solo and Juliette: a man and a woman in intimate company, each glad for the presence of the other despite the dire circumstances. These are lovely notes for the show to play; considering the likelihood we’re getting an old-fashioned “Juliette does some engineering and some death-defying” sequence next episode as she goes diving for those firefighter uniforms, let’s enjoy the loveliness while we can.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

Dr. Eli Adler is not a Velvet Underground fan. I don’t know how else to explain his bafflement when Noah, his mysterious patient, puts on VU’s devastating junkie epic “Heroin,” causing the late addict Benjamin Walker’s brother Lawrence to break down and cry. Eli, I’m begging you, at least pick up The Velvet Underground and Nico! (Loaded too, if you want a different kind of sound, but that’s really neither here nor there.)

If I’m making light of this moment it’s not because I wasn’t affected it. Oh, on the contrary. In my review of last week’s episode I made no bones about my admiration for character actor Lenny Venito, who plays Lawrence…or Lonnie, as Noah calls him when he apologizes to him, speaking as his junkie brother Benjamin. Between the boy and the song and his memories of his brother playing it for him over and over — parents, this is a warning sign, but maybe it was also the only way the guy could communicate what he was going through to his baby brother — Lawrence crumbles. Using the incredible power of the song (they don’t even get to the part where Lou Reed sings the word “heeeeeeee-rooo-innnn” like the exhalation of a dying man) and Venito’s excellent performance, the show really makes you feel for the man, and for the brother he lost.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Javicco’s own bastard son, Constantine, gives up the goods on Desmond while in the middle of a lengthy sex scene with Duke Richese’s daughter, Lady Shannon (Tessa Bonham Jones), which unfolds languorously in an immense and ornately decorated hollow tree trunk. Detractors might call this kind of eroticized info-dump “sexposition,” a term frequently lobbed at “Game of Thrones.” It’s this critic’s opinion that if you have to get an earful about intergalactic politics, you may as well get it from good-looking naked people.

I reviewed this week’s Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times.

My publisher Mutual Skies informs me there are only 25 copies left in the neon-pink-and-sea-green second hardcover edition of my book Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. If you don’t have one, now’s the time to buy one!

All over the Silo’s brutalist concrete expanse, graffiti has begun popping up reading “JL” — Juliet Lives. 

Might it have been nice if she lived in this specific episode? Sure. Robbins, Common, Moodie, and Walter are lively screen presences, but Juliette’s steely glare is the show. I completely understand the decision to bifurcate these two storylines, for the time being anyway. Still, no doubt writer Fred Golan and director Michael Dinner knew they had an uphill climb, or upstairs in this case, facing them with this episode. There are defects in the script beyond that to be sure: Shirley’s rebelliousness is fairly rote, and I heard the word “tape” more in this 45-minute episode than in the hundreds of hours of TV I’ve watched all year long. 

But — much like this review! — this episode has a task to perform: It has to reintroduce the world, the story, the plot (from the big picture to the nitty-gritty storytelling mechanics), and the characters to the audience. All episode one had to do was show Rebecca Ferguson Indiana Jonesing herself through an abandoned Silo. The degree of difficulty was higher here, in other words, and for fewer rewards. If the task was just to refresh my memory and recommit me to the story, mission accomplished.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

That’s a digitally de-aged or deepfaked Young Judith Light, meeting cute with a similarly youth-ified Billy Crystal. Look, I know there are all sorts of issues surrounding this kind of technology — from the use of dead actors’ likenesses (not applicable here, fortunately) to the way a lack of consistency between de-aged actors and recast actors used to portray young versions of older characters can get confusing (it really threw me for a loop in Disclaimer, for example). But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a real gee whiz! feeling from seeing convincing versions of Crystal and Light in their early days as actors having an emotional moment together. I like Soap and Who’s the Boss? as much as the next guy, you know?

I reviewed this week’s Before for Decider.

My wife Julia Gfrörer’s forthcoming book World Within the World got a great review in the New York Times, which rules, and it mentions me and my contributions to the bok, which is an unexpected bonus. Go read! (Gift link!)

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FINALES OF THE CURSE AND FARGO SEASON 5

It’s this collapse of meaning that frightens me the most about The Curse. The idea of falling into the sky is a common enough fear for anyone who’s laid back and looked up at the blue yonder and suddenly found themselves gripping the grass a little tighter. Once it starts happening to Asher, he and Whitney and their employees come up with a series of rational explanations and practical solutions, none of which mean anything in the face of a power capable of flinging a human being clean off the face of the earth and into the frozen space beyond. Everything Asher believed was true ceased to be true, in the most rapid and complete way imaginable. 

Fargo slams the breaks on all that. There’s a version of this season that ends with a happy suburban family systematically executed by a supernatural entity whose only moral code is that debts must be paid, a version in which everything that spousal abuse survivor Dorothy Lyon was able to put together for herself and the new husband and child she loves is dumped into that metaphysical garbage can by a psychopath. In the case of this television program, anyway, that’s not the version we got.

I wrote about the January 2024 finales of Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie’s The Curse and Noah Hawley’s Fargo Season 5 as two contrasting visions of the future for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World. It’s a subscriber-only piece, so subscribe!