And it’s an emotionally intriguing note to end on, that’s for sure—a new Marvel Cinematic Universe hero, doing something pointedly anti-heroic, or even just straight-up bad. If we do wind up getting more Moon Knight adventures, Oscar Isaac’s lightly comic performance as all of the Moon Knight collective’s individual components will be the main selling point, no question; they’re what made this show so easy and fun to watch. But after that ending, I’ll be curious to see just how grim’n’gritty the character is allowed to get. I’d imagine that white costume dirties up pretty good.
“Moon Knight” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Gods and Monsters”
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Six, Episode Four: “Hit and Run”
But there are times when appearances tell us more than what’s going on beneath the surface does. At nearly every step of this story, Rhea Seehorn, directing herself, places her character Kim in front of bar-like vertical blinds, walls of glass bricks, a window grid. Slowly but surely, as she’s been doing since the series started, she’s sealing herself into a Saul Goodman–shaped trap, like a vacant office in a strip mall furnished solely with a toilet.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.
“We Own This City” thoughts, Episode Two
We Own This City knows its chief weapon is Jon Bernthal, that’s for sure. The show’s second episode is full of lingering close-ups on his character Wayne Jenkins as he does, well, nothing really—sitting and waiting in an interrogation room, in a jail cell, wherever, just impatiently thinking about his next move. Bernthal’s black-eyed charisma here is just off the charts; even in doing nothing, Jenkins feels so dangerous you don’t want to come near him.
I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Fourteen: “A Hard Way to Go”
But in the end, I enjoyed the bulk of my time in Ozark’s world. Clearly positioned as Netflix’s answer to the canonical prestive-TV crime dramas, it succeeded in creating a visually distinct world peopled with compellingly broken characters. With the exception of a Ben Davis here and a Ruth Langmore there, it never quite held the incandescent power of those earlier shows in its hands. But I appreciate the boldness of its core performances—Jason Bateman as the perpetually scowling Marty, Laura Linney as the crescendoingly dangerous Wendy, Julia Garner as the raw nerve that was Ruth Langmore. And I respect its bleak outlook, never bleaker than here in the finale—a view of a fallen world. Welcome to Ozark Country, population: us.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Thirteen: “Mud”
I’m starting to wonder if, in the end, we’ll look back at Ozark as primarily Wendy’s story rather than Marty’s or even Ruth’s. I wonder if watching her American dream completely fall to pieces, scattering dead bodies all along the way, is the whole point.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Twelve: “Trouble the Water”
“I know I’m not easy to love,” Wendy Byrde tells her husband Marty.
Long pause.
“…That’s not true,” he finally says.
But it’s the pause that does the talking here. I do believe Marty still loves Wendy, in that bone-deep way that people who’ve thrown their lot in together do—despite their bitter disagreements, despite their enmeshment in criminal conspiracy after criminal conspiracy, despite their constant life-and-death danger. Or maybe not despite them, but because of them. Hard though Wendy may be to love, I can’t see Marty taking her up on her suggestion that, after it’s all said and done, she’ll understand if he leaves her. They’re simply in too deep together. And in Ozark Season 4 Episode 12 (“Trouble the Water”) may well be where they finally start drowning.
I reviewed the antepenultimate episode of Ozark for Decider.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Eleven: “Pound of Flesh and Still Kickin'”
There’s other business to attend to in this episode, of course—Wendy and Camila attempting to force Claire Shaw to uphold her end of the old deal with Javi, Ruth getting declared Wyatt Langmore’s heir and thus the inheritor of a large portion of Darlene Snell’s holdings, FBI SAC Hannah Clay (Tess Malis Kincaid) trying to force Marty to remain in charge of the cartel—but I’ll freely admit to being most fascinated by the return of Rachel and Wilkes. These once-and-future main characters, seemingly swept aside for others, are now being put back in play for the show’s endgame. What will their moves at this late stage mean for the game at large? I have no idea—and that’s a thrilling place to be. More shows should leave the viewers guessing like this, I say. Bring it on.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Ten: “You’re the Boss”
Two momentous developments bookend Ozark Season 4 Episode 10. Both feature members of Wendy Byrde’s family. Both involve executions. But beyond that, they couldn’t be more different. It’s a hell of a parallel that writer John Shiban and director Melissa Hickey construct here, first showing us how a decent person dies, then how a deeply compromised person kills.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Nine: “Pick a God and Pray”
It’s business as usual in Ozark country. After a killer mid-season premiere that effectively functioned as an interlude based on a single plot point—the murder of Javi Elizondro by Ruth Langmore, in response to his murder of her cousin Wyatt—the show has returned to the status quo ante. Tense phone calls, shifting loyalties, last-second business deals, lots of characters driving back and forth to talk to other characters for two minutes or less: The tropes that have made Ozark what it is, for better and for worse, are back with a vengeance.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Eight: “The Cousin of Death”
Ruth Langmore behind the wheel of her truck. Ruth Langmore standing in the middle of a country road. Ruth Langmore sitting atop her trailer. Ruth Langmore listening to music and sipping coffee in a diner. Ruth Langmore following Wendy and Marty Byrde. Ruth Langmore crying in an underground parking lot after shooting a man to death.
You could practically reconstruct the plot of Ozark Season 4’s mid-season premiere (“The Cousin of Death”) from lingering closeups of Ruth Langmore alone. Writer/showrunner Chris Mundy and director Amanda Marsalis know what a weapon they have in the form of actor Julia Garner—I’ve waxed rhapsodic about her myself, multiple times—and in this pivotal episode from the show’s final season, they’re firing at will. Even aside from the repeated use of lengthy shots of nothing but her face, this whole hour is a star turn for Garner, and a turning point in the life of the character she plays.
I’m covering Ozark‘s final episodes for Decider, starting with my review of the mid-season premiere.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Yoshino”
The question, I suppose, is this: Is it so bad that the show ends this way? If you were looking for a happy ending, then sure, it’s a bummer. But the counterargument, that individual virtue and skill are not enough to stem systemic injustices, is a strong one, and it’s powerfully made here. It may not be the ultimately upbeat tale of a cub reporter exposing wrongdoing that the show promised to be early on, but that may not be a bad thing in the end. After all, it’s the job of a journalist to tell the truth, and sometimes that truth is ugly indeed.
“Moon Knight” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Asylum”
An episode like this serves as a good reminder that the show has a secret weapon on its side: the casting of Oscar Isaac as its hero. Isaac has to be equally at home screaming and sobbing from the sudden intrusion of deeply traumatic childhood memories and talking to a CGI hippopotamus woman; he has to play both his Marc and Steven personalities, holding conversations between the two of them thanks to a little movie magic; that split has to be played for laughs, for pathos, and for mind-warping reality-shifting superhero antics. Isaac makes it all look easy.
“We Own This City” thoughts, Episode One
How deep does that villainy go? There’s the rub, with the show and with [David] Simon’s work as a whole. Starting with The Wire, Simon opened a lot of eyes to the rank brutality, corruption, and racism of the War on Drugs, and for that he is to be commended. But…well, let’s quote from the blurb HBO PR attached to advance screeners of the show: “We Own This City chronicles…the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.” This presupposes, of course, that somewhere out there exists “actual police work” divorced from these cruel, classist, and racist policies; it ignores the possibility that cruelty, classism, and racism are in fact the real work that the institution of policing exists to do. For all his fire and brimstone, Simon is a garden-variety cop-respecting Bernie-bashing solidarity-undermining centrist in many respects; he doesn’t question bedrock supposition that policing is, at its heart, pretty good, and could perhaps be made to be pretty good overall. So, as you did in The Wire, you’re going to see a few heroic cops fighting to reform the system from within, shoring up the romantic ideal of police work even as the show purports to undermine that ideal.
I’m covering We Own This City for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “Sometimes They Disappear”
“I do it despite the indifference,” says Jake Adelstein’s editor, Emi, “because somebody has to tell the truth. Someone has to build the wall of information, brick by brick, story by story, until the facts cannot be ignored, and then things have to change.” Ah, were we ever so young?
Perhaps Tokyo Vice’s greatest strength, as well as its greatest flaw, is its faith in journalism as a means of fighting corruption and criminality. It’s very hard, in the year of our Lord 2022, to look around and think that journalism has done much of anything with regards to fighting off the wolves at the door. If anything, the workaday venality and vice among the political class that journalism has exposed over the past six years has almost reached the level of white noise, easily tuned out. Always there are new horrors, and always those horrors are met with a shrug, a “wish there was something we could do, but….”
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “The Information Business”
This episode of Tokyo Vice, written by Jessica Brickman and directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka, is one of my favorites so far. It has a biting sense of humor, like when Jake approaches Tozawa’s mistress and says “One of Tozawa’s mistresses went missing because she spoke to the press—would you care to comment?” It delivers a Godfather-worthy meeting of mob bosses. It plays with lighting in a beautiful way: the dim recesses of the car in which Ishida passes his intel to Jake, the lovely blue light when Sato picks Samantha up after work, the lurid pink-red when her friend Polina gets wasted on the dime of her club-owner boyfriend, that dazzling green mirror backdrop at Samantha’s club.
“Moon Knight” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “The Tomb”
We’re now two thirds of the way into Moon Knight, and the show’s strengths are self-evident. No, there’s no cool superheroic death-defying Moon Knight action in this ep, and Khonshu is out of the picture as well. But you’ve still got Oscar Isaac’s charming performance as both nebbishy Steven and deadly serious Marc. There’s still inventively staged action—Layla really makes the most of her collection of flares throughout, at one point stabbing a lit flare into a zombie’s eye. And the show is aware enough of its pulpy B-movie/syndicated-TV roots to make a joke about it in the form of that Tomb Buster video. There’s even a little mystery about the identity of Marc’s old traitorous partner, though the odds are certainly stacked in favor of Harrow himself.
Is Moon Knight going to reinvent the genre? No. Is it going to rise to the emotional heights of the better ex-Netflix Marvel shows? I doubt it. Does it need to do either of these things to be an enjoyable action-adventure series? Not as far as I’m concerned!
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Six, Episodes One and Two: “Wine and Roses” and “Carrot and Stick”
Better Call Saul is like Breaking Bad equipped with a silencer. It’s one of the quietest shows to emerge over the past decade of television, despite being nominally about the most loudmouthed character in creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s universe. If you track main character Ignacio “Nacho” Varga through the two-episode season premiere, in fact, I think he utters under a dozen words total. I’ve sung the praises of actor Michael Mando in this respect many times before, but I don’t care—the way he commands the screen with nothing but his big brown eyes demands it.
“Tokyo Vice” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Everybody Pays”
It seems like a good time to take stock of Tokyo Vice as a whole. Adelstein makes a lot more sense as a character than he did at the start, and that goes a long way. A little action never hurt a crime drama either. But there’s definitely a sense that the mystery aspect of the story is a bit too easy to suss out—seriously, who else but Kume could have been the mole inside Ishida’s organization? And certain character beats, like Jake’s phone call to his oh-so-concerned mother (Jessica Hecht), feel really paint-by-numbers.
That said, this is still a stylish crime drama in a fancy and exotic milieu, involving secretive criminal organizations, cynical cops, and idealistic reporters. These basic components are sort of hard to screw up unless you’re, like, trying really hard. It may not make for remarkable television, but watchable television? You bet. I’m looking forward to next week’s double dose of episodes, to see if it rises or sinks from here.